Grilled steak and fried mushrooms

'Nuff said.

Chowdah

Had me a hankerin' for some kind of soup with a smoky taste. I had no clearer vision than that but eventually realized that what I wanted was a chowdah. So with some hunks of ham I had left over from sandwiches and the reserved fish fillet (see, All is guided by the Left-Over) we made a nice chowdah. The basic chowdah base: onions fried in oil with smoky meat (usually bacon, in this case ham); potatoes in little cubes, flavored with thyme, salt, pepper. Then water just to cover. Cook on low till tender. Add the flaked fillet. Then a bit of milk, then a lot of cream. Bring all to just under a boil. The whole was deeply satisfying, if not a chowder that any Yankee would recognize, being mostly a ham and potato soup, with a tiny bit of fish floating around, which, after all, is what fish do best.

Fish tacos

Many of our dinners are inspired by having things left over from other dinners. This one arose from the chicken enchiladas meal, which left us four extra tortillas and some bottled salsa.

There seem to be as many fish taco recipes as there are fish. Some of the recipes we read said to batter and deep-fry the fish, but we'll wait to try that until January, when we go to San Diego, which claims to be America's center of fish tacos. We used tilapia fillets, marinated them in a little oil and lime juice with chopped jalapeno and fresh cilantro, plus a pinch of the famous chile de nuevo Mexico, and after waiting a while for them to soak that up, fried them quickly over high heat in a cast-iron pan. (They were a bit delicate - next time we'll try a thicker white fish like mahi-mahi, which could be grilled.)

We put the fillets on two plates, and these accompaniments on the table:
lettuce, from the garden
more fresh coriander, ditto
salsa, left over
crema (usually sour cream, but in this case, yogurt drained in a cheesecloth-lined sieve)
chopped red onion

We then nuked the tortillas for 30 seconds, and had fun putting various combinations together.

And we deliberately left over one unmarinated but fried tilapia fillet for the next day…

Parsley-anchovy pasta

This was taught to me by the Divine Miss Williams, who just threw it together one winter evening when there was nothing else in the house. It is light but filling, and the green saltiness makes it perfect for a winter evening with a sore throat coming on (how do evenings get sore throats?). Incidentally, parsley keeps really well if you cut off the ends of the stems, set them in a jar of water (yes, like flowers), cover the leaves with a loose plastic bag, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator.

As below, you want twisty pasta, to hold the pesto-like sauce. While the pasta's boiling, mince 2-3 cloves of garlic and sauté it in a pan with a half-can of anchovy fillets and all the oil from the can, over medium heat until the anchovies dissolve. Now, you know those bunches of flat-leaf Italian parsley they sell in supermarkets? Take a whole one of those, strip off the leaves, and chop them up small. Add them to the pan and keep cooking - they'll wilt down to almost nothing. Help them along with a droozle of extra-virgin, and season them with salt (surprisingly, some anchovies aren't salty enough, at least for this salt monster) and lots of black pepper. Drain the pasta and toss it in the pan REALLY thoroughly, so the parsley goes into the twisty parts of the pasta and doesn't hold together in clumps; if necessary, add a touch more oil. Cover with heaping handfuls of grated pecorino romano or parmesan, either in the pan or on the plates, preferably both; and it helps to have a grater and a nubbin of cheese at the table, too.

Fricassée de poulet à l'Angevine

Okay, so it's chicken and mushrooms in cream sauce, according to the Larousse Treasury of Country Cooking; probably very illuminating to anyone who's traveled through Anjou, which we have not (we like their pears, though). We simply owe it to the fact that the Nice People had nice mushrooms at a nice price at Findlay Market this past Saturday.
Take the chicken parts of your choice (we used thighs) and pat with salt, pepper, and fresh thyme leaves. Brown them on both sides in a pan that holds them comfortably in one layer but not much else. Set them aside, and sauté some chopped onions for 5 minutes, then add thickly sliced mushrooms and keep them cooking until they become dark and have given up some of their juices. Take out the vegetables with a slotted spoon and put back the chicken, which takes some fancy platework if you're trying to keep from dirtying more than one plate. Add some white wine to the vegetable juices, cover, and lower the heat. Simmer for 45 minutes, checking occasionally to make sure there's enough liquid to keep the chicken happy. When it's tender and done, uncover and boil the juices down if necessary; add the vegetables and some cream, and reheat on high until the sauce is thick. Et voilà, as they probably say in Anjou.

Salmon with mustard-dill sauce

I planted a whole packet of dill seeds in the garden this summer, but was disappointed in the results: only two plants, both so scrawny and undersized that you couldn't cut much off them. Now it's time to use them up, as it's getting cold and they won't overwinter. And dill calls for salmon, as salmon (okay, the gravlax sort) calls for dill. So we dug a pair of salmon fillets out of the freezer and pan-fried them.
Holt found a new recipe for a dill-mustard sauce using dijon mustard, but the mustard was so strong you could hardly taste anything else, though we added twice as much dill as was called for. If we had do-overs, we would make a milder sauce, going back to one of the classics based on either mayonnaise or sour cream, and only a dab of mustard, so the dill flavor would stand out.
The Pepper People at Findlay Market had some just-born marble-sized Yukon Gold potatoes, so we boiled them with some tender green beans from the garden and had them on the side. I keep thinking that every cold snap means the last of the garden produce, but so far I've been wrong. Enjoyably so.

Die Yuppie Scum Pasta

If you were eating in the 80s (and we bet you were), you probably got pretty tired of recipes that included The Yuppie Triad: sun-dried tomatoes, goat cheese, and arugula. This recipe includes at least two, and optionally all three, of the above, but it's easy, quick, and uses things you may well have in the fridge. So forget your embarrassment for the days of shoulder-pads and BMWs.
Start the water boiling and cook some twisty pasta, maybe rotelle or cellentani. In a wide pan, boil down some cream. Chop up some sun-dried tomatoes; if they're dry, throw them in the cream first thing to soften, if they're sott'olio (as we get them in the big jars from Costco) they can go in a little later. Crumble in some plain goat cheese until the sauce is the consistency and flavor you like. When the pasta is done, drain it and toss it in the pan as usual.
Plate it out, and top it either with chiffonaded fresh basil (as we did, since we still have some in the garden) or chopped arugula (for that full yuppie experience).