Whole Roast Bluefish with Garden Fennel

Saturday December 1

It is a truly frabjous day when we can get fresh bluefish here in Cincinnati, either from Luken's or Jungle Jim's. We don't know how they manage to make a living off a fish that is so perishable, so East Coast, and so foreign to Midwest "can't-I-have-something-boneless-and-bland?" tastes. Especially at $2.99 a pound, which is cheap for fresh fish - though Holt remembers days of yore in New Haven, when a bluefish was what they threw in as lagniappe when you bought something better.

Once again, we used the classic method of oven-roasting.
In this case, we even had some freshly-made basil oil, the last fruits of this year's crop. When drizzled over the hot fish, it is sublime.

As an accompaniment, Barbara sacrificed two of her amazing garden creatures, the Florentine fennel plants that have been growing like multi-limbed mutants. It's a good thing that none of the neighbors understood her cries of "Eh! Finocchio!" as she cut them off their roots. Some of their ferny fronds went into the fish to be roasted, while the bulby parts were chopped, gently simmered in white wine and a mite of butter until tender, and topped with grated parmesan cheese and a grind or two of white pepper. The garden stuff turned out to be much more fresh-flavored than your usual supermarket or even organic-foods big-bulb fennel, so we consider this experiment to be worth the $2.50 it cost for the packet of seeds.

Tilapia with Dill Sauce and Green Risotto Cakes

Friday November 30

Holt had made the full recipe of Green Risotto on Wednesday, which meant that about a third of it was left over (we find that a cup of dry Arborio rice makes the perfect amount of risotto as a main dish for both of us; that recipe called for a cup and half). But we LOVE having leftover risotto, because that means we can make risotto cakes.

We also wanted to use some of the fresh garden dill before it all freezes. Dill and fish are natural buddies, but almost every recipe you see pairs a dilled sour cream sauce with cold poached salmon. Nothing wrong with that, but sort of boring, and too summery for this season.

Instead, we got out our old standby, Trader Joe's frozen tilapia (defrosted, of course). We coated the fillets with fine breadcrumbs (same sort we were using for the risotto cakes, made from finely-ground-up Holtbread) and shallow-fried them up crisp. Then we held them in a warm oven while we deglazed the pan with a bit of white wine, showered it with chopped fresh dill, added a some cream, reduced the sauce and added a final swirl of butter. A warm and herby alternative.

Pulled Pork and Mash

Thursday November 29

This was just the meat and sauce left over from Tuesday's Big Ol' Butt, ladled over a heap of mashed potatoes (again the russets, but they seem to make an acceptable mash, so long as they're whipped with enough butter and cream).

This is the ideal meal after a hard, cold day, when all you want to do is have something warm and satisfying about 20 minutes after you walk in the door. A glass of red wine doesn't hurt, either.

Green Risotto

Wednesday November 28

Despite its being the end of November, we still have an amazing range of greens in our garden, presumably due to global warming (thanks, George W. Bush!). So we are using them as much as we can, as long as we can. Again, the Herbfarm Cookbook provided an interesting and unusual recipe, a risotto using exactly what we had most of: sorrel, arugula, parsley and chives.

Here's the recipe. It also offers lots of ideas on other herbs to substitute.

Holt is the risotto master around here, and though he follows almost none of the rules (has used non-Arborio rice, added cold or even frozen broth, and finds risotto to take far longer than they ever say it does), his results are always great. In this case, he calculated that adding the herbs at the very last minute, as the recipe states, would give you more of a risotto salad than a true risotto, especially since we were also using some tiny but tougher turnip greens, and had no basil (though we could have thrown in a cube or two of our own pesto). We left it out instead, and did it Holt's way, adding the chopped turnip greens just after the sautéed green onion, and the other herbs later but still while adding the broth (in this case, our own duck broth, which is what we had in the freezer). The result was lovably tender, and probably no less tasty than the original.

Pulled Pork Stew

Tuesday November 27

This is a polite way of referring to what we usually call Barbara's Big Ol' Butt. I don't know why, but I feel unusually polite today.

We prepared the Butt yesterday, searing it while the potatoes roasted, leaving it in a slow oven all evening long, and then leaving it overnight in its covered dutch oven in the fridge. So when we got home from work, all we had to do was get it out of the refrigerator, reheat it on the stovetop while the oven hotted up, add sliced carrots, turnips, and onions, and let it stew in the oven for almost an hour more. At the end, you could not only remove the single pig-bone with one tug, but you could pull the tender meat apart with two regular dinner forks. Which we then used to fork up the savory mess.

Hamburgers

Monday November 26

Over the weekend, Holt baked his week's worth of bread, a lovely batch of herb-crusted rolls, using a recipe from the Herbfarm Cookbook. They looked like perfect hamburger buns, so what else could we do but make hamburgers?

The best accompaniment to hamburgers (besides, of course, Heinz ketchup and Parker's prize-winning Perfect Pickles) is some sort of fried potatoes. Once again, we turned to the Herbfarm Cookbook and decided to make their herb-roasted potatoes. As we reported yesterday, the russets we have on hand are not very trustworthy, and once again they proved it: they boiled up way too soft, and only gradually gained a little resilience during the second stage of the recipe, when they were oven-roasted. We find the Herbfarm's double-cooked method to be a bit odd, but we won't be able to say for sure how it works until we try it with a more dependable potato.

Roast Beef Hash

Sunday November 25

Surprisingly enough, though many good sandwiches had come off it, there was still a knuckle of beef left over from last Saturday's roast. So we made a hash of it - no, this time, we REALLY did.

Though we followed our traditional theory of hash, this time the potatoes WOULD NOT get tender, despite being sautéed and steamed even more than usual. They were russets we got on sale at the IGA, and as soon as we've gotten rid of them, we will go back to using either Yukon golds or Kennebecs, both excellent potatoes for boiling/steaming.

So despite our other, better choices (fresh parsley and thyme in the mix, veal stock and HP sauce as the liquid), the hash was edible, but not on the level of hash-heaven we usually aspire to.