The Dwarfs' Dinner

This cold has made me think of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In fact, I think I've actually been at least four of those dwarfs, myself, this week - namely, Grumpy, Sleepy, Dopey and Sneezy. I think I need to stop being Bashful and just call Doc! Once this cold has passed, I'll be Happy.

Okay, now you see how sad my condition is, when I'm reduced to actually working at finding ways to incorporate all seven names into my opening paragraph. I even thought it was clever. Truly pathetic.

Anyway, I've been playing around with pasta dishes while I've been ill and I think I hit the Holy Grail last night. I had some halibut fillets in the fridge and a single mild Italian sausage left from my earlier attempt and, somehow, to me the combination of the two seemed really appealing, although very strange. What the heck, I couldn't taste much with a stuffy nose, so why not try it? If it's a disaster, so be it.

My Beloved and I sat down with some trepidation to the finished bowls of capellini topped with fish in a soupy, tomato-y, spicy broth but the first taste was like a divine revelation - nothing short of enlightening. Hallelujah! Halibut and sausage were made for each other!

This is easily the best dish I've made in a month of Sundays. It cleared my head with its fragrant heat and the flavors melded perfectly. We slurped it down 'til there was only a little red goozle in the bottom of the bowls. I should have served some good, rustic bread with it so we could have sopped up the last few drops - as it was, I just tipped up the bowl and drank the last bit. My very proper mother would have been appalled.

The next morning, I awoke with a clear head - no more sniffles. Apparently, this dish is also a cold remedy. I can't say I'm looking forward to my next cold but I know for sure what I'm going to cook up when it comes. Snow White would be proud.

The Dwarfs' Dinner

1 Italian sausage, about 10" long

2 cloves garlic, minced

Olive oil

1 can fire-roasted, chopped tomatoes

1 leek, light green and white parts only, coarsely chopped

2-3 fresh roma tomatoes, coarsely chopped

2 cups chicken broth

Microplaned zest of one lemon, plus the juice of the lemon

1Tbs. Sartain's Menu sauce (this is a smoky, spicy sauce)

Black pepper to taste (you won't need salt as the sausage is salty)

Capellini pasta (or your favorite), cooked al dente

2 halibut fillets, skin removed, if necessary

Green onion, sliced, for garnish

Using just a slick of olive oil to coat a wide frying pan (you won't need much as the sausage will provide plenty of fat), squeeze out dabs of the sausage from its casing to make perhaps two dozen tiny meatballs and brown them on both sides. When the fat has rendered from the sausage and the meat is well browned, add the garlic and cook carefully, so it softens but doesn't brown. Add the next seven ingredients, stir to mix, and cook over a low flame for about 10 minutes. It will be very liquid and soupy and it will smell like the open door to Heaven.

In the meantime, bring your pasta water to a boil with some serious salt and add the pasta. Drain and remove pasta to soup or pasta bowls. Be sure to set the table with a big spoon and a fork - you'll need both.

After simmering, turn the heat to low and push aside the ingredients in the pan to make a well for the fish fillets. Cover the pan and poach the fish in the sauce very gently, just until it is white rather than clear and it flakes apart, perhaps five minutes depending on the thickness of your fillets, turning it once gently if the fish is thick.

Serve the fish over the pasta, topped with the pan contents and garnished with the green onions. Serves 2-4.

Parched Halibut

I'm not the first ever to state the obvious - English is a weird language. How come the verb "to parch" and "parchment" have nothing in common? They really should. And parchment paper makes no sense, either, since parchment is actually made of skin, not of wood fibers.

Okay, enough of that. No one will ever be able to make sense of English, we just have to embrace its oddities.

I'm embracing the heck out of parchment paper these days, such a useful tool in the kitchen! You can bake on it or stew in it, raise a collar for a tall soufflé or line the bottom of a cake pan to keep things from sticking. My favorite way to use it this week is to make fish packets for dinner.

Halibut is a lovely fish, firm and white and mild - but it can be a little, shall we say, flat? All those flat fishes are like that - sole, sanddabs, halibut, all nice and mild, but a bit boring - but they are also wonderfully good for you, still sustainably fished, and easy to tweak in new ways.

This time, I had a couple of nice fillets of halibut, about 1.5 inches thick, and some of the prettiest, freshest asparagus I've seen. To a generous sheet of parchment paper, I added five or six spears of asparagus, half of a chopped leek (white and yellowish parts only), a slice of lime from Jeanne's tree, fresh chopped oregano from the garden, sliced leftover cooked potatoes (two walnut size ones per packet) and a dab of butter, wrapped it up securely by folding the top over several times and gathering the ends and giving them a good firm pinch. One packet for me, one for My Beloved. They fit easily side-by-side on a rimmed baking sheet (in case the goozle escaped) and I slid them into a preheated 350 degree oven.

When you cook fish this way, it makes its own sauce from the mingled juices of the fish and veggies. You could add a sprinkle of white wine, but it really isn't necessary. Fifteen minutes (less if your fish is thinner) and the asparagus is perfect - still brightly green but tender - and all the ingredients have had a happy slumber party in which they all got to know each other very well.

To serve, you can simply slide the packets onto a plate and let each open his own, releasing the fragrant steam as the world's best appetizer, or you can flip them over fold-side down and slash a bold X into the paper with a sharp knife or a razor and peel it back to reveal the asparagus topping the fish. Either way, it's a dramatically beautiful plateful and you will get oohs and aahs from the Beloveds.

'But Cheeks

Cookiecrumb set it all up - lovely lunch on the prettiest day of the year in San Francisco (I think she ordered the weather, too) at the Hog Island Oyster bar in the Ferry Building to meet DancingMorganMouse and Mr. Brown after all these years of reading Morgan's comments and stories about her life in Oz on her blog - only to fall ill herself and miss all the fun! Sometimes, life is unfair.

My Beloved and I did have fun with Mouse and Mr. Brown - they are interesting, lively, funny and open to the San Francisco experience. How could we not enjoy people like that? Mouse is quite pretty, too, and Mr. Brown has lovely blue eyes, a bonus in my view.

The food was good, too. The Hog Island folks serve a grilled cheese sandwich that is my new gold standard, despite having no salami in it. The cheese is as thick as a Swiss shepherd's lunch, but melty all the way through. I don't know how they do that without burning the bread, but they do. Wonderful!

The clam chowder captured the essence of clams so tiny that I almost mourned how short their little lives were until I took my first bite and sip, when all regrets flew away. The broth was light and thin, not like the library paste served in many places, and packed with flavor of anise, herbs and ocean.

My Beloved and Mr. Brown's halibut cheeks with spinach and forbidden rice was the hit of the day. The halibut was deliciously mild and meaty and the dramatic black rice was wonderfully lemony-nutty-crunchy; I'd love to know how they made that rice!

We sat in the shade with the bay at our side, being entertained alternately by the new friends from Down Under and the very lively young waiter whose service with both food and wine was a marvelous performance, exchanging ideas and wishing that Cookiecrumb and Cranky could have joined us. We strolled the Ferry Building with coffee from Blue Bottle, admiring the goods and chuckling over the prices, then exchanged hugs at the end of the afternoon and promises to get together in Sydney next time.

Sometimes, life is really, really unfair.

Wallflower Fish

I tend to overlook halibut. Like the wallflower at a dance, halibut doesn't grab my attention with sexy color like salmon or beautiful curves like shrimp. It has the virtue of being one of the sustainable catches these days but it's just white. Plain white. Nothing very fancy.

When I remember to ask it to the dance, however, it's great - versatile and friendly to lots of other foods. This time, I served it grilled with a very quick sort of salsa spooned over it and it tasted like the essence of summer.

The salsa was nothing but an ear of raw sweet corn cut off the cob, half a ripe tomato, a couple of slices of red onion and half an avocado, all chopped to roughly the same size. Over that I squirted half of my last wonderful lemon from Patty and Momo's garden, mixed it all together and added it to the grilled fish. By themselves, all these ingredients might have been yawn-producing but together they really woke up our plain, white fish and did a little jig on our tongues.

I won't be overlooking this lovely fish in the future; it reminds me of that song from my youth, "Let the little girl dance."

Halibut Riff

Look familiar? Yes, this is the same preparation that the Italian Dish recommended for scallops but, having eaten one too many scallops in my youth, I seem to have developed an allergy to them - or maybe it's just an aversion. In any case, I wanted to try the orange-and-dried-herb combo on halibut.

Both My Beloved and I actually preferred the halibut this way to the scallops. The mild flavor of the fish was enriched by the sauteeing, the strong herbs and the freshness of the oranges. We will add this one under "Keepers" to our permanent recipe file.

Sheeshkabobs

The most recent Sunset magazine ran a quick and easy recipe that was easily the most delicious thing I've eaten this summer - halibut kabobs with bread chunks and pancetta.

All you do is cut halibut into 2" chunks, do the same with some nice artisan bread (Sunset recommends ciabatta; we used leftover sourdough baguette) and toss the fish and bread in a little olive oil into which you have snipped fresh rosemary.

Let them stand in the herbal oil for about five minutes, then thread them onto skewers with bacon running over, under and between each piece (the recipe called for thin-sliced pancetta but I didn't have any in the house). Grill for about 7-10 minutes and devour!

Sheesh, I hardly had time to take a quick-and-dirty picture before we devoured these!

Delish Fish

My Virginia brother's wife, Ann, is an amazing cook. She has the background for it, having been to the Cordon Bleu in Paris to take classes when she and my bro were stationed there. When we visit her, she always makes killer meals - cassoulet that takes her three days to make, Cotelettes Pojarsky rich with butter and cream and, this time, Zucchini-Wrapped Fish Fillets.

She used salmon for her version and it was really pretty with the pink salmon peeking out of the fresh green wrapping but I wanted to try halibut both because it's less threatened here in the west and because I thought the flavors of halibut, basil, lemon and zucchini would meld well. Both versions are really delicious and the wrapping keeps the fish wonderfully moist. While it is fairly simple to prepare, it makes an elegant presentation and looks much more difficult than it really is, once you get the knack of shaving the zucchinis very, very thinly. She adapted hers from the recipe on epicurious.com so if you go there and do a search for Zucchini-Wrapped Fish Fillets, you'll have the basic recipe and can do your own riffs on this swish and delish fish dish!

Veggie Stew

We have some old friends staying with us - that I had never met! These are friends of My Beloved's from his Air Force days, back when Vietnam was the conflict we Americans were botching rather than the current one in Iraq. Annette and Dave are in town for the wedding of their daughter so I got to meet them at last and after just a few days I already count them among my good friends.

This is what I made to share with them from the perfect pepper and a bunch of other fresh veggies like pattypan squash thinly sliced, zucchini chunked, a big onion cut in spears, minced garlic, some white wine, tomato paste, Italian-type herbs and olive oil. All I did was soften the onions and garlic in the olive oil, add the rest and simmer for about half an hour or so.

It made the base on which we laid some fresh halibut fillets to steam with the lid on, skin side up so we could easily peel off the skin once it loosened, then flipped the fillets over in the sauce to coat them and served them simply resting on a bed of the soft, sweet veggies.

The oohs and aaahs from our Florida friends rewarded the not-very-hard work and the Ferrari-Carano 2005 Mill Station chardonnay gave up its oaky essence to enhance the fish and the friendship.

Hunger Is The Mother of Invention

Even my tried-and-true epicurious.com failed to offer me a recipe for halibut steaks that matched what my tongue was hungry for today, so I decided to improvise. Sometimes, that's a big mistake but this time, it was a big winner.

In a wide pan, I sauteed fresh mushrooms in olive oil, then lowered the heat and added nearly everything else I had in the fridge - sliced onion, julienned zucchini, chopped leeks, pitted Tuscan table olives - and slowly cooked them with some thyme and herbes de Provence, adding a little tomato paste and white wine as the pan juices reduced. When all that was cooked down and sweet, I laid two halibut steaks on top and covered the pan, steaming them gently until just done. Making a bed of the veggies on the plate, I slid the fish on top and heaped more veggies, serving them with a wedge of Meyer lemon to spritz over both.

The fish was tender but very moist, the veggies sweet but with a hint of tartness left in the olives. The lemon juice gave a lively, fresh note to the overall mellowness of the dish. One of my better inventions and just what my tongue was hungry for.