cod à l'espagnol

ML has been "jonesing" for white fish, so I made this tonight.  It's from "Cooking With Claudine" by Jacques Pépin, a book I am loving these days.

Mince a bunch of green onions and thinly slice 3 cloves of garlic.  In a deep skillet with a cover, sauté these briefly in about 1/4 cup of olive oil (not EVOO).  Add a zuccini and a green pepper diced medium and sauté for another minute.  Add about 4-5 peeled plum tomatoes seeded and cut in half inch strips, a big pinch of salt (about 1/2 tsp) and a small pinch of saffron (this is important).  Nestle 4 6 oz cod fillets (could be haddock or hake) in this preparation, cover, reduce heat to low and cook for about 10 minutes until cod flake apart.  Season with pepper.  Plate and drizzle with EVOO.

The fish was a beautiful colour and everything was perfectly cooked.  The vegetables and cod release a lot of liquid which become a delicious broth.

ratatouille

Here's what I did (with some help from the 'fuzz) to make the simplest possible ratatouille with all our farmer's-market late-summer vegetables:

• 2 onions, sliced
• 6 small eggplants (or 2-3 huge supermarket-style ones), diced
• 3 zucchini, diced
• a few sweet peppers, seeded and diced
• 3 large tomatoes, diced
• a few tbsp fresh basil, chopped
• salt, pepper, olive oil

Soften the onions (and maybe some garlic) in a lot of olive oil. Add eggplant and cook until it starts to soften. Add zucchini and peppers and cook until the zucchini starts to soften. Add tomatoes and basil and a fair bit of salt and pepper and simmer until the whole thing turns into ratatouille (about an hour, maybe less). Fix seasoning at the end. Serve with crusty bread, and then freeze some for the coming winter.

salmon and vegetables

Salmon, which is a gloriously fatty fish, takes well to the same treatment as those chicken thighs in "chicken and vegetables".

• Rub salmon fillets with olive oil, lay in a sheet pan (roasting pan, big cast iron frypan or what have you) and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. I allow about 200 g of fish per person, but of course we really like our fish around here. Skin on or off, doesn't matter; this treatment does nothing for the skin (you need pan frying for that).
• Nestled in the pan are "the vegetables", ie. anything that will be cooked to your satisfaction in the same time as the fish. See below.
• Fire this into a blazing hot oven (say, 450) for about 15 minutes.
• Very good with a simple yoghurt sauce: good, thick plain yoghurt, salt, pepper and optionally some ground roasted cumin (this is extremely good) and lemon zest.

I pull the fish out when it's two-thirds done; residual heat does the rest in the five minutes it takes to get things on plates and get kids to the table. "Done" for me would probably be sent back by 1 in 3 customers in a restaurant, although these same people readily eat salmon raw in sushi. Human folly!

As for the vegetables, tonight we had oven-candied tomatoes I still had in the freezer from last summer, thinly sliced red onions and kalamata olives. The onions had time to get soft and a bit brown here and there. I learned to do salmon this way from The Naked Chef, where he used blanched green beans, cherry tomatoes, dry cured olives, torn tender herbs (like basil) and anchovy fillets.

Ideas to try...soon:

• sliced potato (1/8") and onion with some thyme
• zuccini and red pepper strips
• baby beets?