Last Night’s Dinner

I spun out another one of our old standbys last night - crispy fillets of white fleshed fish (this time, black sea bass) over tomato-fennel broth. This is so easy to prepare, and I love how well it works in the heat of summer or on a chilly fall evening.

Wine Pairing: Our friends at Thirst recommended the 2005 Olivier Savary Chablis Vieilles Vignes to go with this dish, and we both agreed it was a really gorgeous wine - a beautiful gold color, very crisp and flinty, with an almost toasted-buttery aroma.

What do you do when time, money and inspiration are in limited supply, but you still need to get dinner on the table? Fall back on an old standby, of course.

My standard macaroni and cheese, dressed up with a little crispy bacon and served with a side of sautéed rainbow chard - another of Mike’s favorite meals.

“Snacking on sardines.”

It was an innocent little text message, sent out over Twitter by my husband, but it got me craving those savory little fish in the worst way. Though some of you probably can’t imagine sardines being a crave-worthy food, I’ve been completely smitten with them since my first taste (Prune restaurant, birthday dinner, sardines with Triscuits, mustard and cornichons – simply perfect). I knew we had a couple of tins in the pantry at home, and we had one bunch of baby fennel lingering in the crisper, so I scrapped my previous plan for dinner and put together one of my favorite fall-back pasta dishes – linguine with sardines, fennel and tomato, also known as “Linguine con Sarde.”

The last time I made this dish I was sort of going through the motions, so I did a few things differently this time. While my pasta water came to a boil, I sautéed garlic in olive oil, then added my sliced fennel bulb and a bit of salt and let it soften and begin to caramelize. I added a pinch of red chile flakes, one tin of sardines (minus the oil they were packed in), and a pint of tiny Super Sweet 100 tomatoes, gently stirring everything together. I added a hefty splash of white vermouth, the juice of one lemon, and a handful of chopped fennel fronds and let the sauce bubble away while I cooked a pound of linguine. When it was just short of al dente, I added about 3/4 of the pasta to the sauce along with a couple of small ladles of the starchy pasta water and gently tossed everything through. When the pasta had finished cooking in the sauce, I plated it, adding a sprinkling of toasted bread crumbs, a grating of lemon zest and a few more fennel fronds to each bowl.

While I think last night’s version of this dish could have used a touch more salt, Mike and I both agreed it was really good – the lemon was a great substitute for the sherry vinegar in my original dish, and the addition of the fennel fronds and zest at the end really brought all the flavors together. Think you don’t like sardines? This simple pasta dish just might make you change your mind.

When I wrote up our meal plan for the week, our original thought for Wednesday evening was that Mike would come home early and grill pizzas. As it turned out, he did come home early, but the heavy overtime he has been working caught up with him a bit and we decided to hold off on the pizza-making until this coming weekend. I’ve been devoting a lot of time and energy to testing recipes for our upcoming cocktail party, so I decided to go with an old standby for dinner - Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe. This is this dish’s third appearance on this site, but when something is this easy to make and reliably good, it’s worth repeating.

We picked up some of our favorite hot Italian sausage (from Flying Pigs) and a big bunch of broccoli rabe earlier in the week hoping to use them to top our first grilled pizzas of the season, but once again Mother Nature foiled our plans. With sporadic storms still coming through the area, we just didn’t want to risk ruining our meal, so we decided to go with Plan B: Orrecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe, a perennial favorite.

I stuck to my basic recipe and method, which I’ve written up here before, but since Mike had brought home two big bunches of Rocambole garlic – with the scapes still attached! – from Keith’s Farm on Wednesday, I decided to use that in place of the garlic scapes I used last time. (I was really eager to play with this particular garlic anyway – I’m in the middle of It’s a Long Road to a Tomato and had just finished the chapter about how their garlic came to be. It’s a delightful story.)

The only other differences in last night’s version of this dish were the substitution of white vermouth for white wine, as well as the addition of a couple of pinches of red chile flakes and a cup or so of chopped fresh tomato I had left over from Wednesday’s lunch, both of which I added at the same time as the garlic. The tomato cooked all the way down into the sauce and left a nice hint of sweetness, and the chile flakes gave it a nice little kick.