Making your meal

Last night, I had occasion to cook with two good friends, who profess an inability to cook. Well, you could have fooled me. They did really, really well in the kitchen. And in musing about it this morning (we were up way late, laughing and being silly, like we all need to be sometimes), I realized that, ultimately, putting together a meal is a question of wanting to, and not being intimidated. That's why I think that anyone who DOES cook regularly has more than a bit of an obligation to help people who want to, but feel that they're just not"there." So, I'm going to tell you how this meal developed, and give recipes along the way.

When I went to the farmers' market on Saturday, our fishmonger had some lovely stuff, including something that he doesn't have often: shark. Now, I will not buy mako shark, or any of the bigger sharks, which are being hunted to extinction, but this was sand shark. There's plenty of that around. It's small, and the piece of fish that he had was, essentially, a whole shark that had been skinned, and cleaned, leaving about two pounds of filet. That's plenty for four portions.

Shark is a nice, firm fleshed fish that can be cooked just about any way you would cook cod, or even tuna. I had a plan for it already, however, and that was to cook it in foil, like I've written about before. The only question was: what was going into the foil with the fish? That came later in the process of thinking about the meal.

That same day, I bought some greenhouse tomatoes which had flavor. That's unusual, but as Mary, the tomato goddess said "if you know how to do it properly, they taste good." And they did: bigger than cherry tomatoes, smaller than plum, they were sitting on the counter (I never refrigerate tomatoes), waiting to be used for lunch.

One of my two friends loves asparagus, and since we're into "high Jersey grass" season, that was an easy one. Asparagus would be our vegetable. And we would have a salad.

You can see how the meal is shaping up, but it didn't finalize, until Monday morning. I had been planning to make rice, perhaps with some pan cooked onions stirred in, as our starch. But when I got to the market on Monday, the first new potatoes of the season were there. DONE. There's the starch. The rice will wait, the potatoes came home with me. They would get cooked with the onions.

Onto the fish: I really hadn't made up my mind, and then it struck me: a sort of "provencal" style of dish, with tomatoes, fresh thyme, and lemon slices.

SO, this is how we did it, in the order we did it, for teaching purposes. First, we cut the potatoes in half, and put them in salted water to cook until they were just tender. While that was happening, we prepped the asparagus. We counted on six stalks each, and my two friends did the prep work of peeling back the stems. Put those aside, and get the fish ready. Olive oil on some foil, and then two slices of lemon, with the fish right on top of that. Then a handful of salted halved tomatoes with some thyme leaves, wrapped tightly in foil, waiting to cook. By this point, the potatoes were done, and we drained them, while four red spring onions cooked away in a pan with salt and olive oil. Then the potatoes, drained and dried, went cut side down in a pan with some oil, and sizzled to brown. The fish went into a 400 degree oven, to cook for fifteen minutes. A large pan came out, got filled with boiling water, and salt, and in went the asparagus, for less than five minutes. We tested the asparagus along the way, and when they were just a tad underdone, out they came. I don't usually "shock" vegetables, so they did continue to cook for a bit.

By this point, the asparagus were ready, and the potatoes had browned. The fish was not quite ready, so we turned to salad. The greens were that wonderful vegetable, "mache," which always reminds me of rabbit ears, and a head of green radicchio that I had picked up at the market that morning. That radicchio was very bitter, so we knew we needed a "sweeter" kind of dressing. A white wine (actually champagne) vinaigrette got put together, with some vinegar, salt, and about four times as much olive oil. The greens went in, and then the "kicker." Kim, the miracle citrus queen, had sent a huge box of the sweetest oro blancos that you could imagine (think HUGE grapefruit). While I sing the Supremes, I don't supreme fruit, so I just peeled and cut this into chunks and put it on top of the greens.

Plating? Ok, first the asparagus, and then the potatoes. The fish, very moist and very wet was ready. Here, I didn't do something that you CAN do if you want. There is a lot of liquid in the foil, and if you don't want to muss up your plate, you can just slide the fish and the other solids off of the foil, and discard that liquid. I didn't mind if it wet the veggies, so I just pushed everything off of the foil and onto the plate.

Because we had olive oil in the fish, and in the potatoes, and we were going to have a dessert, the asparagus were just, simply steamed. No one seemed to miss the butter or olive oil.

VOILA. This was a meal that we prepped in less than an hour, having fun every inch of the way. (At least I did).

If you're cooking it yourself, you can probably do it in less time, but then you'll miss the joy of sharing the act.

Cook together with your friends. Get together, work in the kitchen, and the food will taste that much better when it's done. I guarantee it.