Learning fish.
Back before I learned that Chilean sea bass is heavily overfished, I bought some lovely fillets to make for dinner. I decided to roast them with veggies. At the time, I lived in a run-down but large and comfortable apartment with an equally run-down gas stove. In a lot of ways, the kitchen in that apartment was dreadful – my current kitchen is much smaller, with, somehow, twice as much counter space – but I learned to cook with gas on that stove, and learned to live with Nat in that space, and so I’ll always feel a bit of affection for it. In addition to working with – against? – the whims of a cranky old oven, this was one of my first forays into cooking fish.
Fish was not a major component of my diet as a child; my mother made a mean baked sole with tomatoes, and a sizzling fried flounder, but as I wasn’t very fond of those fishes, or of anything that smelled fishy, I stuck to chicken or shrimp at times when I could have been expanding my palate. Then I started dating a boy from coastal Massachusetts, and he wasn’t having any of this not-eating-fish nonsense, and that was the end of that – I learned to eat all kinds of fish, not to mention calamari, crab, lobster, oysters…. And I learned to cook fish, fumbling my way along, relying heavily on The New Basics to get me through.
I rinsed my sea bass fillets and patted them dry, and then I roasted them with veggies in a glass baking dish I got from my mother; it has to be twenty years old, at least, because I burned my hand on it when I was little. While I admit a glass pan originally intended for lasagna is not the ideal roasting vehicle, when you’re just out of college you’ll take the antique thing and be glad of it. I still have it, I still use it, and if I manage not to drop it on the floor, I will probably shuffle it off to some innocent yet-to-be-spawned child in another twenty-five years.
The fish emerged soft and almost translucent, pear-and-ginger scented, perfect with couscous and a simple salad. We spooned the sauce over couscous; our salad was plain mixed greens with apple-balsamic vinegar/safflower oil/honey dressing.
If you, like me, have stopped eating Chilean sea bass, you could make this with a number of other fishes – red snapper, striped bass, even salmon.
Roasted fish with vegetables and ginger sauce
- 4-5 carrots, peeled
- 2 large d’Anjou pears, peeled and sliced thin
- 3-4 leeks, cleaned and quartered lengthwise
- thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped or grated
- 2 fish fillets
- olive oil
- apple-balsamic vinegar
Preheat oven to 350?F.
In the roasting pan, put carrots, pears, leeks, a little olive oil and a little apple-balsamic vinegar. Place fish on top, and add ginger, a little more oil, and a little more vinegar. Place, uncovered, in the oven. Halfway through, turn the fish and rough up the veggies; you can also put some of the veggies on top of the fish to keep it from browning.
With fish, the rule of thumb – devised by the Canadian Fisheries and Marine Service- is 10 minutes per inch of thickness, plus 5 minutes because this particular fish is in a bit of a sauce, but you will have to keep an eye on it. A digital thermometer may be useful.
Remove fish from oven and let stand ~5 minutes before serving.