baked cod, potatoes, habanada, micro amaranth; mustards

Great, great stuff. As delicious as it looks.

The cod was very fresh, and very sweet, as were the potatoes and the gorgeous micro amaranth.

I didn’t have enough of any one kind of potato to produce a dish I’ve made many times before, and each of the 2 varieties I ended up using was considerably smaller than any I’d ever used. Also, I inadvertently used more olive oil to bake the potatoes than I should have.

So they weren’t big, and they didn’t turn out crispy, but they were really luscious.

I don’t have an image of the tiny fingerlings, but here are the small Carola, still at the farmer’s stand, in a light rain.

Also, because I think potatoes always look so good, here are both kinds, tossed, with seasonings, inside the largest of a nest of vintage Pyrex bowls,

and inside a glazed Terracotta dish, on their way into the oven.

  • one 17-ounce fillet of cod from Blue Moon Seafood Company in the Union Square Greenmarket, prepared more or less from a recipe from Mark Bittman which I originally came across 12 years ago: the cod washed and rinsed, placed on an ironstone platter on a bed of coarse sea salt, more added on top, until it was completely covered, set aside while preparing a bed of potatoes for them by slicing to a thickness of less than 1/4 inch, about 11 ounces of 2 kinds of potatoes, scrubbed but unpeeled, some small Carola potatoes from Lucky Dog Organic Farm and a slightly less amount of tiny fingerlings from Phillips Farm, tossing them in a large bowl with a tablespoon of olive oil, salt, pepper, and a large pinch of golden home-dried Habanada pepper [acquired fresh last fall from Norwich Meadows Farm], arranging the potatoes, slightly overlapping, in a rectangular glazed ceramic oven dish, cooking them for 20 or 25 minutes in a 400º oven, or until they were tender when pierced, meanwhile, before the potatoes had fully cooked, the cod was thoroughly immersed in many changes of water for about 15 minutes in order to bring down the saltiness (incidentally the soaking process somehow gives the fish more solidity, which can be easily felt while handling it at this point), divided in half, drained and dried before being placed inside the pan on top of the potatoes, skin side down, drizzled with a little olive oil, some freshly-ground pepper scattered over the top, returned to the oven for 8 to 12 minutes more (the time would depend on the thickness of the cod), removed from the dish with a broad spatula, along with as much of the potatoes as can be brought along with each piece, everything arranged on two plates as intact as possible, followed by the remainder of the potatoes, splashy red micro amaranth from Windfall Farms scattered over the top

The mustard greens were phenomenal, and gorgeous resting on the farmer’s stand.

  • frizzy purple mustard greens from Bodhitree Farm, wilted inside a large enameled cast iron pot in a little olive oil in which 2 cloves of  garlic from John D. Madura Farm, halved, had been allowed to sweat, seasoned with salt, pepper, and a very small amount of crushed dried Sicilian pepperoncino from Buon Italia, finished on the plates with a drizzle of juice from a sweet local lemon (Fantastic Gardens of Long Island), and a bit of olive oil
  • the wine was a California (Lodi) white, David Akiyoshi Reserve Chardonnay 2015
  • the music was Vivaldi’s 1726 opera, ‘Il Farnace’, in an extraordinarily beautiful performance led by Jordi Savall; it was at least our second hearing, not counting this one, from over 12 years ago, in which Vivaldi’s music accompanies Muntean/Rosenblum’s ‘It Is Never Facts That Tell’, the collaborative’s digital projection of a great world emptied and reduced to an enormous landfill, achingly beautiful, even without the music which accompanies its hooded figures