spicy wild salmon; potato, spring onion; rabe, spring garlic

It was a pink interlude between a meal of white fish and one of red meat (to come on Sunday). I would have prepared a pasta dish on Saturday, except that I’ve managed to accumulate a few green vegetables that really would work better with a fish or meat entrée than with a pasta.

  • one fifteen-ounce fillet of previously-frozen Pacific coho salmon from Chelsea Whole Foods Market, rinsed, the skin removed by the cook, seasoned on both sides with sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, the former flesh side [CORRECTION: this should have read “the former skin side”, and in fact this time I incorrectly pressed the mixture on the flesh side] pressed with a mixture of ground coriander seeds, ground cloves, ground cumin, and grated nutmeg, sautéed in a little olive oil over a medium-high flame inside an heavy antique oval tin-lined copper pan over medium-high heat, the spice-coated side down, for 2 minutes or so, then turned over and cooked for another minute or 2, finished on the plate with a little squeeze of organic lemon from Whole Foods Market and a drizzle of a good olive oil, garnished with micro scallion from Two Guys from Woodbridge
  • sixteen or so very small unpeeled Norland Red potatoes from Norwich Meadows Farm, scrubbed, boiled unpeeled with a generous amount of salt inside a large vintage Corning Pyrex Flameware blue-glass pot until barely cooked through, drained, dried inside the large still-warm vessel in which they had cooked, tossed with a tablespoon or so of olive oil, sprinkled with sea salt, freshly-ground black pepper, some sliced spring red onion, also from Norwich Meadows farm, and garnished with those farmers’ bronze fennel
  • one bunch of tender early broccoli rabe, or rapini, from Migliorelli Farm, washed and drained several times, trimmed and very roughly chopped, and, with much of the water still clinging to the greens, wilted with olive oil inside a large enameled cast iron pot in which one large spring garlic stem had been heated in a little olive oil until softened, finished with sea salt, freshly-ground pepper, arranged on the plates and drizzled with more olive oil
  • the wine was a Portuguese (Alentejo) white, Aiesoporão Reserva White 2105, from Garnet Wines
  • the music was the album, ‘Eastern European piano music’, with Alexei Lubimov playing piano concertos by Gubaidulina, Ustvolskaya, Górecki, and Pelécis, Heinrich Schiff conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie