There were 8 of them, but combined they weighed only about 13 or 14 ounces, which is even less than I sometimes buy for the two of us. Because they were tiny and thin, they took up a lot of the surface area of even a large pan. I didn’t have room on the stove top for another, so they ended up crowded; this is not ideal on any count, including the processes of turning them over and of removing them from the pan when they were done.
As a result, they ended up looking a bit disheveled on the plate, but they were delicious.
It seems that the cauliflower liked it, since it decided to imitate the appearance of the sole, and it too was delicious.
- eight very small grey sole fillets from P.E. & D.D. Seafood, a total of 13 or 14 ounces, dried thoroughly, salted on both sides and brushed with a little good Italian white wine vinegar, sautéed over a medium-high flame inside an enameled cast iron pan in 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil, turning once, the fillets removed, the pan wiped with a paper towel, 2 tablespoons of Organic Valley ‘Cultured Pasture Butter’, 2 tablespoons of juice from an organic Whole Foods Market lemon, and and a loose handful of pea greens from Windfall Farms, allowed to warm inside of it for a minute or so, either over a low flame or none at all, before the sauce was drizzled onto the sole
- one 15-ounce head of white cauliflower from Alewife Farm, separated into florets and par-boiled in salted water for 2 minutes, drained and set aside while 2 finely-chopped Keith’s Farm rocambole garlic cloves were heated in 2 tablespoons of olive oil inside a large enameled cast iron skillet until pungent and beginning to soften, then 2 salted Sicilian anchovies, rinsed and filleted, added and stirred briefly until ‘melted’, the reserved cauliflower, and the more tender leaves (which had not been blanched) thrown in, along with a decent bit of peperoncino Calabresi secchia from Buon Italia, and sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, everything stirred together and cooked until the cauliflower softened (in this instance, very quickly), served with chopped parsley from Keith’s Farm
- the wine was a California (Sonoma) white, ROX Scott Peterson Sonoma Coast Chardonnay 2017, from Naked Wines
- the music was the entire album, ‘Dussek: Concerto for Two Pianos & Chamber Works’, with Alexei Lubimov, Olga Pashchenko, and the Finnish Baroque Orchestra; the eighteenth-century Bohemian composer Jan Ladislav Dussek‘s compositions sound somewhat proto-romantic, and very charmingly so)