I’ve made this Sicilian monkfish and couscous dish twice before and it just seems to get better each time. Last night I even managed to obtain socarrat!

It’s also pretty foolproof. I’ve served it with a vegetable each time, but the original, David Pasternak recipe suggests making it a one-dish meal, which would make it even simpler to put together.

I went with a vegetable again last night.

After I had picked up the fish at the Greenmarket earlier in the day, I also found the last bunch of mustard greens.

This is the couscous mix just after monkfish was added, and before it was covered.

• two 9-ounce monkfish tails from Pura Vida Fisheries, prepared using a David Pasternak recipe which includes M’hamsa Couscous from Tunisia (purchased at Whole Foods), olive oil, sliced garlic John D. Madura Farm, a little more than one and a half 16-ounce cans of really superb Mutti baby Roma tomatoes from Eataly (which are also available at Whole Foods), and cracked Sicilian green olives from Whole Foods, and part of one crushed dried Sicilian pepperoncino from Buon Italia, cooked, because the monkfish tails were smaller than those described in the recipe, for a total of only 10 minutes
• mustard greens from Norwich Meadows Farm, wilted in a little olive oil in which several small halved cloves of garlic form John D. Madura Farm had been allowed to sweat a bit, seasoned with salt and pepper and finished on the plates with a drizzle of olive oil
• the wine was an Italian (Sicily, Palermo) white, Corvo Insolia 2015 from Philippe Wine and Spirits, on West 23rd Street less than one block from our table, a wine we have often, and enjoy just as often
• the music was the piano quintet in C-minor of Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, his Opus 1, published in 1803, Christoph Hammer, fortepiano, and the Schuppanzigh Quartet, heard streaming on Yle Klassinien

[1799 portrait of a dreamy Louis Ferdinand by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, from Wikipedia]