We don’t see haddock in the stalls of our local fishers very often, but I’m always anxious to bring some home when I do.  A beautiful and very delicious white-fleshed fish, It’s usually offered in the form of fillets. Even now, when it seems to be somewhat more appreciated than it had been in the past, it’s usually less expensive than its cousin cod.

I think the recipe I used last night is one of the easiest, and probably the least stressful, of several that I’ve used for haddock. It’s  inspiration was actually a recip for cod, Mark Bittman’s ‘Emma’s Cod’, which I found inside his book, ‘Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking‘.

While the description below uses many lines, the process actually isn’t complicated, and it’s pretty unfussy, and forgiving.

Anyway, this outing was sublime.

• *one pound of rather small Nicola potatoes (I had thought I would be boiling them when I chose the size) from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, washed, but not peeled, sliced thinly, pushed around inside a 12″ glazed ceramic rectangular oven pan with two tablespoons of butter that had already been melted in the pan over a low flame (surprisingly, while it’s only ceramic, that ‘seasoned’ veteran pan can actually be safely used over a burner, so long as it isn’t shocked by the flame, although I almost never test that assertion myself), adding some salt, and pepper, after which it was spread evenly on the surface and roasted at 425º for about 12 to 15 minutes (when they had began to brown), sprinkled with 3 or so sliced shallots from Norwich Meadows Farm, tossed again and returned to the oven for another 12 or 15 minutes and near the end of that period, a few Backyard Farms Maine ‘cocktail tomatoes’ from Whole Foods Market, each sliced horizontally into 3 sections and lightly seasoned, added to the pan, and when that time segment was up, the vegetables topped with a one-pound fillet of haddock from Pura Vida Seafood, which had been divided into two equal-size pieces, the fish dotted with softened knobs of one or 2 tablespoons of butter, plus some sea salt and freshly-ground black pepper, and returned to the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the fish was just done, arranged on 2 warm plates and served with a rough chiffonade of sorrel leaves from Two Guys from Woodbridge which had been not quite  ‘melted’ in a little butter
• the wine was an Italian (Piedmont) white, Angelo Negro, Roero Arneis Serra Lupini, 2016, from Flatiron Wines
• *the music was Rossini’s beautiful 1821-1822 melodramma giocoso (opera semiseria) ‘Matilde di Shabran’, Riccardo Frizza conducting the Orquesta Sinfonica di Galicia, with Annick Massis and Juan Diego Florez