{"id":4784,"date":"2015-07-30T19:18:20","date_gmt":"2015-07-30T19:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=4784"},"modified":"2015-07-30T19:18:20","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T19:18:20","slug":"butterfish-breaded-sauteed-heirloom-tomato-salsa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=4784","title":{"rendered":"butterfish, breaded, saut\u00e9ed; heirloom tomato salsa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"butterfish_clipped\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Three butterfish<\/a>, their fins removed in this picture, but still waiting to be\u00a0cleaned, resting next to the sink on a sheet of parchment.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They were beautiful, and they were delicious, but, note to self<\/strong>: I’m not likely to prepare them again. It’s about those bones.<\/p>\n

But now, as I continue working on this post the next afternoon, I’m thinking: \u00a0They\u00a0really were\u00a0beautiful, and very tasty;\u00a0maybe if I had a little more patience, and took a little more time with the fillet knife…?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"butterfish_tomato_salsa\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This picture shows\u00a0what the butterfish looked like when they reached our\u00a0ancient\u00a0dining table.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"heirloom_Norwich2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And this one\u00a0includes, at\u00a0the lower right of\u00a0the second basket\/tray from the bottom, the one-pound heirloom tomato which became a salsa all by itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Barry was going to be in a\u00a0Catskills wilderness<\/a> from Wednesday through Friday, ‘camping out’\u00a0with his Artsy<\/a> coworkers. \u00a0I would have gone to the Union Square Greenmarket<\/a> yesterday out of habit alone, but I also still wanted to eat well. \u00a0More and more, for us, ‘eating well’ has come to mean\u00a0seafood, so seafood it would be. \u00a0Since I was going to be the only guest at the table, I decided to try to find something I hadn’t cooked before, something with which I might take a chance, exposing only myself to the possibility of\u00a0failure.<\/p>\n

Blue Moon Fish<\/a> had a few butterfish left when I got there at 11:30, a very few – one more than the two visible, in fact, once Margo had scooped through the ice to find the third. \u00a0I had never cooked butterfish, but I was so excited with their simple beauty that I didn’t even think about the fact that they weren’t yet cleaned, and I also had no idea what I was going to do with them.<\/p>\n

There was also a certain amount of pride in buying my dinner, 11 ounces of whole fish, for only $2.25 ($3.50\/lb) when some popular, premium species might sell\u00a0for, . . .\u00a0yup, up to seven times that price. \u00a0Then there are those bones.<\/p>\n

I cut off their fins (not quite deeply enough, it turned out, in the case of the dorsal and ventral rows), gutted them (I was surprised at how tiny was the pocket\u00a0occupied by the\u00a0innards), keeping heads and tails intact with the bodies, washed them and returned them to the refrigerator, to turn to\u00a0assembling a\u00a0recipe\u00a0I might\u00a0use.<\/p>\n

I knew I might spend some time removing the fillets from the bone, so whatever vegetable accompaniment I selected would have to be happy sitting around for a while. \u00a0The decision to use a tomato salsa was more or less\u00a0determined for me by the ripeness of a single large heirloom which had been sitting on our table for a few days.<\/p>\n