[local eating] Farm share week 6 and fish share week 10

[magid]

This week's farm share included:

• a bunch of basil
  
• a bunch of cilantro (given away)
  
• a head of fennel with all its frondiness
  
• a head of lettuce (I opted for red leaf this time)
  
• three zucchinis (smallish)
  
• a bunch of scallions
  
• a bunch of Ailsa Craig onions
  
• three hothouse tomatoes (tomato squee!)
  
• a head of radicchio (I chose a small one; I'm still unsure how to deal with radicchio other than slivered in salad)
  
• a bunch of carrots with greens

First thoughts: tomato-basil salad with feta (if only I still had some of last week's cukes...), scallion pancakes, roasted zucchini and fennel with onion.

And the fish share this week was whole fish (I need to email them about the balance of whole and fillets still). The options were cod or sea perch, and I figured I'd opt for my favorite cod, especially since there were warnings about the dangerous spiny bits on the sea perch. Except that by the time I got there, the cod was gone (apparently the proportion had been 10 cod : 40 sea perch, so that's not so surprising). I'd intended to bake the cod fillets with a dredging of barley flour and topped with scallions and apricots for a wholly MA-based dish (if you grant the fish being from MA waters...). But sea perch were another thing entirely. They're not flatfish, but they're definitely less round, and instead of getting one big fish, I had five smaller ones, so it would be a lot more work to fillet them, and the guys at the distribution suggested I cook them whole, after gutting them (they also said I should cut off the spines and scale the skin, which I mostly didn't do (People talk about how much kernels of corn fly about when cutting them off the ear, but that's nothing so bad as fish scales flying about when scaling fish. Since I wasn't planning to eat the skin (maybe I should've, but whatever), I just ignored it after an initial attempt frustrated me by the scales landing in odd places.). Which is what I ended up doing, realizing that this was the first time I'd really gut fish: the whiting and other small fishes from last summer were just a quick cutting off of head and guts, rinsing out the cavity, and good to go. This was cutting in, getting the organs out, leaving the head intact. I wasn't grossed out, but it did take some time; I didn't really want to deal with filleting after that.




It looks to me rather like a scary Abarat fish, really.

So I stuffed them with the scallions (farm share) and sliced apricots (thanks again, DAL!), and baked them at about 400 F for 20 minutes. At that point I was running out to a program at the library, so I chilled them until I returned, then pulled all the meat off the bones (well, I missed some bones, especially the smaller ones *sigh*). It's good, but I'd still rather have had the cod.

Comments

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Those things have NASTY spines :(

[magid.livejournal.com]

Happily, I managed to avoid mutilating myself on them even without snipping them off (a particular accomplishment this week, where I'd already managed to bang my thumb into a door hard enough to make it bleed under the nail).

But yeah, not a wonderful feature for the predator that eats the fish. Presumably quite useful to the fish until then...

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I snipped them off, and was safe doing the cleaning and stuff - but that week's share was one of the bunches of fish parts that went under the tomatoes, and -that's- when I cut sliced up :(

The spiky bits on their heads were pretty impressive, too - clearly a fish that could puff itself up and make life very painful for anything trying to gulp it down.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Oh, ow. And by then you think you're free and clear, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Scallion pancakes!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never made them before, but Chef Google has a lot of recipes that are similar enough to get the idea. (And once I get the to the ready-to-fry stage, they're apparently freezable, too.)