Prosciutto Roasted Bass with Autumn Vegetables
- By Katie Roche
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- 11 Jun, 2019
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"Autumn vegetables" was a good lead on this recipe - it's nice to have a heads up that I'm going to be hunting for non-seasonal vegetables which, as I've stated in the past, I didn't really ever know could be an issue until I moved somewhere that pays attention to that sort of thing. I make fun of it sometimes, but I think, on a strictly food-related level, I'd choose to be limited to really great seasonal produce over having mediocre everything all year round. ItemQuest wasn't too challenging though, because if you're hunting for seasonal vegetables, autumn and winter vegetables are usually a lot easier to find year-round. I like to think the grocery stores have root cellars like in Redwall or Little House on the Prairie or whatever, where they go down a bunch of spiderweb-y steps to just find massive amounts of potatoes. Stores are never out of potatoes. Butternut squash is pretty easy to find now too, out of sheer trendiness, and its launch to kitchen popularity has also brought it to us in the glorious convenience of the pre-chopped situation you see here. Is it ridiculous to buy pre-cut vegetables? Maybe. But have you ever tried cutting a butternut squash? Like, ugh, I will save my wrists for knitting, thanks. Carrots, prosciutto, lemon, rosemary - check. Now let's talk about bass.
Dan was pretty sure I wasn't going to be able to find striped bass, which is what Ina calls for here, but I thought I'd give Whole Foods a try anyway, since their seafood department is the most reliably-stocked around here. In the event that we couldn't find it, I was going to use Ina's secondary recommendation, halibut, which I know Whole Foods has pretty much all the time. I walked up to the seafood department and this was the first thing I saw - whole entire bass, like on Napoleon Dynamite when he gives Deb that fish and is all, "I caught you this delicious bass." Initially when I saw this post was coming up, I had wanted to learn how to fish the way normal people do (as in, not with giant nets in the Kenai River but the whole fishing pole situation) but the whole thing got away from me and I didn't end up making the time to invite myself on someone's boat, coat my entire body in SPF 100 like fifteen times, and spend a day trying to catch one of these bad boys. Whole Foods did it for me, and in this case, they're not kidding, they had the Whole Food. My only hesitation on this was that I'm pretty sure it was farmed and generally I try not to eat farm-raised fish. It's one of my few crunchy people food habits, and it's really less that I'm crunchy and more that I was just raised on better food than that.
So I have never seen an entire fish being sold in a store like this and wasn't sure what to do...do you just...take it and put it in your basket straight up? Slime and all? Do you ask the seafood people for it? It just seems weird that they're sitting there for all to reach, in a bucket on ice, if there's more involved than just taking them. You know? But the guy at the seafood counter was like, "Do you need me to fillet that for you?" and not being the biggest fan of filleting fish, I said "Sure." I came home, unwrapped it, and regretted that decision.
So I have never seen an entire fish being sold in a store like this and wasn't sure what to do...do you just...take it and put it in your basket straight up? Slime and all? Do you ask the seafood people for it? It just seems weird that they're sitting there for all to reach, in a bucket on ice, if there's more involved than just taking them. You know? But the guy at the seafood counter was like, "Do you need me to fillet that for you?" and not being the biggest fan of filleting fish, I said "Sure." I came home, unwrapped it, and regretted that decision.
I mean BRO. Like...if you're gonna do this, could you just at least phrase it correctly and ask if I would like the fish "mangled"? Every last one of my Alaskan sensibilities is offended. But I mean, I guess they have always called themselves "Whole Foods", and now we know they've never claimed to be Properly Filleted Foods for a REASON.
For the roasted vegetables, I've got the butternut squash, carrots, parsnips, and potatoes all in disappointingly varied sizes because I'm not that great at chopping stuff. They get tossed with a little olive oil and go in the oven for a head start on the fish, which won't need to roast very long.
Before being swaddled in prosciutto, the fish fillets get brushed with olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper. You can see that Dan did his best to salvage the terrible fillet job; even so, one of the fillets was a bit delicate and wanted to fall apart every time I picked it up. Fun.
Do you feel like you're looking at some kind of weird, all-meat burrito? Me too. This wasn't DIFFICULT, per se, but it also wasn't exactly super EASY - wrapping something super greasy around something kind of slimy? Good luck with that. As she is wont to do, Ina gave specific instructions on how to wrap for maximum aesthetic effect, which of course I only sort of executed, about as much as I ever execute the aesthetic effects of anything.
While those were cooking, I began melting butter with a rosemary sprig in it on the stove. One of these days I'm going to do a taste test of thing like this - butter with and without a rosemary sprig, things with bay leaf vs. without them, etc. - just to see if I really can tell a difference. I had to buy a whole dollar or so of rosemary just to do this and then throw it away. I mean, just feels like throwing George Washingtons STRAIGHT into the trash. Anyway, got this all melty for the pouring. Pouring butter on stuff...who doesn't love that???
Here she is! All done, with a little of the rosemary-lemon butter poured on top of everything. (I didn't mention earlier that you add some freshly squeezed lemon juice to the butter after chucking the rosemary.) I made this in a jet-lagged haze after returning home from London, where I had actually just eaten bass for the first time. I think that may have been sea bass, but I'm not really sure; they did, however, serve it with a turnip so I'm wondering if serving bass with root vegetables is, like, a THING. If it is, great, because I'm HERE FOR IT. This was so good!!! I think the rosemary did come through in the butter and it really added something, especially to the vegetables, with just that hint of acidity from the lemon juice really brightening the rich flavors of the fall vegetables and the saltiness of the fish and prosciutto. Is there anything lemon DOESN'T make better? It's really kind of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants of food. Dan liked it as well, but he did say that he did not like the parsnips: "They had an awkward texture, like mushy potatoes." I just replied to this quote by telling him that potatoes are mushy and he is arguing that if you bake a potato, it's "not mushy, it's potato-y". If anyone knows what he means by that, please do illuminate me.
Ina recommends this for company, and I would agree - it's easy enough to prepare, you can do a lot of the prep work ahead of time, and as long as you start your vegetables a few minutes in advance, you could pretty much roast your fish when your guests arrive to ensure that everything is hot even if they're late. I'm always looking for recipes like that, because when I first got married, I would habitually have EVERYTHING I was serving on the table right at the agreed upon dinner time until my husband gently suggested that I allow people to be late without feeling like I'm breathing on them the second they walk in the door. It's a work in progress. This, however, was a majestic and resounding success of Ina's. Give it a try, and if you can hop on a boat, ride it to the middle of the lake, spend several hours fishing, and come up with your own freshly caught bass, store-bought won't have to be fine - you'll be all set - and even better off in the end if you can fillet your own fish with a fraction of the skill that Poorly Filleted Foods did. Get to it!
Ina recommends this for company, and I would agree - it's easy enough to prepare, you can do a lot of the prep work ahead of time, and as long as you start your vegetables a few minutes in advance, you could pretty much roast your fish when your guests arrive to ensure that everything is hot even if they're late. I'm always looking for recipes like that, because when I first got married, I would habitually have EVERYTHING I was serving on the table right at the agreed upon dinner time until my husband gently suggested that I allow people to be late without feeling like I'm breathing on them the second they walk in the door. It's a work in progress. This, however, was a majestic and resounding success of Ina's. Give it a try, and if you can hop on a boat, ride it to the middle of the lake, spend several hours fishing, and come up with your own freshly caught bass, store-bought won't have to be fine - you'll be all set - and even better off in the end if you can fillet your own fish with a fraction of the skill that Poorly Filleted Foods did. Get to it!
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!