flora and flying - You cannot make this stuff up

Dinner on the fly, November 2007.

For those of you utterly tired of recipes for swiss chard gratin, chipotle braised rutabagas seasoned with epazote and pumpkin sweet potato gratin served with a froth of nutmeg air, I bring you eating something else the night before Thanksgiving.

Originally, our thought was to go to the local really better than you would think Chinese place next to MM, but then life got the better of me. I looked in our nearly bare fridge and came up with a dinner that will be a keeper for a while.

I'm not a big fan of ready made food, nor am I a big fan of making foods that others make better than me that are available in the ready made format. One of these foods is gravy, but you can deal with that tomorrow. The other is alfredo sauce. I can't imagine having such ingredients on hand and honestly, we don't use tons of it. However, one local company, Cucina Fresca does a great job and we have been seen with the very lovely reusuable jars in our shopping basket. One leftover lug of saffron pasta from Wedgwood's La Pasta, some smoked halibut kindly gifted to us by MZ, fish smoker extraordinare and the some fresh parsely snipped from the garden and we had a dinner that made us both happy and used some awesome local ingredients.

For some the combination of the smoked fish and saffron may seem odd, but honestly, it worked, the woody, sweet flavor of the halibut played nicely off the sweetness of the saffron and the alfredo just held it together. If you can believe it, we're out of parmesan reggiano as well, but this dish didn't need it. The flavors stood on their own.

I can't really give you a recipe for this, I already did. It was a total throw together a meal meal and it worked. I can't wait to make it to the market on Saturday to buy more pasta and recreate it.

For those of you still looking for holiday recipes, remember, stick to the classics and it will all be okay.

Happy Thanksgiving eve.

nm