Grilled Halibut with Tomato Butter

My normal procedure for gathering information from food magazines goes like this: 1. read magazine, 2. place magazine in stack with others that have been read, 3. eventually, flip though all those read magazines and cut out recipes and photos I want to keep, 4. file those pages and use some sooner than others. However, once in awhile, something catches my eye, and I have to try it immediately. That was the case with this grilled halibut dish from April’s Food and Wine. I didn’t even get to step two. I saw this and made a shopping list. It’s from an article about food and wine pairings suggested by a few different sommeliers. This dish is from Caroline Styne of Lucques and AOC, and a pinot noir was recommended for it.

Tomatoes cooked in butter and spooned over grilled fish was all I really needed to know to want this for dinner. But, as I read through the recipe, I began to wonder how much I would love it with tarragon rubbed onto the fish and also used in the sauce. It’s not that I dislike tarragon, but I wasn’t sure I would love a double-dose of it. I’ve mentioned before that I have Mexican mint marigold growing in my yard, and that is our Texas substitution for fresh tarragon. The plants die back to the ground at the end of winter and then begin new growth in early spring. They’re about halfway back to their normal height now. So, I used chopped Mex. mint marigold instead of tarragon, and it has the same anise flavor. The halibut fillets were rubbed with a combination of chopped parsley, the M.m.m., and lemon zest, and they were left in the refrigerator for a couple of hours. Then, they were grilled outside over charcoal while the sauce was made. Butter was melted in a small skillet, whole M.m.m. leaves were added and cooked until fragrant, and then grape tomatoes joined this mixture. It was left to cook over low heat until the tomatoes burst to release delicious juices into the browned butter.

I can say with certainty that the flavors of this dish were as good as I’d imagined when I first saw it in the magazine. The two uses of tarragon or M.m.m. worked fine. The anise was subtle and married nicely with the freshness of the tomatoes and richness of the browned butter. The herb rub on the halibut became a very good accent to the flavor of the fish itself and the smoke from the grill. I made the smashed fingerlings mentioned in the article as well, and they were great on the side. Also great was the light, California pinot noir with nice, balanced fruit whose name I can’t remember because we ended up with a different wine than the one from the article and I failed to write it down. The simple, flavorful sauce could be used on ravioli or gnocchi, and the tarragon could be replaced with thyme for variation. Or, I could happily sit down to a plate of burst-open tiny tomatoes in herbed browned butter and a hunk of bread.

Light Tex-Mex

I believe this whole meal started with a crisp, fresh head of green cabbage. We only have one more pick-up in our fall/winter CSA subscription, and I’m trying to make good and interesting use of these vegetables. I remembered a jalapeno corn slaw from Robb Walsh and David Garrido’s Nuevo Tex-Mex, and that inspired another look through that fantastic, little book. This book includes everything from drinks to desserts, and it never disappoints. There are salsas, sauces, enchiladas, huevos, tacos, appetizers, rice variations, and sweets. To make a light meal with the slaw as a side, I was thinking of roasted salmon with a spicy sauce and maybe some simple but flavorful rice. I’ll post more about the slaw later, and today I’ll show the Ancho-Tomatillo Sauce and Mexican Mint Marigold Rice that I chose.

I realize the sauce looks mole-like, and I just prepared a mole a couple of weeks ago, but it’s different, it really is. First, this is much less involved. Onion, garlic, tomatillos, anchos, guajillos, and serranos are sautéed together with some broth and lemon juice. Once the dried chiles are somewhat reconstituted, all is pureed with cilantro and strained. The sauce is then re-heated in olive oil and seasoned to taste. I usually skip straining, but I’m glad I did it here. The sauce became velvety smooth, and the last re-heating with oil step made it even more so. The complex spice and sweetness and the layers of mole flavor are not part of this sauce. Instead, this sauce is more of a punch of piquant chile heat, rounded earthy chile flavor, with slight tangy undertones. The resulting dish was all about the sauce with the roasted coho salmon serving merely as a delivery system for it. A lighter fish would have disappeared all together, but the salmon performed adequately.

The spicy sauce required a quiet, calming companion like rice, and the Mexican mint marigold variation was lovely here. Mex. mint marigold, tagetes lucida, is an herb that grows easily here in Texas with an anise scent and flavor. Tarragon doesn’t fare so well in our heat and humidity, so it makes a very good substitution. It’s a low-maintenance, compact, perennial and produces little, yellow flowers in the fall. Its slender leaves are easily pulled from its stems, and a tablespoon of chopped leaves were added to the finished rice. First, onion, garlic, and chopped serrano were sautéed with the rice before water and butter were added. That adds a lot of flavor and a near nuttiness, and sautéing the rice in oil prevents the grains from sticking together once cooked. Tossing in the chopped herb added a subtle bit of freshness and barely there anise.

In the end, I got what just I wanted: big flavor, some serious spicy heat, an interesting rice dish, and cool, refreshing, crunchy slaw, all in a light meal.