Baguette #1, Beef Box #2, Fish Box #3 - Triple Threat!

Last Sunday we had a very busy day of cooking. It all started with our third fish box. Fillets of Chilipepper Rock cod - which after much searching turns out is also know as Red Snapper. Much easier to find recipes for this! Jerome found a recipe for Veracruz style. We wanted to have bread to go with it, so I volunteered to make baguettes. Since we were already cooking up a storm and had our latest beef box on hand, we decided to make a big pot of chili to eat during the week. Get ready for a busy blog post!

  

To begin with I measured out the baguette ingredients - Flour, Salt and Yeast - on our handy dandy scale - accurate to 3 decimal places! You can find the recipe here, it's nice and easy! 

Made a well, added the water and mixed it all up. Leave it to rise for an hour or so. 

Meanwhile Jerome assembled all his ingredients for his fish sauce. The recipe calls for onion, garlic, bay leaves, parsley, oregano, olives, capers and finally raisins. 

We weren't convinced, but all the reviews said to be sure not to skip the raisins, so we went along with it.

 

Everything gets simmered up ahead of time and set aside so that the raisins will have time to absorb all the flavours. Don't forget to add the capers!

 

Here's the bread before and after the rising.

I kneaded it a bit more and then formed it into two loaves. Turns out I didn't make them long and skinny enough so next time I think I'll make 4 smaller ones. 

 

Our veggies were bathed in sunlight drying while all the rest of this was going on! 

Here they are after being chopped up and turned into the base for our chili!

Jerome put both the ground meat and the steak from our meat box into it, as well as some of the chorizo he made in his sausage class. In addition there were a variety of beans and chili powders of all sorts that we found at the mexican grocery store next door. 

Here you can see my not very baguettishly shaped baguettes. 

They got popped into the oven regardles!!

You can see a pan of water underneath the baking sheet. 

Apparently this helps your crust get nice and brown and crunchy. 

While the bread was baking we prepared the fish. The red snapper was quite read and very different than our sablefish. This time there was no skin, but still some bones. We received this shipment while I was away and so had frozen it. As a result it was one big frozen lump so we decided to cook it all and have guests!

You put a bit of the Veracruz mixture below so the fish won't stick to the pan and then lay the fish on top and then cover with the remaining sauce. Then you throw it in the oven from which you've just removed your bread and cook it about 15 minutes - or until it flakes (we cooked it just slightly too long I think).

The bread turned out very nicely despite it's odd shape. 

We pan fried some squash with olive oil and chili flakes as another vegetable. 

The final product doesn't look alot different than when it went into the oven, 

but was definetly hotter I promise. 

The bread was a really nice mix between crunchy crust and soft inside, perfect to sop up the sauce!

Jerome serving the fish to our happy guests Mike and Gloria - who were a bit confused when we didn't serve them the giant pot of chili on the stove! But in the end seemed quite content with the fish and bread.

You're supposed to garnish your fish with pickled jalepenos. They added a nice touch to it. So don't skip them. And as for those mysterious raisins, they did end up being pretty good, they got all full of the sauce and nice and juicy and plump. Overall very good, but the downside was that with the tasty but strong sauce, you didn't get as much of the flavour of the fish. But definetly a great recipe to try. 

And we didn't forget about the chili, it happily simmered away all afternoon and turned out deliciously! I had a wonderfully tasty, hearty lunch every day this week!

Meat Box 1a: New York Steak

The first thing we cooked from our Meat Box were the two aged new york steaks. They were each about 1/3 of a pound, grass fed, free range etc. They were very evenly sized and had a bit of marbling in them. 

We brought them to room temperature, patted them dry and seasoned them with salt and pepper. 

To go with it, we cut some tomatoes into thick slices and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Ground some salt and pepper on the top and broiled them. 

We flipped them once the top started cooking, and sprinkled some parmesan cheese over the top and put back until they started to brown on that side. 

Jerome was in charge of cooking the steaks while I worried about the sides. Because they were pretty thin steaks we had to cook it at pretty high heat to get a nice sear on the sides without overcooking the middle. A bit of a challenge, but Jerome did a great job. He got a nice colour on both sides and then added a tiny bit of butter to the pan to finish them off while keeping them medium rare. 

We also made some mashed potatoes to round everything out. It was all pretty tasty! We wanted to keep it very simple this time to be able to taste the meat itself. Next time we may try a saucier approach!

Community Supported Agriculture Programs

We were lucky enough to have the chance to sign up for two programs through Jerome's work that will be providing us with fresh fish and meat. The first one is a pilot program with Google and The Half Moon Bay (HMB) Fisherman’s Association. You can read all about the project here. In essence, we get fresh, sustainably caught, in-season fish fillets every two weeks, which is pretty cool. We don't often cook fish, although we both like it very much. Now we have no excuses!

The second Community Supported Agriculture program we joined is a meat partnership with Google and Marin Sun Farms where we'll get a certain amount of meat once a month in various cuts. The first few months will be grass fed beef and then it will branch off into a variety of other meats including: Beef, Chicken, Lamb, Pork, Turkey, Duck and potentially even Goat. There is also an egg option where you can get free range, organic eggs, but we haven't opted for that part yet, as we don't eat eggs to often.

It seems like a pretty cool set of programs. There is a small green grocer right next to our house, so we should be able to get most of our groceries there now that we won't need to be buying meat as often which will save lots of time and aggravation as we both detest grocery shopping in the big stores.

With our first Fish Box, we received a small insulated cooler and ice packs that we are to bring back for each pickup. We can even exchange unfrozen ice packs for new ones if we've forgotten to freeze them ahead of time. It's kind of nice that they have everything organized for us. Jerome just has to go to a specific place at work between certain hours on the given day, and his package is all labelled and ready for him to pick up and have his name crossed off the list.

At this point we've had our first fish shipment and our first meat shipment, and have documented our fun which will follow shortly.