Go Fish

I have been trying to incorporate more fish into our family's diet. As I am usually responsible for preparing dinner, I have a pretty big say in what we actually eat for dinner. Couple that with the fact that my wife and I like to eat tasty food, and, hopefully without sounding like a total tool, I've developed into a capable chef.

Of course, I've bragged, uh, I mean, told you all, about my Indian cooking, my leet Mexican soup making skills, my beer, and some other food that I've forgotten about.

But today, I'll run down a very tasty meal that you can make in the comfort of your very own kitchen! We had it tonight, and to say, "I was very pleased with myself," would be a huge understatement.

We had Orange Roughy with a roasted red pepper cream sauce, red potatoes, and asparagus.

Orange roughy is a very mild fish that my wife really liked (she doesn't like real fishy fish.), and I really liked the flavor combined with the cream sauce. Ok, ok, here's what I did:

Set oven to 350 degrees
Ingredients:
2 lbs Orange roughy (thawed)
1 medium sized tomato, sliced
1 lb Small red potatoes, quartered. (the potatoes I had ranged in size from a golf ball to a racquet ball)
1 bunch of Asparagus
Olde Thompson Fish and Seafood Seasoning (or your favorite seafood seasoning)
Olive oil
Roasted Red Pepper Cream Sauce

In a large cooking dish (I used a 12x12 Polish pottery deep dish, anything but metal will do), place the fish in the middle, with the tomato slices laid in a single layer on the top of the fish.

Put the potatoes around the edges and the asparagus on top of the potatoes around the fish.

Sprinkle the seasoning on everything and drizzle with olive oil. Cover and bake 40-50 minutes at 350 degrees.

While that is baking, make the cream sauce! I followed the linked recipe with the following exceptions:

For roasting my peppers, I put a little olive oil in a frying pan, set the heat on medium, plopped the whole peppers in it, and occasionally turned them. When all the sides had some nice black char on them, they were done, and I removed them from the heat and covered them.

I didn't have any green onions, so I used 1/2 a small yellow onion, diced. I had to fry it a bit longer than green onions to get them cooked.

I did not strain the puree; I hated to waste all that goodness...

I added the called for amount of cream and then added more as I...uh, felt like it. I was shooting for a little creamier sauce than the recipe apparently makes. shrug. Of course, having all that pulp in my sauce probably accounted for having to put in more cream.

Now, I didn't follow this order because I'm giving you all the benefit of my hindsight. You might have to start the peppers roasting while you prepare the fish for baking; that's what I did.

And, because I did that, I was done with my sauce about 20 minutes before the dish was done, so the sauce had time to sit, off the burner. I do believe that time helped the flavors to meld together.

When the fish dish was done (the potatoes took the longest to cook), I warmed up the cream sauce.

My wife had the sauce just on the fish, but I had it on the potatoes as well. My son declined to have any sauce; he doesn't do sauces...

Ok, now comes the broken arm patting myself on the back part.

I'm sure that everyone has had a vision of something that they'd like to make, whether it's a dinner, or a structure, or a garden, a drawing, or, well, just about anything that one might create, and after you get through crafting the item, you stand back and are so amazed that it turned out not as you envisioned it...

...but even better. That was this dish for me tonight. It was better than I ever could have imagined!