January's Food Focus: Moosewood

Wasting no time diving into my goals for 2008, last night's dinner came from my focus cookbook for January: Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. I picked the Moosewood book up at the neighborhood used book store several years ago because I'd heard good things about the restaurant and the collective. I've paged through it a couple of times, bookmarked a handful of recipes... but never cooked from it until yesterday.

Yesterday's search for inspiration found me preparing their Baltic Fish, a simple baked fish based on the restaurant's more calorically dense Fish Otis, doused liberally in a sour cream dill sauce.

Why'd I choose this one? It looked fairly easy, I had most of the ingredients on hand, and I figured the leftovers would reheat well later in the week when time is at more of a premium.

The verdict? Eh. It was okay. John didn't care for it, but that may well have been partially user error. Because my fish guy at Andronico's was out of cod, I opted for tilapia. Stupid, stupid, stupid... tilapia's never performed well for me in the oven (though it sautes like a dream). In a addition, I cut the bake time back by 5 minutes as fish usually dries out in my oven. So we ended up with a bit of tilapia sashimi in the center of one of the fillets.

You'll also notice there's no photograph. That's because it's visually bland. A study in white. And it's all soft. It needs something... red bell peppers? thicker sliced onions? to balance it out texturally. On the positive side, the leftovers were *far* more satisfying tonight. Not sure if the dill/sour cream needed time to macerate or what, but it was much more interesting reheated. Sadly there are enough to-try recipes out there that I probably won't come back to it.

I served it with a light green salad and a glass of Chateau Ste. Michelle Columbia Valley Riesling. Very nice.

Want to try it yourself and see if I just screwed it up? The recipe follows.

Baltic Fish
adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Low-fat Favorites, 1996

2 large fillets of tilapia (1 pound total weight)
3 medium baking potatoes, peeled and sliced (about 12 ounces)
3 cloves garlic, minced
salt and ground black pepper to taste
the juice of one meyer lemon
1 cup low fat sour cream
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1/2 (heaping) tablespoon dried dill
1 medium red onion, very thinly sliced

Preheat the over to 350.

I started with the potatoes, boiling them as directed with the garlic for ten minutes, mashing them with a wooden spoon, seasoning with a bit of pepper and spreading them in the bottom of an 8x8 glass baking dish.

I added the fish to the potatoes, and juiced the lemon over the top, catching the seeds in my hands.

I combined the sour cream, dill and horseradish in the sour cream container (I'm all about reduction of effort) whisking with a fork until the three were well combined, then spooning the sour cream mixture over the fish.

I then topped this with the red onion slices, covered the whole thing in foil and put it in the oven for 30 minutes while I worked on a salad.

The shopping list:
farm raised tilapia and sour cream from Lunardi's.
potatoes, garlic and red onions from Farm Fresh to You.
meyer lemons from a coworker's tree.
dill from Penzey's.

From the archives: Today in 2007, we made ravioli.

Technorati Tags: Food | Recipe | Seafood | Key Ingredient: Tilapia