All cats love fish but fear to wet their paws

Sorry I've been pretty lazy and behind on posts lately.  I will try to be better about them coming up.  The nice thing about being behind is that I have updates for the days I don't cook!

We watched some show on Food Network and one of the dishes they were serving was Chilean Sea bass.  I don't know that I have ever had Chilean sea bass before.  I originally went to the store for halibut but for some reason they only had portions and none of these portions were big enough so I went with sea bass instead.  I like to cook my fish in one big piece and then cut into portions b/c I feel it cooks better and doesn't dry out that way.  I never knew how much this stuff costs!! Surprisingly though, the sea bass was only $1/lb more than the halibut would have been so I guess I didn't spend that much more..but man! I was really shocked at how much it was.

So along with my sea bass I decided to go with a quinoa pilaf and broccolini.  Here are ingredients for dinner:

Chilean sea bass

lemon

butter

shallot

quinoa

broccolini

celery

peas

onions

lemon

white wine

red wine vinegar

chicken stock

garlic

For the fish, I had Eric salt and pepper both sides and then just pan seared it on both sides until cooked through.  Due to the thickness of the fish, it took a little longer than expected but eventually cooked through.

I decided to make a lemon, garlic broccolini.  This was simple enough.  I drizzled olive oil over the greens and sprinkled chopped garlic.  Then, right before serving, I topped with lemon juice and parmesan cheese.

I feel as if we have almost completely moved away from rice and replaced it with quinoa instead.  Quinoa is so much better for you with more nutritional value and it really seems that you can do almost anything with it that you can can make with rice.  To make the quinoa, I started with cooking some chopped onions in the pan.  Then, added the quinoa, chicken stock, and peas and let it all cook down until the quinoa was cooked through and the liquid was absorbed.

I am a fan of Julia Child's recipes since I know beforehand they will be good.  I originally wanted to make a mustard sauce for the fish but I didn't want to make anything that engulfed the flavor of the fish and masked it completely...especially after how much it cost.  Instead I went with making Julia Child's Beurre Blanc.  I was little worried about it at first b/c it seemed like a lot of work for just white wine butter sauce Plus, I was worried that I'd spend all the time making/stirring it and it would break.  Nevertheless, I decided to go with it and made my first beurre blanc.

The process starts with shallots, white wine, white wine vinegar, salt, and pepper in a small pot.  This gets heated VERY slowly until it comes to a boil.  The heat is then reduced to a simmer until it's reduced by about 1/3.  Then, very slowly, one "chunk" at a time, you add butter into the pot.  I took the pot off the heat for the most part to not overcook it.  You want to make sure you only add one piece of butter at a time but also make sure to add the next piece before the previous piece has completely melted..does that make any sense? Anywho...whisk the entire time and if the sauce is getting too cold, add it back to the heat until it can melt the butter again.  Just stir and stir and stir until it becomes a creamy sauce! I felt like I was whisking for forever so it may take longer you expect.

Everything was finally done after about an hour or so.  I thought it was only going to take 30 min so needless to say, we ate dinner a little later than planned but it turned out to be good!  I think the tartness from the lemon in the broccolini was a good way to cut some of the butter in the beurre blanc.  The quinoa also helped with that b/c it would absorb some of the sauce into it when mixing it together.  The fish was a little sweet and pretty meaty which was nice.  I'm glad that I went with the beurre blanc instead of the mustard sauce b/c it's definitely a delicate fish and it was nice to be able to still taste it through the sauce.  The quinoa didn't really taste like a rice pilaf but it was still good and went well with the rest of the meal.  It was much lighter in flavor than the rest of the meal which was great for balancing out the flavors.