A Simple New England Dinner
Growing up in a New England family with true Yankee blood, cooking has never been a very frilly event. In Yankee cooking, the rules are simple and go along with many of the current trends: the ingredients need to be hardy and readily available (locally grown or caught), inexpensive, and the meals need to feed lots of people on very little money. Since most Yankee people worked hard all day, the meals are also easy to make and take minimal work. It started off as a simple food for a simple working people, but since travel is now more popular it’s turned largely into a tourist attraction with lobster bibs, raw bars, and chefs experimenting with non-native fruits and spices. This is all wonderful, but I thought I’d share a meal with you; a native, hardy New England meal.
One of my favorite things to cook is fish because it’s not super expensive, it’s very healthy, and we get it fresh and local. I understand that this is largely not the case across the country, so for this post I picked up some frozen-at-sea halibut that was on sale at a national food chain this week. In reality any white fish will do, but I like to stick to one rule: grill fresh, bake, steam, or fry frozen-at-sea. You can grill frozen if you’d like, but fresh fish deserves the grill each and every time (my opinion, don’t take me too seriously).
This is the menu: Halibut with bread crumbs and lemon, boiled green beens, and red potatoes. Feel free to omit the bread crumbs, and/or use a little butter, salt and pepper instead.
And this is how you prepare it, in 5 simple steps:
First, preheat oven to 350F, get a big pot of water boiling.
Second, wash all ingredients (including the fish, which you should pat dry). Put the potatoes in the water to boil with a couple pinches of sea salt, set the beans aside, and put the fish in an oven-safe pan.
Third, coat the fish with bread crumbs, then a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. I like using italian seasoned bread crumbs as you don’t have to do any other seasoning after. You can leave the lemons in the pan to bake as well if you’d like.
Fourth, wait 20 minutes. After the potatoes have been boiling for 20 minutes, set the oven timer for 20 minutes and pop the fish in. Throw the beans in with the potatoes to boil.
Fifth, at the sound of the timer, take everything out/drain the pot, make yourself a plate, and enjoy.
It’s pretty simple. 2 pans, about 10 minutes of work, and you’ve got a meal that can feed tons of people. Don’t worry about boiling things together, the beans and potatoes will get along perfectly fine.
Price List
Fish: $7/lb
Potatoes: $1/lb
Green Beans: $2/lb
Lemons: $.50/ea
That’s about $3.50 per person, and you get a really great and hearty meal. You’ll be able to feed 10 people a seafood meal for around $40!
I’ll be the first to admit that this is a very simple meal, and most of what I eat is like this- that’s how we cook up here. Through this style of cooking (by removing frills), you learn to enjoy the taste of your food, not the taste of the seasonings you put in it (when’s the last time you ate a boiled potato without anything on it?). Why am I writing about this? Because like many of you I read blogs, I look at great recipes and I think wow, I’d like to make that. Up until a couple months ago, I’d just move on and order takeout. I’m urging you to try something like this, or any other simple recipe you find. If anything it’ll be a new experience. Hopefully, it’ll be the start of something better.
