We *could* have chosen flounder, but I’m a softie.  It seems that when you’re almost 4 years old, even if you don’t always *eat* the fish Mom and Dad pick up, tradition and repetition can be very important.  So, K accompanied me to pickup, and requested that we get another cod please.  She won, but promised to eat it. (Which she did, at least steak form, so I’m less bitter than I could have been.)

The thick half of the cod got turned into steaks and grilled over very hot coals, imparting a lovely smoky flavor.

The thinner back half, I filleted later and tried another recipe from Claudia Roden, for fish with lemon and egg sauce.  The fish is poached in just enough water/lemon juice/olive oil to cover it, then a mix of lemon juice, fish poaching liquid, and 2 eggs are mixed together and slowly heated until the sauce thickens.  Sauce poured over fish and then chilled.  I thought I would love this as much as avgolemono soup, but didn’t.  Pretty, though, and at least it’s not a rut.

This left the spine with what was left after filleting still on it, which I made a quick stock out of, just enough for miso soup.

Still more cod.  For people who try to balance local eating with a demand for lots of variety, this could lead to a rut.

but!  I found a cookbook with all sorts of very different-styled fish recipes that are good for firm, white fish - largely from different parts of the Sephardic Jewish world.

This particular recipe is Italian in origin, and meant to be served cold. The recipe consisted of baking the fish whole in foil, then separating out fillets once it was cooked, and marinating overnight in a mix of olive oil, lemon juice, and the fish’s cooking juices.

There was an accompanying “green salsa” that I modified to suit our tastes and the pantry. (olive oil, red wine vinegar, 1/2c or so of mint, 1/2c or so of parsley, nuts, a slice of stale bread, salt, and 7 or 8 large garlic stuffed green olives.)  The nuts were macadamias, just because we had some needing to be used before they went stale and didn’t have the pine nuts the recipe called for.  And then, since I didn’t have much parsley or want to make it too minty, I threw in about 1c cooked kale, defrosted from the freezer, to make sure it was green enough.

Note to self: when it’s so hot and muggy out that the the fish share folks say you might as well just steak it and grill it, this means baking it for more than half an hour at 400 degrees indoors, even at 10pm, will leave your kitchen still annoyingly hot in the morning.

Ok, the fish is really good, but we’re starting to worry about Cape Ann’s golden cod population.   Will we see any other kind of fish all season?  And perhaps it’s time to figure out how to make salt cod at home to save some of this without the aid of the freezer!

Yesterday we filleted the cod and made Boston Baked Scrod with it.  Mmm, buttery lemony bread crumbs.

The head, bones, and scraps went into another 2 quarts of fish stock now in the freezer.

The scrap meat (easily 1 lb of it) comes off the bones easily once it’s boiled and that’s frozen separately for making a big batch of fish cakes with later on.

Not the simplest fish to try grilling whole, but we signed up for this fish CSA in the hopes of doing that, and dammit, we were going to.

Off with its head - it was too big to fit on the grill if we left it on!  Head still in freezer.

The rest of it got coated in copious olive oil, and wrangled on and off the grill over hot charcoal, with some mishaps, but turned out beautifully cooked.  Served with swiss chard and potatoes, Croatian style, and garlic and parsley mixed with olive oil, and our favorite Contadino pinot grigio. Fuck Yeah.

As we once again failed to invite people over for the occasion, there was much leftover fish - we ate it reheated one more time, then made a giant batch of fish cakes with the rest, mixed with leftover potato from the swiss chard and potato, roughly following a recipe for crab cakes, the kind you add mayo to, but substituting the cod for the crab.  Fuck yeah.

Week 3: another cod. The final tally:

Filleted one side, cut into smaller pieces, dredged in flour, and fried/sauteed.  Not dredged enough, oil not hot enough, fish tasty anyway.

Filleted the other side, cut into smaller pieces, battered and fried (in deeper hotter oil this time) while oven-baking some potatoes cut into wedges, served with creamy coleslaw.  fuck yeah.

Head, tail, and bones went into stock, following the same method as the whiting, stock frozen and later used for awesome miso soup, fuck yeah.

Removed the extra meat after boiling, froze it for future use as fishcakes or something.  Still in freezer.

Week 1 was a very fresh whole cod.

We hacked it into steaks with a knife. (Hmm.  Time to sharpen the knives.)  All the steaks made it onto the grill, coated with olive oil. Very tasty!

Those we didn’t eat that day or the next day as leftover then turned into improvised fish cakes, half eaten right then and half frozen. I had a theory we’d test out how the fish cakes do when defrosted, but there’s this problem : we keep getting more fish, so why eat the frozen leftovers!

4 fish cakes, the tail and head are still in the freezer.