Home Grown Dinner

I’ve decided to try and feature something I grow, catch, forage or harvest each day and see how long I can go with that theme. I’ll certainly interrupt the theme if a wild turkey plops itself in front of my camera and sits still or something interesting happens that I actually get a photo of, but I am curious just how many things I actually do grow and how long I can go with this theme.

Today’s feature was to be spigariello, but I’ll save that for another post because the photo does not do it justice. Today’s post instead will be the medley of the home grown dinner that includes the spigariello.

Everything on my dinner and salad plate I grew or caught, except for some butter, olive oil and salt which you can’t actually see, but it’s there improving what already tastes good. I enjoy and have lots of fun with the challenge of cooking meals mostly from things I grew, or in this case caught also. It’s kind of like a game for me to fashion a meal from what I can get from the garden or raise. I’ve added the categories of catching or foraging, because it’s my game so I can make up the rules. What you see some is of the striped bass that I froze after the Boston Harbor fishing expedition baked with a little butter and parsley, the first garden tomatoes with olive oil, basil and salt, and spigariello, boiled and then sautéed in a little olive oil. The spigariello is not actually as dark as it looks the photo. At the top of the plate is my favorite part of this meal. It's new Yukon Gold potatoes mashed with butter in which sage has been sautéed. The salad plate consists of romaine lettuce and a few Sweet 100 and Sungold cherry tomatoes, dressed with a little olive oil and salt. What follows is the recipe for the potatoes, It's so simple that it's really more of a concept than a recipe

Recipe: Potatoes with sage butter.
Boil some potatoes. Remove the skins.
Melt some butter in a sauté pan.
Chop up some fresh sage and sauté it in the butter for a few minutes until the butter just begins to start getting brown, but doesn’t actually turn brown. This will infuse the butter with the sage flavor.
Add the butter and sage mixture to the potatoes and mash.
Add salt to taste.

I purposely left the amount of sage butter to use out of this recipe. It’s a matter of taste and conscience. I used about a tablespoon of butter for one serving and it seemed right to me. I swear it tastes even better with new freshly dug potatoes, but it’s actually good with any old potatoes you may have around.