Mac and Cheese

I’m sure almost all of you would agree with me that, as far as traditional American comfort foods go, mac and cheese has to be one of the most iconic, and one of the favorites, especially among the youngsters. As good as it is when you’re at a casual summer barbeque with friends, celebrating Thanksgiving with your family, or just craving some comfort food, there are a few adaptations we can make to the traditional ways of making this dish to make it even better.

There are three key components to this dish that’ll make it or break it. First, sufficiently undercooking the pasta. Second, building a mornay that doesn’t split. Third, creating a topping and baking the dish to completion. Mastering each of these tasks individually is crucial to mastering the perfect mac and cheese. But don’t be too afraid—these tasks may look difficult, but they really aren’t.
Elbow macaroni is the traditional shape associated with this dish. And as good and nostalgic as mac and cheese with this shape is, there are a few shapes that actually hold up better to the sauce and the baking process. Instead of the traditional elbow shape, I suggest gemelli or cavatappi, in that order of preference.

Regardless of its final use, I like to cook each pound of pasta in a gallon of water. But unlike a lot of my other pasta dishes, pasta to be used in mac and cheese should never be cooked in water to al dente. This is a common mistake people make with this dish: cooking the pasta to al dente in the water overcooks it in the oven, and the texture is nowhere near as good as it would be if the proper procedure had been followed. Luckily, pasta boxes or bags give the time required to reach al dente. We can use that information as a baseline, and, in this case, subtract 3-4 minutes from that time, and drain the pasta after that much time.

Bringing a gallon of water to a rolling boil and then parcooking pasta can be quite a slow process, but we can use this time to our advantage. Preheat your oven to 400 Fahrenheit. We need to build a béchamel to eventually turn into a mornay, so this is the best time to do that. By doing things in parallel, the pasta doesn’t get soggy as it waits for the sauce, and the sauce doesn’t develop a skin or thicken too much as it cools. (Sauces thickened by a roux, a mixture of flour and butter, like most of the French Mother Sauces, thicken faster and faster as they get progressively cooler.) We need a mornay sauce eventually, but a good mornay starts with a Béchamel base. Béchamel is one of the five classic Mother Sauces of the French cuisine, so I’ve already covered how to prepare it in a series I did back in October. Since I’ve already covered béchamel, I’ll just create a link to that recipe which you can access by clicking here. 

Once you’ve finished the béchamel as described by that recipe, come back here to learn how to turn the béchamel into a mornay and finish the dish. I will give one tip about the béchamel before moving on: for each pound of pasta, make the roux according to the instructions in the other recipe with 3 tablespoons each of all-purpose flour and unsalted butter.

Once you are satisfied with the taste of your Béchamel, check its texture. A proper béchamel should reach nappe. That is, it should look like a tiny Red Sea if you coat a metal spoon with it and drag your finger across the back of the spoon: there should be two distinct sides of the spoon covered in sauce, a trail in the center where your finger was, and the sauce on either side should not flow back to the center to cover the trail you left. It takes time, but with enough practice, you’ll be able to bring any sauce to nappe. A mornay is a béchamel to which cheese has been added. Cheddar is, of course, the classic cheese for maximum nostalgia in this dish. I already recommended something other than the classic way by suggesting a different shape of pasta, but I’m not going to do that here regarding the cheese. 

Cheddar is a great cheese on its own, and it works really well in mornay sauces, but I do have one recommendation. Just make sure that if you use cheddar, you get a high-quality mild cheddar. Cheaper cheeses (particularly cheddar) usually have extra emulsifiers. These compounds are harmless, and you don’t notice them when you eat the cheese cold or at room temperature, but their presence can slightly change the texture of the cheese when it melts, as it will in this application. Higher quality cheeses lack these additives, so we need to be more careful not to break the emulsion of the sauce, but by using better cheeses, the results will be superior. Milder cheeses, for reasons I don’t quite know how to explain, split less often than sharper cheeses.

I recommend adding a little bit of mustard to a mornay sauce for two reasons. The tang of the mustard cuts through the richness of the cheese quite nicely, and the chemistry of the mustard works in our favor by helping to naturally keep the mornay stable even after the cheese is incorporated and the sauce is heated substantially in a hot oven.

Ideally, it is best to hand-grate a high-quality cheese into a mornay sauce. In any case, however you add your cheese (shredded or grated by the store or processing plant, or grated yourself), do so with the pan containing the sauce off the heat. If direct heat is applied to the sauce before the cheese is combined, the sauce will split. Feel free to adjust the consistency of the sauce with extra milk if it becomes too thick.

Add ¼ cup of olive oil to a skillet, and once the oil is hot, add 1 cup of panko breadcrumbs. Keep the pan and its contents moving constantly and fry the breadcrumbs until they’re golden brown. Remove them from the oil and place them on a paper towel to drain. This should be completed in time with finishing the mornay and the pasta being ready (several minutes shy of al dente). Once all these components are ready, combine the pasta with the mornay sauce, and then transfer the sauced pasta to an oven-safe dish. Top with the breadcrumbs. Cook until golden brown and bubbly. Serve.

(Credit to Fine Cooking)

Revised Bolognese

The Bolognese alla Quarentena has to be one of my most cooked sauces here at home, and a few weeks ago, I made a change to the recipe that merits more than a quick footnote update to the original recipe. The alla Quarentena, as I’ve been preparing it, has always been with a rather lean ground turkey, but traditional Bolognese is made with ground beef (honestly, I don’t remember the last time I worked with ground beef), so I’ll make two changes to the alla Quarentena here: 1) ground turkey will revert back to the original traditional ground beef, and 2) I’ll make the signature change that differentiates this recipe from my other one.

This recipe begins the same way, by sauteing 1 pound of ground beef (a good ground chuck is best). Beef has a significant advantage over turkey: it’s a lot fattier. The most common ground beef sold here in the United States is 80/20. That is, 80 percent of the meat is protein and 20 percent is fat. In general, this is the perfect ratio of ground beef for almost anything. If one of my recipes calls for ground beef, you can safely assume I want you to use 80/20 unless I say otherwise. The ground turkey I’ve worked with, on the other hand, is 93/7. Poultry in general is leaner than beef or pork, but even by poultry standards, this is very lean. (So lean, in fact, that I don’t think I could find beef that lean without going to a specialty butcher shop; most ground beef is 90/10 or higher.)

This higher fat content of the ground beef over the ground turkey (20% versus 7% means that the beef is basically 3 times fattier than the turkey) is important for three reasons: Fat is a barrier that allows for even heat transfer from the cooking surface to the protein. Without that barrier to move the heat from the pan to the food, it cooks unevenly. If that barrier doesn’t exist, I need to create it by adding fat into the system myself, which comes in the form of olive oil. Second, cooking an animal (in any form—ground, as a steak, etc.) in its own fat adds another complex dimension of flavor that is impossible to replicate when cooking an animal in some other fat. With fatty beef, most of the fat is in the beef, and it can be rendered out and used to cook the beef with close to no additional fat. Doing this allows the “beefiness” of the beef to shine, whereas with the turkey, since that fat basically isn’t there, the fat isn’t turkey fat, but olive oil. Don’t get me wrong, I like olive oil, but cooking turkey in olive oil (which obviously isn’t the turkey’s own fat) doesn’t give as robust a flavor to the turkey as the method for the beef. Third, fattier meat stays moister longer. This is why, in general, it’s really easy to prepare a filet mignon terribly, but it’s almost impossible to mess up a brisket in that sense. Beef has more fat than turkey, so I have to put in less effort to keep the beef itself just as good as the sauce it’s sitting in compared to the work I have to do to have the same effect on the much leaner turkey.

In any case, the first step to any good Bolognese is browning the protein of choice. For reasons that will become apparent later, do this in an oven-safe vessel. Whether I use this method or my older method, my preferred vessel of choice anytime I make a Bolognese is my 8-quart stainless steel Dutch oven, but you don’t necessarily need a Dutch oven; anything big, heavy, and oven-safe should do the trick. Protein expels water from within its cells at first, and at this point, it looks gray and, frankly, quite unappealing. However, if you’ve been cooking long enough, you’ll start learning to recognize the different sounds proteins make when they’re expelling that water versus when they’re frying in the fat you put in the pan (or which they already naturally contain). Listen for that sound to change, and with it, watch for the color to change. This is one of the points where I deviate from the original Bolognese alla Quarentena, and one of the keys to making this recipe successful. When you start browning the meat, preheat your oven to 250 Fahrenheit. By the time you finish browning the meat and preparing everything else, your oven should be up to temperature. And even if it’s not quite there yet, that’ll be okay—more on that in a few paragraphs.

This sauce is quite simple, and rather similar to the alla Quarentena sauce or the Sauce Tomate I posted in October when I covered the French Mother Sauces. In a food processor, combine 1 large yellow onion, 6 cloves of garlic, 1 large red bell pepper, and 6 Roma tomatoes, and keep the processor running until the sauce is as smooth as possible, given you’re using a food processor and not a blender. Place the sauce into the vessel you have chosen, where the browned meat should already be. Add to that enough water so that you have 3 parts tomato mixture to 2 parts water. Season this with freshly cracked black pepper, dried oregano, dried dill, dried thyme, dried basil, garlic powder, and onion powder. Stir to combine all the spices and to make sure nothing has burned on the bottom or sides. Place this sauce into the oven (which, again, should be set to 250 Fahrenheit). As mentioned before, it’s totally fine if your prep work is quicker than the time it takes your oven to hit 250. If that happens to be the case, just put the oven-safe vessel into the oven and let it go. In any case, leave the sauce in the oven for at least 1 ½ and up to 4 hours. Resist the temptation to open the oven door for any reason; don’t look at it, don’t stir it, don’t rotate the pan, don’t add more liquid. Leave it alone. This, I think, is one of the areas where home cooks struggle the most: knowing what needs constant babysitting and what can be left alone for hours on end. There’s a ton of liquid in that vessel. Nothing is going to burn, and the oven is at such a low temperature that you don’t have to worry about the reduction process. This is absolutely a recipe that can be left alone.

Up to 4 hours after it went into the oven, turn the oven off and remove the sauce. Stir the sauce again and taste it. Only now, salt it and taste it again. This sauce should never be salted ahead of time (i.e., when you’re preparing it to go into the oven) for two related reasons: 1) temperature and 2) time. I don’t know how accurate your oven is (and, truthfully, you probably don’t know either), and I have no way of knowing how long your sauce will stay in the oven. These are the two variables that control how much something reduces, and reduction is an accelerating process. So if something tastes good before reduction and it reduces just a little bit in my oven, it’ll be okay. But if that same dish tastes good before reduction and it reduces by tenfold in your oven, it’ll be inedibly salty by the end. If you know you have to reduce something, or you even think about reducing it, hold off on salting it until you’re satisfied with the final volume.

As with the original recipe, the ideal serving companion to this sauce is a long, wide, dry pasta, like a good tagliatelle, pappardelle, or fettucine. Cook those according to the package instructions, combine with the sauce, mix, and serve.

French Onion Soup

French Onion Soup is a classic rustic French soup perfect for a cold winter’s day. Done properly, start to finish, this soup can take up to 48 hours, so most people are very intimidated by it. But since most of that work is passive, this is actually a very simple recipe that every home cook should know.
Onion soup is so time-consuming because of the soup base, namely, a beef stock. Beef stock is made with beef bones and, at the lowest of simmers, takes anywhere from 16 to 48 hours of stove time. I have a chicken stock recipe already uploaded, and you can find that by clicking here. The process for beef stock is nearly the same: roast the bones and the aromatics, add a lot of water to a tall pot with as much volume as possible, and let it simmer as gently as possible for as long as possible. If you want, you also have the option of following the stock recipe exactly by using chicken wings to make chicken stock, even though the traditional version of the soup uses beef stock. If you are vegetarian/vegan, I suppose you could make this soup entirely vegan by roasting vegetables and mushrooms, adding water and soy sauce, and simmering that to make a vegetable stock to serve as a base.
 

Cut 3 pounds of yellow onions in half pole-to-pole, that is, through the root and the stem ends, like I always recommend for when they are to be chopped. Peel the onion halves, and then cut them thinly, once again pole-to-pole. If you have a mandolin slicer, use it, but be sure to put on a hand guard first, since mandolin blades can be very sharp. If you use a knife, make sure your blade is sharp, not only because sharper blades are safer, but also because sharper blades disturb fewer cell walls and are thus less likely to make you or anyone else around you cry as you slice the onions. Once all the onions have been sliced, melt a whole stick of butter. Once the butter has melted but has not started browning, place all the onions into a large pan or Dutch oven.

Caramelize the onions slowly, over medium-low heat. Stir constantly. Caramelization is not a linear process, so you should never step away from caramelizing onions. Watch and stir them constantly from anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on how much moisture your onions need to expel before they start taking on color.

If you have any, when the onions are almost done, you can deglaze the pan with sherry or cognac. Otherwise, use an equivalent amount of water (2-3 ounces) to deglaze the pan. The caramelization process certainly created fond—the chef’s dream, the sticky flavorful bits that get stuck to cooking surfaces, just waiting to be dissolved. Deglazing a cooking surface picks up that fond with a liquid and dissolves the fond into that liquid, so no flavor is lost. The onions have finished caramelizing when they are deep mahogany brown, have an almost jammy consistency, and are about to burn but have not yet. Monitoring the onions as they get closer and closer to this point is essential. I’ve said it already, but it is worth repeating you CANNOT walk away from caramelizing onions, or they will burn.

For 3 pounds of onions, I recommend about half a gallon of stock. Add the stock to the onions, and let simmer, stirring occasionally for 25 minutes. Once the stock goes in, you can afford to step away, only checking every five minutes or so. There’s a gallon of liquid in your pan/Dutch oven, so surely nothing will burn because there’s no way that a gallon of liquid will evaporate, since the liquid is only simmering, and for not even half an hour. Check for seasoning and adjust as normal, bearing in mind that my stock recipe never called for salt precisely so that at a moment like this, you could season your soup to your liking.

In the meantime, figure out how many portions of soup you will be serving right away (this soup is great for leftovers after the fact, but right now, handle however many people you’ll be feeding right away). Find that many oven-safe ramekins or bowls and cut slices of baguettes about ¾ of an inch thick so that the tops of all those dishes can be covered in bread. At the same time, grate enough Gruyere to generously cover all of the bread.

When 25 minutes have elapsed, the soup is ready to be portioned into the ramekins. Top the soup with the bread, and then top the bread with the cheese. Place the filled ramekins on top of a baking sheet and place the baking sheet into an oven with the broiler (“grill” if you speak non-American English) on high. Check on the soup after 90 seconds, and every 15 seconds thereafter. The objective is for the cheese to take on some “leoparding,” that is, for it to look like the cheese on top of a well-made cheese pizza: taking on some color but not burned. Once you are satisfied with the degree of melting and leoparding of the cheese, turn off the broiler, carefully remove the ramekins from the oven and serve.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Cream of mushroom is a great soup to have on hand for the winter, and it’s actually one of the simplest soups to make. There are three components to good cream of mushroom: a good bechamel, sauteed mushrooms, and good duxelles.

Whether someone recommends washing mushrooms in an application like this can be quite a point of contention, and, putting this out on the internet, I fully recognize I might be putting myself in a position to have a heated discussion in the comments below. For several years, I was of the opinion that white, baby bella, or cremini mushrooms shouldn’t be washed per se, and that they should just be scrubbed with a moist paper towel to remove any grime that might be on the surface. But now, after dozens of experiments, I’ve concluded that washing mushrooms by submersion makes no difference to the saturation when compared to the moist-paper-towel-scrubbing method. Personally, then, I’ve returned to submerging the mushrooms, but if you would like to, feel free to scrub them individually.

Cream of mushroom makes use of the whole mushroom—the cap and the stem. But unlike other dishes I’ve developed that use mushrooms (like this stroganoff), the cap and stem are not used together. For this, we need to separate the cap and the stem from each other. This is a simple process that can certainly be done by hand. To do this, I like to place the cap of the mushroom in my non-dominant hand; grab the stem with my dominant hand, and then gently twist clockwise until the cap and the stem have come apart. Keep the caps on your cutting board and go ahead and place the stems in your food processor.

Peel and quarter one large yellow onion, and peel half of a head of garlic, placing both the onion and the garlic with the mushroom stems. Run the food processor until the mushroom stems, onion, and garlic cloves have become a relatively homogenous paste. This will eventually become the duxelles.

Slice the caps into relatively even pieces; in general, cutting each cap into 3 to 4 pieces should be a good size. Smaller-than-average mushrooms should be cut only in half, and larger-than-average mushrooms can be cut into up to 6 pieces. Coat the bottom of a Dutch oven or large saucepan (at least 4-5 quarts) with a thin film of oil. When the oil begins to shimmer, place the sliced caps in the oil. Be careful to avoid splatter. Water in the mushrooms may splatter when it hits the hot oil, so a burn hazard certainly exists at this point. Early in this process, there is no risk of the mushrooms burning, but as they expel water and begin to sauté, these mushrooms need progressively more attention. The sound you’ll be hearing when the mushrooms expel water versus when they sauté will be different, and you’ll learn to recognize the different phases of the cooking process by experience. Once the mushrooms start to sauté, add 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, and let the vinegar cook down a little with the mushrooms, taking care not to burn anything. Season with salt, freshly cracked black pepper, dried thyme, and dried dill. After a few more minutes, transfer the mushrooms and the vinegar to a separate heat-safe container.

In the same pan, cook down the mushroom stalk-onion-garlic paste from the food processor. Season the paste with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Once most of the moisture has come out of the onions and garlic (this requires constant stirring since the pieces are so much smaller than the pieces of the caps), reserve this to a separate container. This is the duxelles.

For the last time, start over with a clean pan, being sure to remove anything that may have burned to this point. Build a béchamel using the method I’ve outlined here. Once the béchamel is ready, return the duxelles and the mushrooms caps to the pan. Stir. Adjust the consistency of the soup and check for seasoning. Adjust the consistency and/or the seasoning if necessary.

(Photo credits to Cafe Delites)

Pan-Seared Marinated Pork Tenderloin with Pan Sauce

A few weeks ago, in time for Christmas, I put out a recipe for a rolled pork loin stuffed full of compound butter. I made very sure to draw a distinction between that cut of meat (the “pork loin”) and the “pork tenderloin.” Two loins exist (one on either side of the spine), but only one tenderloin. The tenderloin, is, effectively, the chateaubriand of a pig. (You normally buy the chateaubriand cut up into individual steaks or medallions, which we call “filet mignon” from cattle, but you can and absolutely should buy the whole muscle, which we call a “chateaubriand.”) While the loin recipe I shared several weeks ago was intended for far more people to eat at once and was far more expensive, this recipe can be a meal for one or two, it is much quicker, and it is much cheaper—perfect for a busy weeknight.

You’d be hard-pressed to ever find the loin pre-seasoned and pre-packaged, but it’s actually probably harder to find a tenderloin that isn’t seasoned than one that is. Most tenderloins on the market are going to come sealed in a plastic bag already marinating in some oil and spices. Don’t buy those if at all possible. Instead, look for just the tenderloin. Buying just the tenderloin allows you, the home cook, maximum control over as many parts of the culinary experience as possible. For this reason, in general (that is, not just with pork tenderloins but with any meat, fish, or poultry), my advice is to buy meat that has been handled as little as possible.

A tenderloin isn’t a very big piece of meat—they average about 20 ounces or so, a little more than a pound. That much meat (it’s quite lean and it’s boneless) feeds two people. Plan accordingly, and scale this recipe up or down based on how many people you need to feed. There generally is no way to scale this recipe up other than by buying more tenderloins—their size is relatively fixed in that range.
Tenderloin is quite lean and not as “porky” as some other cuts, so it benefits from marination overnight. I like building a standard marinade not unlike what I make for my signature dish: some kind of vinegar, mustard, and spices mixed together, and then olive oil drizzled in slowly at first (and then at an increasing rate as more oil is added) while whisking constantly. Add whatever you like to your marinade, being sure to season it well. Once the marinade has been prepared, place the pork into it and make sure all the pork’s surface has at least some contact with it. Close the container with an airtight lid and place it in a fridge overnight.

Coat the bottom of an oven-safe skillet in a thin film of oil on the day you want to cook the pork (which must be the day after marination started, so plan accordingly). Remove the pork from the marinade, but do not discard the marinade. Over medium heat, get that oil shimmering. Place the tenderloin in the oil. Allow the Maillard reaction to take place, creating a caramelized crust on the side of the tenderloin in contact with the pan. Wait for the tenderloin to release naturally from the pan. This will tell you the Maillard reaction has finished. If after this side you notice there was too much browning to quickly, lower the heat before flipping to another side. Repeat this process with every surface of the tenderloin, generally flipping a quarter-turn each time. Once the tenderloin has undergone a full revolution, check its temperature. If the internal temperature in the center is between 140 and 160 Fahrenheit, you’re done. If it isn’t, put the pork in the same pan in an oven preheated to 400 Fahrenheit until it reaches that temperature target zone. Where you pull it within the target zone is entirely your preference. Just know that pork will continue rising 5-10 degrees even off the stove or outside the oven, and pork cooked to an internal temperature any hotter than 145 is considered safe in the United States. (If you live in a part of the world where certain parasites are common, cook your pork all the way to 160 Fahrenheit just to be safe.)

When the pork reaches your desired temperature, remove it from the heat, take it out of the pan, and place it elsewhere to rest. There are probably some sticky, caramelized bits of pork crust stuck to the bottom of the pan. These bits form what is called a “fond.” (French viewers, I mean this in the sense of “sucs,” whereas you may use a “fond” – what we English-speakers call a “stock,” or another liquid—to perform this next step.) Deglaze this. That is, bring a cold liquid (water, wine, or stock) to the pan and stir, thereby loosening those bits from the pan and dissolving them into your deglazing liquid. Learn this procedure well. “Sear, finish, rest, deglaze, mount,” is a simple and effective procedure for cooking almost protein with a pan sauce, and thus it is very adaptable. Once the pan has been deglazed, reintroduce the marinade to the pan and, over medium heat stirring often so that nothing burns on the sides or bottom of the pan, reduce the liquid by half. This does several things: (1) it kills any bacteria in the marinade, (2) it concentrates the flavor of the marinade, and (3) it prevents the final texture of the pan sauce from being too loose. By the time the marinade has boiled down enough that its volume has reduced by half, it will be safe. Once this occurs, turn off the burner, and whisk in 3 tablespoons of cold, unsalted butter. Check for seasoning, adjusting as necessary. Serve with vegetables and starches as desired.

New Year's Eve: Greek Salad, Potatoes, and Oven-Roasted Salmon

Friday night was New Year’s Eve, and, to celebrate, we had a dinner I’m now realizing would have been perfect for Christmas Eve, exactly one week before. By popular request, I took on a Greek theme for the night’s dishes, and now that I’m actually sitting down to write these recipes for the blog, I’m having the realization that this would have been a perfect inclusion on Christmas Eve’s Feast of the Seven Fish, if we’d done that exactly one week before.

The starch accompanying the meal Friday night was about 2 pounds of the Signature Potatoes. That by far takes the longest to finish—about an hour and 10 minutes. Cut, season, and toss the potatoes according to the recipe, and then immediately begin working on the following dish.

The festivities on the 31st began with a Greek salad. As with almost any salad, the hardest part of a Greek salad’s assembly is the preparation of its dressing. I’ve already covered how to make vinaigrette emulsion dressings on this blog, so rather than explaining the whole process again here, I’ll just link to that post so you can reach it by clicking here. Two major changes were made to that process: 1) the exclusion of raw minced or pressed garlic and 2) the addition of several herbs common in Greek cuisine as seasonings in the vinaigrette, including dried basil, oregano, dill, and mustard powder.

It’s always been my philosophy when making a salad that the dressing should always be complete well in advance of any of the other components. This serves two purposes: first, it allows me o check that the emulsion I’ve made is actually stable (and to fix it if it isn’t) and to allow the flavors to meld and interact with each other, thereby creating a dressing far more complex than the sum of its parts. If the dressing is stable—and I have to confess that mine wasn’t initially stable, but that’s fine because there is a way to fix that! (first by adding more mustard, and then by adding more oil very, very slowly)— it can sit indefinitely, and it won’t split.

When I judged that the potatoes were about half-done, I pulled 3 sockeye salmon fillets I had been thawing in cold water out of the water, removed them from the packaging, Adam Ragusea has a pretty good way of classifying the three general shapes of salmon fillets, as “car,” “flat,” or “tail” pieces. I posted another salmon recipe a few months ago where I seared salmon in the pan. The first category are much longer than they are wide, and, on the profile, they kind of look like a sedan: not very much fish at the front where the “engine” is, lots of fish in the middle “where the people sit inside the car” and not much fish where the “trunk” is. The second category comes from the middle of the side of the fish and looks most like a slice of a cube: from above, it looks like a square, but it’s not a cube, since its much thinner, but the virtue of this piece is that it is almost uniform in its thickness. The third piece is, like the “car” distinctive in its shape: you can very easily tell it came from the back of the fish because one end looks like it would’ve been connected to a flat piece and the other end tapers almost to a point.

That method of pan-searing works best with “car” pieces. They’re the ones that cook the most quickly and most unevenly, so it’s definitely a good thing to be watching those pieces the whole time as they cook on the stove rather than letting them cook unattended in an oven for a longer period. But in this case, and in most cases, I get bags of fish that have mostly flat or tail pieces. That was certainly the case on New Year's Eve, so this oven method is perfect.

Line an oven-safe pan with aluminum foil. It is always better to cook fish skin-on (because already-skinless fish will immediately disintegrate into its flakes when you pick it up, thereby ruining the presentation). Because we’re not searing the skin as we would in the other pan method, the skin will come right off—but the fillet will stay intact and presentable—at the end of the cooking process in the oven. Place the fillets in that pan in one layer, and being careful not to touch the fish so as not to contaminate the dressing, spoon some of the Greek vinaigrette onto the fish. Once the fish have been dressed, place them in the oven with the potatoes. Time this so that the fish and the potatoes will be done around the same time. The fish needs about 20-25 minutes to cook, plus 5 minutes to rest (in the oven, with the oven turned off), and the potatoes usually take about an hour.

While the fish is in the oven, begin working on assembling the salad, but do not dress it with what remains of the Greek vinaigrette yet. Cut, wash and dry one head of Romaine lettuce. Wash one cucumber. Wash, dry, and then cut a cucumber in half along its length and then again in a perpendicular direction. This will create four quarters, each of which, when cut, will create half-moons of cucumber. Wash and dry 1 pint of grape tomatoes. Remove Kalamata olives from their brine and cut them to your liking. Crumble 4 ounces of feta cheese into the vegetables. Combine well. Only when the fish and the potatoes are ready to come out of the oven (cooked and rested), dress the salad and toss again.

Serve.