January 12 – January 17, 2026

Monday:                  Leftovers w/ Miso Sesame Dressed Greens

Tuesday:                  Cacio e Pepe with Asparagus

Wednesday:          Creamy Tomato Soup with Fried Bread

Thursday:                Cacio e Pepe

Friday:                      Saffron and Tomato Fish Stew

Saturday:                Margherita Pizza

Sunday:                   Roasted Chicken Potatoes

APOLOGIES: Word Press has altered the format and tools I have used for several years and I have no idea how to get the pictures and the text to mesh. So, I’ll add a few pictures at the end, but I’m afraid this will be mostly a written post. By next week, I hope to have this figured out. My children think that unlikely.

This Is Getting Fishy

Sometimes, the best dish of the week resembles the best dish of the previous week.  This and similar coincidences seem to happen so often in our lives that Arthur Koestler, a fine writer and anti-communist and a sometime quack, devised a name for the overabundance, as he saw it, of coincidence.  He called this perception synchronicity and believed that some psychic force was behind it all.  Kind of like imagining that déjà-vu is proof of a past life.

Koestler was a bit dotty, but I’m not and it seems logical that given the finite number of proteins, grains, vegetables, etc. that we cook with, you’re going to have similar dishes from time to time.  Indeed, when we were busy with careers and young children, we ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza and Old El Paso tacos weekly. 

All of which is a sort of loosening up of the computer keys to get me into the rhythm of producing another semi-whimsical post about seriously good food that you can cook.  [Excuse me while I pause to give my fingers a rest.]

. . . I’m back, and I’d like to share another hum-dinger of a recipe from Samin Nosrat.  Billy’s Christmas gift – Jacques Pépin’s Cooking My Way – has given me a real workout this year.  What I love about Nosrat’s book, Good Things, is pretty much what I love about Pépin’s:  the simplicity of the recipes – no cheffy techniques, no need to find a Tibetan grocer or a Finnish reindeer meat smoker, and no exotic cooking instruments.  All you need is a willingness to follow Jacques’ and Samin’s lead.  Cooking experience, of course, is what you need to nail the recipes, but hey, the only way to get that is to try them.

Now about that coincidence of recipes – last week we shared a solid New England Clam Chowder* and this week we’re sharing a fish stew.  As Catholics, we no longer need to eat fish every Friday.  [For the dogmatically precise:  There was never a rule to eat fish on Fridays, but there was a Church directive to abstain from meat, the food of the rich, to remind Christians that Christ humbled himself, especially on Good Friday.  If the Church every tightens up again, I imagine it will add abstinence from fish as well as meat.  So, if you get wind of a new Pope calling himself John Paul III, you might want to plant some quinoa on the back 40.

Kevin F, one of the followers of this blog, and a native New Englander, sent along an hilarious video illustrating the Massachusetts accent I tried to mimic in last week’s post.  The video is a good deal funnier than I am and you can see it by going to Youtube and searching for ‘Three Guys from Boston Say Every Town and City in Massachussetts’

And now, get yourself some healthy looking cod or halibut or rockfish, and cook yourself a nice Pre-Vatican II Catholic dinner .

. .

Saffron and Tomato Fish Stew

(adapted from Samin Nosrat, Good Things)

Timing:                                            30 minutes

Ingredients:                                     Serves 4

28 oz. can of whole tomatoes – splurging for San Marzano (not ‘San Marzano Style’) is worth it.

1 lb. cod, rockfish or halibut

1 cup dry white wine

¼ teaspoon of saffron bloomed – to bloom saffron, crush the threads with a mortar and pestle or in your fingers, put the powder in a heat-proof bowl and add 2 tablespoons of boiling water.  Let sit for 10 minutes,  Note:  Saffron is expensive, but you’ll be using just a few threads per recipe.  You can mimic the color by substituting ground turmeric, but you won’t get the earthy, floral taste.

4 cloves garlic, sliced – we used ½ teaspoon of garlic powder

½ teaspoon Calabrian chile paste or a pinch of chile flakes

3 Tbs extra-virgin olive oil, 1 cup dry white wine, 2Tbs butter, 2 Tbs roughly chopped parsley

Kosher Salt

Crusty bread, for serving

Prep:

Bloom Saffron (see above).

Pour the tomatoes into a large bowl and crush by hand or cut up with kitchen shears.

Slice Garlic.

Cut the fish into bite-sized pieces and season with salt.  Set aside.

Assemble other ingredients.

Cook:

Set a very large saucepan or Dutch oven over medium and add the oil.  When the oil shimmers, add the garlic and chile paste and cook maybe one minute – do not let garlic color.  Add the tomatoes and the bloomed saffron.  Increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring, from time to time, until he tomatoes reduce a bit and become jammy – 10 to 15 minutes.

Add the fish and the wine, cover and simmer until cooked – about 8 minutes for cod or rockfish, 3 minutes for the halibut.

Stir in parsley.  Served with toasted or fried bread to soak up the sauce.

Below are the Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Asparagus, the toasted bread with avocado and pecorino-romano paste that went with the creamy tomato soup, and the Margherita pizza