Perch with Sage

Pesce Persico alla Salvia

1 pound 5 oz perch fillets
all-purpose flour for dusting
1/4 cup butter
8 fresh sage leaves
salt and pepper

The last days of summer are here and only sage and a dab of rosemary remain in the container behind our apartment. Sage is a relative of the mint family- like other mints, it has a square stem and flourishes with little care. And it smells like a warm, spicy version of its spearmint cousin, too.

It filled the cool, evening air with fragrance when I picked eight leaves for the recipe.

Found a pound of fresh, wild perch at Schnucks. Ocean perch has a rich, red color on its scales.

I melted a walloping 1/4 cup of butter in our trusty skillet.

Then I added my eight leaves of sage and melted the butter over medium high heat. A delicious smell wafted through the house . . .

 In the meantime, I dredged the perch with flour, and shook off the excess.

And placed in the skillet with the melted, delicious-smelling sage butter.

I cooked on medium high heat for 3 minutes on both sides and generously salted and peppered.

We enjoyed the perch with some cherry tomatoes. It was warm and buttery, with a subtle note of sage.

Orecchiette with Broccoli

Orecchiette con Broccoli

1.5 lbs of broccoli cut into flowerets
2 tbs olive oil
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped
11 oz orecchiette
salt
Parmesan, freshly grated

I cut my little flowerlets until they were nice and small, and then cooked the broccoli in salted, boiling water for five minutes.

Then, I added the garlic and chile and cooked for three minutes. Smelled nice.

Since this was my first recipe attempt, and the instructions for orecchiette were a little vague- the basic recipe for orecchiette calls for 1.5 cups of all purpose flour, a generous 1/2 cup of semolina, and a "small" amount of water- I cheated on the orecchiette and picked some up from Wine Merchant on the way home, rather than make my own.

Gave it a sixteen-minute boil for al dente perfection. We only had a tiny pot for boiling, so the pasta was packed tight.  Though this kind of thing is probably completely unacceptable in Italy, I did follow the Italian adage that the pasta water should be as "salty as the Mediterranean."

Pasta was drained and tossed, as was the broccoli, and the two were mixed with the garlic and chile. I threw in some red pepper flakes since the only chile I could find at Whole Foods was green and the dish needed a dash of color. In retrospect, I really wish I'd had a red chile, because it looked a little pasty 'round these parts.

Finally, a little crumbled Parmesean:

While it wasn't splendido, it was finito. I encountered a problem with the ratio of pasta to broccoli; I had way more pasta to broccoli than the deceptively beautiful Silver Spoon image, which I chalked up to the fact that I used 8.8 oz of dry pasta rather than 11 oz of fresh.  And with the simplicity of this dish, freshly-made pasta would have been wonderful. I'm still excited to have completed a single recipe in the cookbook, and we enjoyed the spicy broccoli orecchiette with some Trader Joe's smoked herring and called it a day.