Menu
Pan-Fried Trout with Roasted Asparagus
Rhubarb Crumble Bars with White Chocolate Drizzle
Every now and then throughout the growing season, John likes to have what he calls a “native Connecticut dinner”. Every dish is based on a local, seasonal ingredient, and we open a bottle of Connecticut wine to enjoy with it. For him it’s less about the sociopolitical issues involved in eating locally, and more a kind of romantic ideal of survivalism, living off the land, using your own skills and efforts to produce at least some of the food that ends up on your table.
Later in the season we’ll have our own garden vegetables, absolutely a labor of love. This early in the spring, we rely on farm stands for native produce, and this dinner features three types – spinach, asparagus, and rhubarb – one for each course of the meal. But the star of the menu is local trout, an enormous rainbow John caught himself.
I transformed the spinach into a cheesy puff pastry appetizer. Easy store-bought pastry is rolled up to enclose a filling of spinach, bacon, sauteed shallots and Gruyere and Parmesan cheeses, then sliced into spirals that bake up golden and flaky.
For the main course, I wanted to showcase the freshness of the trout and asparagus, so both were prepared simply, no distractions, just a squeeze of lemon for an accent.
After such a simple meal I thought a spectacular dessert was in order, so I pulled out all the stops with a pan of buttery crumble bars, filled with a tart, juicy rhubarb jam and drizzled with copious amounts of white chocolate.
My playlist for this month is a collection of mellow folk songs that’s perfect for a warm spring evening out on the deck (which is where we seem to want to spend all our time these days). I call it We’ll Make It Through because it starts with that beautiful song, but also because the title just seems generally fitting for this time. As I write this post, a week after we enjoyed the trout dinner, Connecticut has just become the 50th state to start reopening, and we’re taking baby steps. After two months of sheltering in place I’m used to my routine; adjusting to this new phase and learning what the rules are is both exciting and a little scary. I have to keep reminding myself that we will make it through.
In the meantime, home is not such a bad place to be.
The Game Plan
- Early in the day bake the rhubarb crumble. Prepare the filling for the spinach spirals, roll up the pastry around the filling and store the roll uncut in the fridge until 45 minutes before serving time.
- About 45 minutes before you want to eat the appetizer, slice and bake the spirals.
- Start marinating the trout 1 hour and 15 minutes before you want to eat dinner. Wash and prep the asparagus. The rest of the preparation and cooking is done in the last half hour before serving,
- For a detailed plan with step-by-step instructions and timing, download the Game Plan document linked below.
Saturday May 16 2020 Game Plan
