I think I know why there are no skinny Santa Clauses. The extra pounds that the holidays always put on me have been slower than usual to come off, this year. As a result, I’ve been looking around for relatively light recipes – but ones that would still be interesting to make. I found just the sort of thing I wanted in Anne Willan’s French Regional Cooking.
Merluza, Salsa Verde, or Hake in Green Sauce, is a Basque recipe from the book’s section on the Pyrenees and Gascony. The author explains that what’s called salsa verde there isn’t a sauce at all, but rather a garnish of green vegetables – in this case, peas, asparagus tips, and parsley. That made a penny drop for me: Last year I did a post about a dinner from three Spanish cookbooks, which included a dish of clams and hake in salsa verde. I wondered about the name at the time, since the only green thing in that recipe was some parsley. Now I know.
Willan’s recipe started by having me cook peas, asparagus tips, and little potatoes in three separate pots of boiling water. Then, I floured my thick hake fillet and browned it in olive oil. I put the fillet in a pyrex dish, topped it with minced garlic and a few shakes of cayenne, and surrounded it with the cooked vegetables. I added salt, sprinkled on parsley, drizzled on olive oil and a small amount of water, covered the dish and put it in the oven for 20 minutes.
It made quite a pretty presentation, though I was amused to see that it came out of the oven (left) looking just about the same as it did going in (right).
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And how did it taste? Well . . . all right. The hake was bland. Hake is pretty much always bland, so I should have known that. The fish didn’t have enough flavor of its own to rise above the strong garlic presence. The vegetables tasted nice and fresh, but having so briefly been acquainted with each other and the fish, there had been no interchange of flavors among them: each remained its own separate island of pleasant taste. The whole was definitely not greater than the sum of its parts.
Willan’s recipe does have several virtues, however. It would be an excellent dish to prepare in advance, since once it’s assembled it can sit for a few hours in the refrigerator before the short stint in the oven. And the calorie content had to be admirably low. I just wish the flavor content had been a little higher. If I do this recipe again, I’ll try it with cod or scrod, or maybe even monkfish.
A few more words about my concern for calories, which may seem odd in light of the kinds of dishes I often write about on this blog. (I don’t eat like that every day.) I was overweight for much of my life. Five years ago, I slowly and sensibly lost 50 pounds, and I’ve kept them off ever since. Still, three to five of those pounds creep back on during each holiday season and vacation, which forces me to grit my teeth and pare them back off. Doing this has so far kept me able to fit into my size-10 slacks (which may not seem very small to you, if you’re not 5’ 10” tall), but as I grow older, the struggle between vanity and gluttony gets ever more intense. Sometimes I don’t know which side I’m rooting for!
