What My Dad Didn't Teach Me

Last night, I designed what was probably my most creative dinner menu ever - and it was tasty, too! The centerpiece would be a cod dish (cod being on sale at Shaw's). I decided to bake it in a marinade composed of butter and white wine, in which I sauteed onions and, at the last minute, added red horseradish. That last ingredient was as much for the color as for the taste.

To accompany the cod, I invented one salad and borrowed another. The invented salad consisted of (farmer's market fresh) lettuce, avocado, sauteed red pepper, and boiled Yukon Gold potatoes. For dressing, I made my own ranch from Mark Bittman's recipe in Tuesday's New York Times, adapted from his How to Cook Everything. (The ranch was probably the least successful part of the meal, perhaps because I didn't include chives, parsley, dill, or any of the other herbs that are sometimes used in ranch dressing.)

The borrowed salad came from a list of 101 simple salads compiled by (again) Mark Bittman in Tuesday's New York Times. The #7 is: Grate carrots, toast some sunflower seeds, and toss with blueberries, olive oil, lemon juice and plenty of black pepper. Sweet, sour, crunchy, soft. We substituted almonds for sunflower seeds, but otherwise stuck to the recipe. The tartness of the blueberries (fresh from our backyard - we didn't plant them, but whoever did doesn't seem to be harvesting their crop...) contrasted nicely with the more staid qualities of the carrots. And the almonds added a welcome crunchy texture to the mix.

The part of the meal I'm most proud of is its color palette - green, red, orange, blue, pink, white, brown, almost everything! I've come a long way from Chef Boyardee Dinosaurs and Kraft macaroni and cheese . . .

Clockwise, from the top: baked cod with sauteed onions and butter/white wine/horseradish dressing; carrot-blueberry salad; and improvised green salad. (Maggie's next career should be in food photography.)

Maggie and her cousin Rebecca enjoying our extremely classy meal. (Wine and dinner rolls (only 25 cents each at When Pigs Fly!) rounded out the menu.)