Small Plates

For Steve’s birthday dinner I wanted to make something “gourmet.” I also wanted to focus on what’s in the garden. I spent a lot of time looking through websites for recipes, but in the end decided to do tuna steaks, potatoes and zucchini. I’d just fancy them up and call it a day.

To me, fancy means “small plates,” especially following the great experience at Next in Chicago last month. Also, Steve likes a little spice, and he spent some time in Japan. I found the wasabi powder and got to work.

In the end, like all good food, it was simple. Also, I’m really not a very good cook, I just like cooking. The panko crust didn’t stick to the fish, even when I dunked them in egg, but no matter. When making the crust with some lemon zest (the recipe was on the Trader Joe’s albacore steaks package, as was the recipe for the wasabi sauce), I squeezed some lemon juice on the fish and it started cooking, so we almost had ceviche instead!

In the end, it was lovely and delicious. I picked out the micro-potatoes, the tiny potatoes from the potato harvest, and with a few very thin zucchini slices mixed in the wasabi sauce (mayonnaise, wasabi powder, rice vinegar and sesame oil) and garnished it with some Thai basil flowers. I grilled the fish and more zucchini slices and the put some rice vinegar and sesame oil on the zucchini. I layered it on brown rice and put more wasabi sauce on top. There is really nothing like the first zucchini and potatoes from the garden. The fish, gratefully, was not dry.

The meal filled the small plates, and once we started eating I actually put large plates underneath because we were getting rice all over the place! Luckily for Steve, I made extra fish and rice, or he would have been hungry. Not a good thing on your birthday.

I had also stopped and picked up some birthday beer, i.e., beer in bottles, Fat Tire, which went great with the meal.

For dessert– ice cream drumsticks, the clear choice for summer no matter the meal!