Butter and Cod

This was a quick mostly local Friday night dinner that turned out surprisingly well. The trick? Lots of the homemade butter I made last weekend.

Here's the butter ball that I made. The butter that supposedly comes from the local creamery is not actually made here from local cream. They buy butter from Fresno and package it under the Humboldt Creamery label. Pretty sad when you realize that Humboldt County was once known for producing the best butter in the state! I decided that since I'm doing this local challenge, I had to make some real local butter!

I used Humboldt Creamery heavy cream -actually produced locally from local cows. I won't go into the whole process now, I'll leave that for another post, but basically I cultured the cream and then whipped it into butter in the food processor. I didn't salt it or anything, but boy is it good! I'm a sucker for butter, and this is some of the best butter I've ever had! It's nice and yellow, which means its got lots of vitamins and comes from cows eating good healthy grass.

This is the crust I made for the fish. Coarse cornmeal (another long forgotten item in the cupboard,) dried parsley from the garden, salt, and pepper.

This is a little less than a pound of locally caught Black Cod. A beautiful piece of fish!

I cut the fish into pieces, dried it with a paper towel, coated it with melted butter, dredged it in the cornmeal crust, and put it in this baking dish with the leftover melted butter drizzled on top. I baked it for about 20 minutes in a pretty hot (420 degrees) oven. Halfway through the cooking I decided to add some of the garlic from the garden, so I chopped some up and sprinkled it on top.

These are green beans from Ed in Blue Lake. They're seriously some of the most flavorful beans I've ever had! I'm not usually a big green bean person, but I can't seem to get enough of these. They're from the same farm that the beans at the La Trattoria feast in August came from. I steamed them while the fish cooked.

Here's the finished meal. The fish was just delicious - buttery, flaky, with a wonderfully crunchy crust. The beans were cooked perfectly, and it was all complemented well by some of the wonderful local salad mix from Bayside. I've been using just olive oil and vinegar to dress my salads, and really enjoying it - it lets you really taste the flavor of the greens.
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