Caution: Drunken Goat In The Kitchen

The last time we prepared a complex meal, Marina raised the stakes by bringing out a fruit salad and a plate of crackers and cheeses as appetizers. I knew I would have to raise my game, at the very least providing an appetizer to keep pace. Crackers and cheese? How serious can we get about eating as adults? I mean, seriously.

So I took some time to look at the cheese selection at The Good Life Grocery on Cortland. Keep in mind, in the past I've tended to just buy mozzarella, provolone, or, if I was feeling spicy, sharp cheddar. It seemed to me that those wouldn't be exciting enough for a Saturday night. I needed something with flavor, even if I had no idea what the flavor might be. I had already selected table water crackers so that the crackers wouldn't overwhelm the flavor of the cheese.

I picked out some dill-flavored Havarti, because I remembered liking Havarti before dinner. Then I saw it. A cheese called the Drunken Goat. I looked closer and saw it was from Spain.

I mean, come on. If you see a cheese from Spain called the Drunken Goat, it would be a gastronomic crime not to buy it. And as it turns out, it is one of Marina's favorites, so ha!

As I wrote about previously, I decided to do something with tilapia this time. It's fairly forgiving to the inexperienced cook in my experience, and it seems to be one of the more environmentally-sustainable fish, from what I've read. I would accompany it with couscous and salad again, because that had proved a reliable and simple background to a light and tasty meal.

We searched online for recipes, and found one for almond-covered tilapia. It sounded good, so I pulled it up. The first item that caught my eye was an instruction that said to sprinkle the fish evenly with salt, and then to dredge in the almond mixture.

"Well, that sounds disgusting," I remarked. "Isn't dredging where you comb a lake looking for bodies?"*

It turns out that dredging means running a moist food through some sort of coating, in this case, a mix of flour and chopped almonds.

In pursuing the proper pairing of a white wine with fish, I went with a safe choice, a sauvignon blanc from Yellowtail, a label that I've found reliably reliable, which was a strong consideration for me.

The fish was easy to cook, if not entirely easy to flip, and it tended to fall apart, so that what I ended up serving on a bed of couscous was less a tilapia fillet and more a pile o' tilapia. But it was light and tasty, and the wine was pleasant and smooth, and they did indeed compliment each other. There was also a salad of mesculin, red pepper, broccoli slaw, dessert radish, and soy nuts, with a peanut vinaigrette that was maybe a tad spicy, but in general was satisfying.

So I was satisfied with another meal attempted and consumed, with no sign of food poisoning for either one of us yet. I perhaps needed a shallower bowl for the dredging, as the almonds didn't really stick to the fish and flower that much, but otherwise, it was good. And maybe next time I'll figure out how to flip a fish over without disintegrating it.



*Yes, yes it is. Dredging has many meanings and uses outside of cooking, including when police use a special dredging tool called a drag to drag a lake.