branzino with roasted grapes

You would think that working from home might mean that we dine on fancy, elaborate dinners, and that Andrew eats like royalty around here. I run an elaborate ruse: come weekdays, we’re all about quick meals around here. Roast chicken is for the weekend, and so is stuffed cabbage. Mondays through Fridays, it’s all about the manageable, or if I am feeling lazy – take-out.

Our regular weeknight rotation includes: shrimp and broccoli, deconstructed banh mi, merguez burgers, Thai beef salads, and lots and lots of pasta dishes.

But sometimes, instead of cooking a meal I can’t wait to write about, I fail. I burn dinner. I discover that chickpeas and kale stewing together in a slow-cooker, while sounding amazing in theory, look like the split pea soup they used as vomit in Poltergeist.

[I just wrote “vomit” on my blog. Excuse me for my brutal honesty.]

Most often, I get lost in my work only to realize that I have fifteen minutes until Andrew comes home and, it’s far too late to start anything that doesn’t end with a fried egg on top.

But I can always roast a whole fish such as branzino, a process that takes give-or-take fifteen minutes. Which means that weeknight dinners that look, smell, and taste of sophistication and elegance is in my reach even if I’m in a pinch.

Roasting a whole fish for dinner is one of my favorite things to do. Branzino is affordable unlike, say, wild salmon or tuna. It’s fairly sustainable (given my limited understanding of fish sustainability). It’s a perfect portion for one person and can easily be scaled up. There is little (if any) mess involved and the clean up is a cinch. It’s healthy. It’s fast. And it’s totally doable in twenty minutes or less.

A few weeks ago, while preparing the fish, I went ahead and stuffed the branzino with lemon, rosemary and garlic, a common practice in our kitchen. I heated the oven while I prepped the fish, slipped it in when the oven was ready, and for a few brief moments while the fish cooked, I felt transported to somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. [Note: if you find it a bit out of your budget to travel to Italy for a vacation, this just might be a poor man’s substitute.]

Halfway through the roasting time, I decided to throw in a handful of Mars grapes, a purple seedless grape variety I had picked up at the farmers’ market a few days before. Mars grapes, my current autumn addiction, are just like Corcord grapes: grapey and jammy, with juicy flesh that easily slips out of the thick grape skins, minus the seeds. It’s the lack of seeds that now makes these muffins a cinch to make.

Roasting grapes is nothing new; people do it all the time. But I’ve never roasted grapes with fish and haven’t really seen it anywhere. It sounded good to my mind’s palate, so I gave it a go, hoping that roasting these so-grapey-it-almost-tastes-unreal grapes would turn out gloriously. I was hoping that the grapes would caramelize and take on deeper jam notes and work well with the lightness of branzino.

My hunch was a good one. When we sat down to dinner, spooning the roasted grapes over the fish, it was indescribably good. The kind of good that makes you easily bid goodbye to summer, and welcome fall with open arms. The kind of good that makes you realize that if ever in a pinch, you’ve got dinner covered. The kind of good that I’ll keep on regular dinner rotation (for weekdays and weekends) for years to come.