Seared Wreckfish with Mushroom Ragout

I love the concept of “Sunday night dinner,” that dinner where there has been more time during the day to prepare so it’s perhaps the nicest meal of the week, it is with family and/or friends, and it’s relaxed and unrushed.

For our Sunday night dinner this week, I made a new recipe out of my beautiful Farmer’s Market cookbook from Williams-Sonoma. It was called "Seared Halibut with Mushroom Ragout," and was a lovely seared fish fillet topped with a creamy blend of simmered mushrooms. I didn’t actually use halibut – too expensive. I substituted another white fish called wreckfish that I found at the fish counter of Wegman’s grocery store and thought it worked just as well. Conveniently, wreckfish, according to NOAA's FishWatch site, was a good seafood choice environmentally because it is "highly regulated and is a fishery management success story." I also didn’t get my mushrooms from a farmer’s market. They didn’t have mushrooms at our market this week, so I picked up a “gourmet blend” of baby bella, shitake, and oyster mushrooms at Wegman’s as well. I did, however, serve all of it over a bed of freshly steamed green beans and next to roasted halves of sweet acorn squash, all of which I did get at the farmer’s market.

It is very likely that this ideal of the “Sunday night dinner” does not actually happen on Sundays. Maybe it is a Friday night dinner or a Tuesday night dinner. Regardless of which night of the week, and even if it is not every week at all, I do hope that each of you gets the time once in a while to really enjoy a meal together. A meal like ours this evening: seared wreckfish with mushroom ragout atop a bed of green beans and served with acorn squash and garlic tuscan bread. And after all of that, we finished off the evening with another scoop of that homemade banana bourbon ice cream that I was raving about yesterday.