This week we decided to take a break from the red meat and sample some local seafood. My favorite fish market is the New Deal in Cambridge: I am not a fish expert, but everything I have bought there has been excellent. It helps that their staff is incredibly friendly, talkative and helpful. They were happy to tell me the origin of every fish they had available, as well as their flavors and strengths. I choose a large, locally caught halibut steak with beautiful translucent white flesh. The clerk pointed out the fresh, still-red blood that spotted on the cut surface of the steak and showed me where to cut out the bones. Then he suggested searing the steaks very quickly in olive oil over high heat, then, setting the fish aside, sautéing onions, garlic, white wine and tomatoes in the oil. Then the steaks are returned to the pan for a two-minute simmer in the sauce. I took most of his advice, only omitting the tomatoes.

For once, I managed the timing, and the result was perfectly moist, tender and flaky throughout. The mild, clean flavor of the halibut married perfectly with the garlic and white wine. I think it speaks to the freshness and delicate flavor that no fishy smell lingered in the kitchen, nor appeared in the microwave a couple days later when I reheated it for lunch.

The raddichio, on the other hand, was overwhelmingly bitter. It was a gorgeous mottled red and green, with perfect texture, but simply intensely, bitingly, inedibly bitter. It mellowed out in time to eat as leftovers, however. The polenta was, well, the same polenta we've had several times now - still delicious, but no longer novel.

Ingredients:
Halibut from New Deal Fish Market in Cambridge, MA (Fish caught off MA shore)
Radicchio and young onions from Red Fire Farms, Granby, MA
Gray's Rhode Island Cornmeal, from Gray's Grist Mill in Adamsville, RI