I wasn’t sure how this dish was going to turn out after I tasted the wine butter. Kind of weird tasting. I never, ever cook with a wine that I wouldn’t drink, but I think for this dish the wine needs to be really good because it’s boiled down to a syrup for the butter. The wine butter is used to baste the halibut, to coat the potatoes, and then drizzled over the entire dish (which includes the halibut, red potatoes and sauteed greens). It all came together in the end and was really good. We had a beautiful piece of halibut and I really liked it cooked this way.

• Pan-Roasted Halibut with Red Wine Butter and Red Potatoes (Wildwood, p. 34)
• Roasted Cauliflower

Wine: Prahova 1999 Pinot Noir (Romania). This wine was a gift from someone we know who’s Romanian – it was drinkable, but I wasn’t that crazy about it. A bit flat.