steve the laser mouse.

Oh, look.

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Mara is cooking tonight, and this makes me happy...it feels like a long time since we've cooked dinner specifically for each other.

I was just reading something random this weekend about the process of deciding what's for dinner, and it made me realize that many, many food bloggers linger on this step when posting a recipe.

But why? Is it just like any other creative activity that you might document, so you give a little back story on your thought process? I don't know, I'm not so sure there's not more to it, something pleasure-related in the recounting of how you decided what to eat, that whole dopamine/anticipation thing. Research this, will you?

Regardless. Tonight we had fish defrosting and we wanted something comforting. To me, fish and comfort do not necessarily belong in the same sentence unless possibly it's a sentence about something other than food, but there's this one thing Mara makes that we both seemed to be gravitating towards: she does some kind of stuffed fish a couple of times a year, and it's always good, but we never write it down, so this is tonight's attempt. It contains the controversial fish and cheese combo, a controversy that I don't totally understand because they always seem to taste pretty darn good together. Maybe more cheese = more comfort.

I filed this under Southern Cooking because it reminds me of something you'd see in a Louisiana kitchen (kidding, more like this or this), maybe even a Louisianan Italian one, except they'd probably use cream cheese somewhere, and pecans instead of pine nuts, and scallions somewhere, and of course there'd have to be shrimp or crab in the stuffing or on top...all of which sounds pretty good.

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baked fish stuffed with spinach, pine nuts, and raisins. 

4 tbsp butter
4 fillets of catfish, tilapia, cod, etc.
a bag of fresh spinach, WASHED (ahem)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup or less pine nuts, toasted
3/4 cup or less raisins
1 tbsp Cajun seasoning (or substitute, say...cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder, and thyme)
1/4 cup or more Gouda, shredded
salt
pepper

Melt butter in small saucepan, add raisins, let sit, possibly transferring to a smaller bowl if butter does not cover raisins. Your goal is plump raisins.

Butter a baking dish. Saute spinach and garlic in oil with salt and pepper to taste. Add the butter-soaked raisins (reserving the butter), the cheese, and the pine nuts to the spinach. Stir to combine.

Roll the spinach mixture up in the fish fillets. Pour the reserved butter over the fillets and sprinkle with cajun seasoning. Bake for 20 minutes at 200C.