Cooking With The Wolfes

Dill, dill, and more dill...


My first attempt at growing dill in my greenhouse window didn't go so well, so I was very pleased that my second attempt on the porch has been a raging success. Maybe it's due to the constant vigil provided by Morgan the cat.
Here's the plant - you can see that it's so bushy, it looks like I cut practically nothing off of it - but really I cut it nearly in half! Morgan was very interested in my snipping, as you can see :) I used the dill in two different recipes, Dill Roasted Salmon and Dill and Cheddar Beer Bread.

The Salmon cooked on a bed of dill. The recipe calls for smoked paprika, but in my last Penzey's order I got a sample of chipolte pepper, which is also smoky, so I put that on instead. The recipe also lists an optional Lemony-Dill mayo that can be served with the fish, but I skipped that part.

The Dill-Cheddar Beer Bread recipe intrigued me, because it lists lots of other interesting sounding varations on the basic recipe (Rosemary-Feta Beer Bread, anyone?) I cooked the bread in a cast-iron cornbread pan from Oma (Mike's German grandmother).

Below is the final product, along with a homemade salad (with greens that I grew!!) with homemade croutons.

The bread came out incredibly light and delicious, and the salmon had just the right amount of kick - I'm glad I didn't overdo it with the chipolte (as I am prone to do). I was concerned that simply cooking the fish on a bed of dill wouldn't impart enough flavor, especially with the skin still on, but it imparted a nice dill-y flavor. I also made a salad (with greens that I grew), and while I burned the homemade croutons on one side, I DID figure out a nice trick for making homemade croutons much easier - frozen bread! The only bread I had was in the freezer, so I just smeared the whole piece of bread with butter (I usually use olive oil, but hey, ya gotta have SOME fun!), then some garlic salt, then cut it up and popped it in the toaster oven. It made it very easy to cut the bread into perfect little cubes. Maybe that's how the restaurants do it!