Tuesday Night Dinner Party: Blending Families With Fish Tagine

On a recent Thursday, I decided to get two families together with ours in an attempt at some platonic matchmaking—something I’d been meaning to do on Tuesday nights, but have shied away from in practice. So many dishes! So much facilitating! To further complicate matters, I encouraged my friend K. to bring her mother, since my own maternal unit was in town for the week.

The moms hit it off, quickly gripping a couple of glasses of albarino and conversing about particle physics and women’s colleges. It was the last we nongrandparents heard of them for a while, while six children swirled around the house on the verge of mayhem. (My stolen-from-restaurants trick of papering the table and putting out crayons worked, but only for about seven minutes.) The scene was merry, but not quite as seamless as I’d hoped, and I downed my own albarino as I tried to get dinner under control.

Back in the Stone Age when I got hired at Chez Panisse, I had to do a test dinner for the management (not CP’s guiding light, Alice Waters—she was on sabbatical), for which I made a version of a Moroccan fish tagine with tomatoes, potatoes, saffron, preserved lemon, and green olives. It’s a flavor combination that never fails to surprise me with its warmth and salty brightness. Back then, I fancied it up with semi-dehydrated tomato petals and carefully crisped potato medallions. This time I hoped to simplify the process. I applied casserole logic, baking the fish on top of a bed of sautéed fennel, onion, and garlic, and topping it with roasted tomatoes, olives, preserved lemon, and a little cilantro. In the end, this still meant a lot of ingredients but not a lot of tending once it was in the oven. The kids on the other hand, required plenty of tending.

I wanted to serve the kids the same thing as the adults, only simplified, so I applied universally loved panko crumbs to their fish fillets and pan-fried them. We dished them up with a little broccoli, strawberries, and, of course, ketchup for those who needed it. Six kids is a lot to wrangle at any table, and one guest kept them more or less in place by telling them a story about some very grouchy children and their experiences in a spiny, poisonous desert. Only one child, dressed as a princess kittycat, escaped without her dinner, which seemed a pretty good dinner matriculation rate to me.

After dinner, another young friend broke down and wanted to go home—it turned out he was not so keen on this family matchmaking and didn’t want to share my son Gus with others. The solution? Ice Age 2 [2], administered to the whole crew, including, I’m not proud to say, my sub-2-year-old, Adele, who cuddled up to her 3-year-old friend like they were teenagers at a horror movie.

By the time grown-up dinner rolled around, most of us were a little exhausted, but the dinner was swell, as was the conversation. Not only did our mothers hit it off, but so did my sundry friends, talking of food, preschools, and road trips past and future. My neighbor further filled our bellies with sumptuous warm chocolate cakelettes. And as always, when entertaining other families with young children, the whole crowd vanished in a flash about half an hour after everyone’s ideal bedtime. My mother, who has yet to retire from taking care of me, took pity and had the dishes done before my husband and I finished putting kids to bed.

Slightly Sloppy Fish Tagine

3 striped bass, filleted and skinned (other succulent white fish like halibut would work, too)

1 tablespoon coriander seed

½ teaspoon fennel seed

1 pinch saffron, crushed with the back of a spoon

About 2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 large red onion

1 large fennel bulb, sliced thin

¼ cup olive oil

3 medium yellow potatoes, peeled and sliced into ¼ inch slices

8 roasted plum tomatoes, quartered or 8 canned whole tomatoes, roughly chopped

¼ cup water

Chopped zest and pith of ½ a preserved lemon (pulp removed)

¼ cup pitted green olives

3 tablespoons chopped cilantro leaves.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Crush the fennel seed and the coriander with a mortar (or the back of a pan), and then mix with the saffron and 1 teaspoon salt. Evenly season the fish with the spices and refrigerate, for up to an hour until ready to cook. Place the potato slices in a medium pot of salted water and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat, and simmer for a few more minutes until the slices are almost tender but still a little resistant to the tip of a knife. Drain the potatoes and taste them. Toss with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and additional kosher salt to taste, and then set aside. In a wide ovenproof pan over medium-low heat, sweat the onion and fennel with the remaining olive oil and a pinch of salt; cook until translucent and then add the garlic and cook for another minute. Working in the onion pan if big enough, or a casserole dish if not, lay the potatoes over the onion mixture, and then lay the seasoned fish fillets over the potatoes, and garnish it with preserved lemon, olives, tomatoes, and cilantro leaves. Pour in the water and cover, then bake in a 400 degree oven until the fish is cooked through (about a half-hour). Serve with rice, couscous, bread, or nothing else at all.

What the kids ate: Sautéed fish fillets, broccoli, buttered noodles, out-of-season organic strawberries, out-of-season organic popsicles.