The Menu We Deserve

It was getting dark as we rolled into Rehoboth last night.  “What should we have for dinner?” I had asked my brother when we were about 30 minutes out from our ocean front destination. We exchanged ideas and settled on some kind of seafood, since it was, after all, the beach. 

“Let’s see what they have that looks good,” my brother suggested wisely, and I agreed. 

“But I do kind of want potatoes,” I told him. 

“Maybe we could do some sort of olive and garlic and tomato roasted fish on sliced potatoes,” he mused, and that’s what we were shooting for when we pulled into the seafood market a mile or so from our rental house. Inside, there was a fair selection of fresh fish in the case, and we opted for swordfish. 

As the guy behind the counter was cutting and wrapping our selection, we explored the small grocery section where we found a small container of green olives, some pesto, and a jar of puttanesca sauce. With no potatoes to be found, we opted for a bag of enormous pasta rings (called 'calamari'), but I grabbed a bag of Mediterranean herb flavored potato chips on our way to the register. 

"The flavor profile, is right," I told my brother, "and maybe we can do a little potato chip crust or topping on the fish." 

Once we got settled into our beach house, we got cooking and before too long we were dining on potato-crusted seared swordfish served on a bed of artisanal pasta with green olives and puttanesca sauce with basil green beans on the side.

Even though it was not exactly what we had planned, it was delicious, and we congratulated ourselves for preparing such a meal with limited resources. "It might have been better that what we were planning," noted my brother. 

"Having to cook with what we could find turned out great," I agreed. "What's that line from the Batman movie? They weren't the ingredients we needed, but..."

"They were the ingredients we deserved!" finished my brother.

I'd like to think so.