I came very close to embracing an incipient Thanksgiving foodie trend this year and spatchcocking the turkey, as instructed by the Washington Post. But I lost my nerve at the last minute, partly because all the references to spatchcocking I found on the Web other than the Post story described it as a preparation best suited for grilling (it involves slicing through the backbone so you lay the bird flat). Plus the bird (from the Depaola truck at the Union Square greenmarket) was small enough to fit easily in a pot in the fridge. So I went again with what is becoming a pretty conventional Thanksgiving practice (we've been doing it for almost a decade) and prepared a brine.

I put in a bunch of kosher salt (can't even remember now if it was 1.5 cups or 2.5), brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, rosemary and thyme, and brought it all to a boil.

After letting the brine cool down I poured it into the pot with the turkey in it, and didn't make too much of mess. About 20 hours later I pulled the turkey out (and did make a mess) and put it on its side on a rack in a roasting pan. I roasted it on that side at 400 degrees for 27 minutes (seemed like a good number), flipped it and roasted it on the other side for 27 minutes, then turned the oven down to 350, set the turkey breast side up and put some sweet potatos, parsnips and turnips under it, then poured in some turkey broth and white wine. It probably cooked about 90 or 100 minutes like that. I may have turned the oven down to 325 at some point.

It was the first time I had ever cooked a turkey without once consulting a cookbook. And it was good, really good. In past years I've sometimes overbrined. This year the turkey was moist with a hint of the herbs from the brine, but not soft or overspiced. In fact, I'm going to grab a hunk out of the fridge right now.

Okay, that's done. The rest of the menu consisted of smashed potatoes, a really great soup of sweet potatoes and other root veggies that Mrs. By Justin Fox made a few weeks ago, green beans tossed in Dijon mustard and anchovy past.

And then there were the sweet potatoes, which I guess were redundant given the soup but we didn't want to do without. I was initially thinking of slicing them into french-fry pieces and, well, frying them. But there wasn't an appropriate pot available, so I altered a recipe for grated beets that we've been eating a lot of lately (it's from the Gourmet Cookbook).

I grated two sweet potatoes together with one beet, fried 'em up in a skillet with butter like hash browns, then added a little grated lime zest and lime juice at the last minute.

It's better with just beets.

Finally, the salad.

The beautiful watermelon radishes and multicolored carrots were from a really sweet little veggie stand at Union Square near the north entrance to the subway station. I made a dressing of orange juice and shallots and mustard. But it just wasn't very good. It looked great, though.

It was this picture, in fact, that inspired my to write here for the first time in months and months. Not that it's such a great picture, but the salad was beautiful. Plus, the rest of the family (including in laws) is in the next room working on the annual gingerbread house, which this year is a gas station. I said I was going to get to work on the book (I have a cleaned-up manuscript due Dec. 17), and this procrastination opportunity was just too good to pass up. Happy (post-)Thanksgiving!

This blog is now one of the world's foremost online sources of culinary information about sea robins. Seriously, type "cooking sea robin" into the Google and my previous post on the topic shows up--today at least--in fourth place. As such, it's been getting some traffic from sea robin aficionados, one of whom sent me this informative e-mail:

First thing, you got ripped. 5 dollars? Then again after spending 50 bucks on a party boat to catch a few fluke means the few sea robins I took in actually cost more than that ... but anyway, you have to fillet them and deep fry the fillets. They are quite good, but you will still have a few smallish bones that come out easily after cooking. Only a big one will get you decent fillets, it takes a skilled hand to fillet a smaller one. ... People still look at me funny when I take a few sea robins home for dinner. They are aesthetically ugly fish (though divers seem to think they are beautiful) but no uglier, my wife contends, than any flatfish ... perhaps that's why no market ever developed for them.

This is a sea robin. At least, that's what Captain Rick called it last Friday. A friend who stopped by as I was getting reading to cook it said that, when she fished off Shelter Island as a kid, her dad referred to such things as "garbage fish."

Rick sells lots of perfectly normal fish (filets of tuna, flounder, etc.) at his stand at the 97th Street Greenmarket. But that kind of stuff costs real money, and is kinda boring, so I'm usually drawn to his little bin of whole fish. I've bought lots of excellent porgies from him, and the week before I had gone for the butterfish. This time the weirdest thing in the bin was the sea robin, so I bought it. For $5.

I asked Rick what to do with the thing. He said to cut off the tail and bake it. So I cut off the tail:

I then followed a recipe for monkfish tail in the no-longer-All-New Joy of Cooking (1997 edition), stuffing the thing with chopped garlic and basil and Maldon salt:

I roasted it at 450 degrees, initially just with oil and then with some Vinho Verde thrown in.

It was a bust, which is why I took no pictures of the finished product. It didn't look good. It didn't taste good. The kid, who will eat porgies all day, didn't like it. The wife didn't like it. I didn't like it. The mix of flavors was just wrong. Maybe I overcooked it. Or undercooked it. But I don't think that was the problem. Luckily, I had also made a nice salad and cooked up some couscous and Fresh Direct lamb sausage. But still, it was a bust.

I think the fish might taste fine in a thick, creamy sauce. A sea robin etouffee. Except that it's got lots of little bones which would make such treatment difficult. So this week it's back to porgies or butterfish. Or maybe even tuna.

Someday soon, I hope, my digital media empire will consist of the Curious Capitalist at Time.com, a site/blog (probably at this address) promoting my book, and a food blog produced with others (I'm talking about you, Gina). But I haven't gotten around to making that happen yet. Which means this still doubles as a food blog, because I think posting recipes on my Time.com blog would be just too self-indulgent.

And since I cooked butterfish for the first time Friday night, it seems imperative that I share the experience here. I bought them from Captain Rick, who catches fish off the Hamptons and sells them at, among other places, the Friday Greenmarket on 97th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. He sold me six of the little things (for $4, I think) and told me to "lance" them. I took that to be a euphemism for cleaning them, which is itself a euphemism for pulling their guts and organs out. But it was an easy enough process with the little butterfish that I guess lance is as good a word for it as any. Anyway, here they are, post-lancing:

And here they are a couple minutes later frying in peanut oil:

Cooking them in a cast-iron skillet was a mistake. I figured it was the best alternative to teflon, which I don't really like to use plus our one teflon pan is too small for six butterfish anyway. But the skins came right off the fish and bonded in a deep and lasting way with the cast iron. (I was able to get them off eventually, but it took a whole lotta scrubbing.) Here's what the fish looked like afterwards:

The garnish was chopped garlic and ginger fried in a little peanut oil, to which I added some toasted sesame oil and soy sauce after the the frying was done. When I first tasted the fish in the pan I wondered if maybe the garnish was overkill, because the fish really did taste like butter. But after eating a couple of the things I wanted all the flavor I could get because eating plain butter is actually kind of boring. All in all it was a big success, except perhaps esthetically. Oh, and those fish have an awful lot of tiny bones.

Captain Rick also talked me into buying a couple pounds of sand shark filets. When I announced this at the P.S. 163 book sale down the sidewalk, somebody asked, "land shark?" The name stuck.

I kept the land-shark-prep pretty simple. I just rubbed some oil and salt and pepper on it, broiled it, then served it with anchovy butter. It's really rich, and we could have done with far less fish for three adults and a kid. So on Sunday I made myself shark salad out of the leftovers. It was okay, but there's a reason why you can't buy cans of Wolverine of the Sea at the supermarket: Shark doesn't make nearly as good a salad as tuna does.

It looks like we're going to change the name of my book to The Myth of the Rational Market (from The Myth of the Rational Investor). Because that seemed to make more sense, and seems to give the book a better chance of breaking through to non-investing readers.