If you follow our blog, you know that we don’t make many Asian-inspired dishes. We decided to try two new ones on Monday: Ina Garten’s Indonesian Grilled Swordfish and Ellie Krieger’s Sesame Stir-Fried Chinese Greens. Here, Tony describes how the two dishes came together.

The first step in the dish is to prepare a marinade and let the swordfish sit in it overnight. We debated whether to do this at all – it seemed like an extra, unnecessary step – but we are very glad we did. It was very easy and gave the fish a tremendous amount of flavor.

To make the marinade, I just combined the soy sauce, canola oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, ginger, garlic, and mustard. I poured half the marinade into a glass dish, laid the fish on top, and poured the rest of the marinade over the fish. Part of why I didn’t want to make the marinade is that I wasn’t anxious to mince up about 1/8 of a cup of ginger. Then I hit on what turned out to be a great idea: I peeled the ginger, which we keep in the freezer, and then grated it on a microplane. This took maybe a minute or two to do, and basically produced ginger “snow”, which was grated super fine.

Cooking the swordfish was even easier than prepping it. I cooked it on a grill pan over medium heat for about three minutes per side. The fish needed to sit covered (tightly) in foil for about 10 minutes, which was plenty of time to make the greens.

The recipe calls for baby bok choy, but we were only able to get the regular kind, so I needed to cut it up into pieces. I cooked the bok choy over high heat in a non-stick pan for about 2 minutes, then added soy sauce, vinegar and sesame oil and cooked it for about 2 minutes more. At this point, the fish was done resting, so I plated everything, sprinkled some sesame seeds on top, and we were ready to eat.

The fish was cooked perfectly and super flavorful. I think the ginger, because it was grated so fine, really had a chance to permeate the fish, but the other flavors came through too. The bok choy was also cooked just right: softened, but still very crunchy. We paired this with a 2012 Heinz Nicolai German Riesling, which our friends at Wines by the Flask (www.winesbytheflask.com) recommended. It was somewhere between slightly sweet and slightly dry, with a touch of minerality, and was a perfect complement to our dinner.