Flounder and Risotto dinner

It has become a family tradition for me to cook fish during our summer vacation in Cape Cod. The impetus for this was a bet with my oldest brother. One morning, before going swimming he challenged me to eat a clove of garlic raw. In return for this he would buy fish for dinner for me to cook. While I'm pretty sure he would have done this either way, I consumed the clove. By the time I cooked dinner the rank garlic smell emanating from my every pore had subsided. Needless to say, this past year he bought the fish without a bet.
The first year I cooked a blue fish and cod. This past year I took the advice of my father and decided to cook local flounder. This is a very thin, light tasting fish which is easy to cook. Well, the dinner went well.
So when faced, this week, with the decision of what to cook for the first kitchen club meeting, flounder came to my mind. To complement it I decided to make an asparagus risotto. And to give the plate a little color, I determined to have simple roasted carrots on the side. Below I'll give the recipes, but for now I want to remark on some things I learned in my cooking last night.
First lesson: Don't try to pan fry anything with any cheese on the outside. I hadn't planned to, but on the spur of the moment I decided to put a little Romano cheese on the flounder, in addition to the herbs, before pan frying it. This resulted in a lay of burnt cheese on the bottom of the pan. Luckily this didn't really hurt the flavor or surface of the fish. It did, however make it impossible to make a good pan sauce.
Second lesson: Be a little picky about the type of wine used in making sauces. It just threw what ever wine into the already mucked up pan sauce. The wine didn't have a particularly nice flavor, and so the sauce was further worsened. In the end, I just trashed the idea of having a sauce.
Other than the sauce, I think that most of the food worked out well.

Recipes (I made this for six adults and these amounts worked very well)
Risotto:
2 cups of Arborio rice (important to use right rice)
Hard cheese, like parmesian or romano grated
Medium onion
A few garlic cloves
A bunch of asparagus
A cup or two of white wine
Vegetarian thin soup stock (chicken style)
Instructions:
Trim ends then, with a little garlic powder, pepper and grated hard cheese roast the asparagus on tin foil until tender. Reserve and when cooled some chop into one inch pieces. Chop onions and garlic. Heat olive oil in deep bottomed pan and then add in onion and garlic. Cook until onion becomes translucent but not caramelized. Add in special risotto rice (possibly with a little more
oil before hand). Cook the rice for two minutes so that the pieces become also a drop translucent around the edges. Then pour in enough wine to cover the rice and onions/garlic. From this point on you need to stir the mixture ever 5 seconds or so. Keep stirring until the wine is cooked off/ absorbed. You are looking for something close to the point where you can use your spoon to clear an area on the pans bottom, and the rice does not immediately rush back into that cleared area. Have on had warm, but not boiling, stock. Pour in a cup or so and continue this process of cooking the liquid into the rice. Keep doing this until the rice is the desired level of tender. Make sure to
let and residual liquid get absorbed by the rice. Once this is done, turn off the heat and add the cooked asparagus, plus pregrated hard cheese. Mix, add salt to taste, and let cook a little before serving. The consistency should be creamy and smooth, and the rice should be soft.

Fish:
Mixture of Thyme, Oregano, Rosemary
6 fillets Flounder
Olive oil
Butter
White Wine
Lemon
Heat olive oil and butter in a heavy bottomed skillet until melted and hot. Wash and clean flounder and pat dry. Scatter herbs onto the fish. One or two pieces at a time, place into the skillet. The fish is very thin and will not take long to cook. It will also shrink in its dimensions as it cooks. Once the edges begin to curl up, flip and finish cooking. Do not overcook. Remove from heat and place on a serving plate. Continue until all fish is cooked. Then crank up the heat. Deglaze plan with white wine (rose works too) and free up burnt particles into the mixture. Add in squeezed lemon and possibly some lemon zest. Cook until saucelike then pour onto the flounder. Reserve any extra sauce for dipping ect. Before doing this, of course, make sure the sauce tastes good --- otherwise you don't really need sauce with the fish since it should be very flavorful anyway.

Roasted carrots
Skin and cut 8 carrots at an angle so as to make elliptical shaped pieces of roughly 1/4 inch in thickness. Cut on cookie sheet or tin foil, add some olive oil and mix them up. Then add a little garlic powder and pepper and roast until tender.


These items can be prepared an hour or two early, and then just pop the fish and carrots in a warm oven for a few minutes to rewarm before serving. Risotto will keep its heat well for a while with the top on.