Sargent Choice Cooking: Herb-Crusted Cod with Cracked Wheat Berry Salad

Walter Dunphy, BUs executive chef, ushers in spring with a recipe for sautéed cod and a colorful wheat berry salad with fresh vegetables. With little advance preparation, this makes a surprisingly quick and healthful meal. Both the salad and the cod need only a few minutes over heat to bring out their flavors.

An underutilized side dish in many home kitchens, grain salads are filling, light, and nutritious. Dunphys recipe uses wheat berries, the whole grain kernels that are, in their most common form, ground into everyday flour, and that take on a slightly chewy, nutty quality when cooked. For color and flavor, Dunphy adds corn (preferably fresh, but frozen is fine), red pepper, heirloom cherry tomatoes, and edamame, the shelled whole soybeans that are a staple snack in Japan and are now commonplace in grocery stores like Trader Joes and Whole Foods.

Dunphy pairs the salad with simply prepared cod, lightly breaded and seasoned with fresh cilantro, tarragon, and parsley. (Salmon or halibut substitute nicely when theyre in season, he says.) He tops the finished product with a mix of micro-herbs for a dish thats both green and full of protein. The result serves four.

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