Archive for the ‘Fish Wednesday’ Category
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
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I’m a sucker for an exotic cookbook. Our stunning variety of ethnic grocery stores means that here in Seattle, we are able to fearlessly ferret out the bizarre and nonstandard ingredients. And our diverse community means that even the local Safeway has quite an impressive selection of ethnic foods. A good thing, diversity is. I’m for it.
The Vivid Flavors Cookbook, a very exotic selection indeed, has been on my shelf for quite along time, since I picked it up from a remainders pile somewhere. The index in this collection of complicated oddball recipes is, well, crap. I keep saying I’m going to get rid of it, and then, I crack it open and while browsing through in a half-hearted way, dammit, I find something something in there I want to make. Every time.
Case in point, tonight’s dinner. Broiled salmon glazed with honey, lemon, and chili paste served over rice noodles with garlic, ginger, roasted tomatoes, and cilantro. A lovely combination of sweet and sour, and pretty, too, with bright green cilantro leaves against the orange salmon and the red roasted tomatoes. Cookbook, you live another day.
Typically, when browsing my books, I go straight for the index. I look for the items in my fridge and then, I see what the books tell me to make. Yeah, I know, the Internet, blah blah blah, but I like flipping through cookbooks, I like that they fall open to the pages I use the most, I like seeing notes from meals past scribbled in the margins - “never mind vegan, this would be awesome with CHEESE” or “not worth the bother of baking, make the sauce and pour it over pasta.”
The sauce for tonight’s fish was very simple - the juice of a lemon, a teaspoon of red curry paste, and two big tablespoons of honey. I’m absolutely making it again, it would be good on just about any sturdy fish - halibut, salmon, cod, you name it. By next Fish Wednesday, I’ll be the proud owner of a Road Trip Grill and I think halibut steaks marinated in the aforementioned sauce and grilled are going to be oh so good.
I’m excited that grilling season is finally here. We cooked some chicken last weekend on the old Weber kettle grill (slathered in sweet chili sauce) and it was mighty nice to sit in the yard enjoying dinner in the warm evening light. Fish isn’t a summer only food, but the best of it arrives in Seattle in late spring with the long days, so it tastes like summer to me.
My mom cleaned off her bookshelves a little while back and I inherited The Barbecue! Bible
. If the index doesn’t suck, maybe it will teach me a thing or two about how to cook fish.
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Side note: I got the new grill (partly) because I’m having a solstice party. If you’re in Seattle and you’d like to come, email me, I’ll send you an evite.
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Thursday, May 1st, 2008
Pineapple curry with shrimp, before and after
My fondness for far away places means that my comfort foods are a bizarre smörgåsbord of Indian and Asian style curries, European baked goods, taco truck carbohydrates, and mundane supermarket standards like Crackin’ Oat Bran (the crack cocaine of cereals), mac and cheese, and Snyder’s pretzels. Mr NEV, bless him, has come to embrace the oddity that is my appetite (mostly) and has been known to say, unprovoked, “Get your coat, we’re going for pho” or, using his best Homer Simpson imitation, “Mmmmmmm. Spinach naan!”
Today, nothing would reassure me quite like the spicy sweet combination of a pineapple curry, preferably served up on that fluffy reddish brown rice that fancier Thai places offer you. I picked up a five pound bag of Tom Mali (unhulled jasmine) rice along with a ripe pineapple from Costa Rica, a pound of white shrimp from Ecuador, a bottle of fish sauce from Vietnam, some Thai basil from Hawaii, a few greenhouse grown red peppers from Canada, and miscellaneous other items from all over the planet. My dinner had the same carbon footprint I’d have made if I’d hopped a flight to Bangkok, eaten curry, and flown back again.
I would be delighted to do nothing but eat locally were I to live in a tropical wonderland where mangoes fall from the heavens and seafood jumps out of the ocean and on to your plate, perfectly filleted and coated in a little something - let’s say ground macadamia nuts drizzled with sweet chili sauce. We have fairly abundant produce in the Pacific Northwest but I miss California avocados, I love love love the spicy sweet food of the tropics or the complicated aroma of Indian cooking. Kale is great, but how can it compete with the wonders of, say, dragon fruit or rambutan?! Al Gore, I am sorry, but if I can not travel myself, from time to time, I like a plate that reminds of the bright variety of the outside world.
My pineapple curry was imperfect, but it was my first one. I can’t repeat the recipe since it was just a hack between a bunch of recipes I read online during the day. I did learn that the trick to a good pineapple curry is to let the coconut milk based sauce stew for a while. Our seconds - with an added half a teaspoon of red curry paste - were so much better for simmering on the stove for an extra 20 minutes. Next time, I’ll sautée the onions (probably from Walla Walla, Washington), toss in the curry paste, the coconut milk and the pineapple, and let it simmer on low for a good hour. Then, right at dinner time, I’ll add the veggies and the shrimp. That will make for a thicker, more seasoned sauce and the pineapple will be well stewed in the chili paste. There’s nothing like the amazing sweet bite of pineapple offset by the sharp fire of red chili. There’s something about the combination of contrary flavors that reassures a complicated person like me that everything is all right in the world.
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008
My pal S - she lives in Tuscany - is a fine cook. One year, I was at her place in Maremma for a birthday feast and wow, did we eat some seafood. She lives not far from Porto Ercole so we all squeezed into someone’s car and headed down to have Italian style cocoa in the January weather. Before we went home, we stopped at the fish market. Later that evening we ate and ate and ate some more.
It’s from S. that I learned you can rarely go wrong in the kitchen if you use plenty of high quality olive oil. Here in Seattle we buy olive oil in large containers at PFI - Pacific Food Importers. The folks at the counter will tell you the difference between the varieties. In the past, they’ve recommended what the tonier Seattle restaurants are using - and it’s not always the most expensive. When left to our own devices, we look for the greenest oil we can find.
This week’s Fish Wednesday Thursday recipe came from Flavors of Tuscany: Recipes from the Heart of Italy
. I won’t repeat the recipe but in short, it’s braised tuna in a roasted red pepper sauce. It’s time consuming in that you have to roast and peel the peppers and then make the sauce, but it’s not difficult. We picked up some very high quality tuna from our favorite source, Seattle Fish Company, at the West Seattle Junction. The sauce was nice and the fish, if I may gloat a little, was a perfect and tender medium rare, but I wanted a little something more, a little bite. I’ve scribbled “green olives? capers?” in the margins of the book for next time.
When I’m feeling especially pleased with my Fish Wednesday accomplishments, I like to present the tab to Mr. NEV. Tonight, after I said “That will be 32.50, please,” he replied, “No way I’m paying Fish Wednesday prices on Fish Thursday!”
Eat your fish. It makes you smart.
Posted in Fish Wednesday | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
Even though we live in the seafood paradise of the Pacific Northwest we are not snobs ’round here, no sir. Plus, with bad news coming from the salmon streams, we may find ourselves seeking cheap, sustainable alternatives long before we thought we’d have to.
It was just yesterday that I found myself paying a little too much for a grilled cheese sandwich at lunchtime. In spite of the expense, I remembered just how damn yummy a pan fried sandwich is. And when Mr. NEV decided we needed to make chocolate chip cookies too, the die was cast, we were going grade school weekend lunch all the way. In addition to the stuff we needed for cookies, we picked up a jar of kosher mini dill pickles, a little piece of Danish cheese, and some bread. Tuna we had at home.
I’m not going to tell you how to make a grilled tuna and cheese sandwich, plus, everyone has a method. I hear there are those who slather both sides of their bread with mayo before putting it in the pan. If that’s how you like it, more power to you.
I still love to have my grilled sammich with tomato soup, but Soup Swap has spoiled me for quality and I just can’t do the Campbell’s from the can anymore. I guess I’m not a total non-snob and yeah, that was Dijon mustard I mixed in with the tuna.
Still, if you can’t enjoy a plain old grilled sandwich from the skillet, a crispy, salty dill, and a chocolate chip cookie still warm from the oven, well, maybe it’s time to consider antidepressants.
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
I didn’t forget, you know, I’ve just been at loose ends since we got back from the other side of the planet. And yes, I know, it’s been a while, but I was stuck in kitchen reruns and lethargy. My taste buds have been resurfaced by the complicated flavors of Southeast Asia and I am psyched, psyched I tellya, to mix up Fish Wednesday with a little exotica.
Because I was suffering from traveler’s belly, I didn’t eat much more than rice in Bangkok, though I did have one stunning plate of pad thai and a shrimp salad that featured vast amounts of lime, lemon grass, and chili. Good god, it was delicious. Thai food in Thailand is blazing hot, even when you ask for it mild. Making it at home means you’ve got a lot more control over the BTUs.
We shopped at Viet Wah Market, a big Asian supermarket with a weird smell, it was just like being back in Vietnam. We picked up the stuff that you wouldn’t expect to find at your local QFC or Safeway and a few produce items. Viet Wah packs all their veggies in extended family sized bags so now I have an excessive amount of bean sprouts that I don’t know what to do with. J. made me put down the five pound bag of bok choy, but I regret it because we also bought a package of those fat yellow noodles that we both like so well.
I won’t repeat the recipe I used, a hybrid of one from the Noodle Shop Cookbook and this one from the Thai Table. It was quite good for a first attempt, though a little short on the sauce. The fact that I poured several tablespoons of it on my shirt and the floor while stirring it might have something to do with the shortage of liquids, but next time I make it, I’ll double the amount of sauce and see how that turns out. I only used one tablespoon of Sri Racha in the sauce - the recipe called for three - and it had plenty of bite.
The lion’s share of the work is in slicing and dicing; once that’s done, the cooking takes no time at all. Pad Thai is probably a fine dish to make if you have idle hands about the kitchen, you can set them to julienning things while you deal with mixing up the correct amount of sauce. I made my pad thai with shrimp and tofu, it would be just as good with chicken.
The results were better than promising, quite a good first attempt. Seattle’s diverse Asian population means that we’ve got access to all kinds of crazy ingredients. There’s a Cambodian market about three miles from here, so if I get jonesing for Khmer food, I won’t have to go far to pick up the stuff I need. Stay tuned, Fish Wednesday is going all Indochina on you.
[tags]Fish Wednesday, Pad Thai[/tags]
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Sunday, February 10th, 2008
By Your Intrepid Substitute Blogger
If you’ve read Fish Wednesday the last couple weeks, you know I don’t like fish. But I have to admit that this Wednesday, there was little chance of me sweating over the idea of eating fish or cooking fish: I was deep in preparations for our much-delayed Soup Swap. We planned it for after the caucuses, which were, to quote a neighbor, a “meet your neighbor hug-fest”. It was amazing to hear how crowded our local precinct was — four years ago, it was a sparsely attended event. Eight years ago, our neighborhood was so Republican that I was afraid to put up a Gore sign for fear of vandalism (and four years ago, a lot of Kerry signs were, indeed, vandalized in our immediate neighborhood; but not our signs). Things have changed over here.
This year, I opted not to caucus. I could tell you it’s because caucusing is a really stupid way to choose a winner — my brother likens it to a temple board meeting; if you’ve never been to one, it’s a bunch of Jews with more opinions than there are people trying to accomplish something. But really it was because Husband and I would have canceled each other’s vote out, and I knew that Obama was going to take Washington, so my vote wouldn’t be missed. Plus there was more Soup Swap preparation to do.
I planned a tea with sherry and wee things to eat. I made rosemary shortbread, and crostini made of bread from Bakery Nouveau, which NEV has written paeans to before. I put homemade ricotta on them, drizzled half with honey from last year’s pull at Moonshadow Farm, and the other half were drizzled with peppered strawberries in a reduced balsamic glaze. That stuff is addictive; I hope I can make it again.
Yes, homemade ricotta. It’s surprisingly easy and tastes divine. Just take 2 1/2 cups of cultured buttermilk add to a half gallon of milk in a pot over medium heat. Stir every three or four minutes until it reaches 170 degrees. Don’t stir it again, but watch the thermometer. When it hits 190, remove from the heat and strain through cheese cloth. The more you strain it, the firmer it will be. You can add salt to it, but I don’t think it needs it. It tastes amazingly fresh and is great on raisin toast in the morning with a cup of tea.
I had some problem with my lemon meringues, so Neighbor M brought over some cheese triangles she made with her Greek mother-in-law. I’m sure there’s some official title for them, but I don’t know what it is. They’re made with feta and egg and encased in filo and baked. Yum. We had two kinds of sherry and many types of tea. Only H drank the tea. She’s a law student and pled a need to read boring law texts.
It was all served on one dead grandmother’s china, in another dead grandmother’s crystal, and stirred with a third dead grandmother’s silver.
At one point, we wanted a picture taken, so Neighbor S went outside where Dan the Man was playing football with his son. We determined he was Cute, and since two of us were single, we thought we’d ask him to take the photo so the Single Girls could better Check him Out. He was a real sport. He took the photo, we gave him some cookies and soup and off he went. I’m supposed to check on his interest this week. I think I’ll have S do that instead. We had a blast. We all agreed that we should do it more often. The sad thing is that working moms, working wives, we have a tendency to take care of everyone but ourselves. Husband and Son went to the Crumb exhibit at the Frye so it could be a real Girl’s Day. I want to do it again, but I have a great fear that it will be months before we can all find the time and inclination to really give ourselves two hours of time. It’s kind of sad.
We had soup tonight for dinner (needless to say). Our choice was between Persian chicken and vegetable, vegetable beef, gingered carrot, winter vegetable, leek and sorrel (I made that one), and ham, white bean and chard. We chose the latter. My little guy is getting a bug and I thought the chicken broth in the soup would be soothing.
The leek and sorrel soup came of a desire to do something with the sorrel I have growing in my garden. It’s a lemony herb. You can find it sometimes at farmer’s markets or in small clamshell herb packs. It’s a cinch to grow and is impossible to kill. It tastes great in a salad with other greens, like a little surprise of lemon. The recipe requires a lot of sorrel, so find some seeds, plant them, and next fall you can enjoy the soup.
Saute two leeks (the white a light green part, sliced and well rinsed) in olive oil. Or butter if you’re feeling decadent. When they’ve softened, add a good pinch of salt and some ground pepper. Add a quart of chicken or vegetable broth, or water in a pinch. Use the low sodium stuff if you didn’t make you’re own. Add two chopped red, yellow, or white potatoes (waxy type, not baking type). I suppose you could use purple but who knows what color the soup would come out. I don’t peel mine, but you can if you want. Bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook until the potatoes are tender. Mash the potatoes in the pot and add in six cups (loosely packed) of washed sorrel leaves removed from any big stems. Sorrel is one of those herbs like basil that turns a blackish brown when cooked. Oh well. When it’s cooked down, take a stick blender and puree, or put it in a blender in two batches and blend. Adjust the seasonings. It freezes magnificently.
If you have a ton of sorrel in your garden, you can freeze it. It looks awful after you take it out of the freezer, but no different than when cooked. That way you can enjoy it without having to spend a fortune buying a dozen clamshells of the stuff.
Posted in Fish Wednesday, Food, Glorious Food | 2 Comments »
