Eating Dirt

Salmon Cakes

 
I've been struggling with pan frying cakes and patties of all varieties for a long time now.  They never turn out right - sometimes they stick, sometimes they fall apart, sometimes they burn to a crisp. But tonight I asked my husband for advice, knowing that he has a tendency to remember everything he reads (but nothing I say) and that he read Russ Parson's How to Read a French Fry a thousand years ago when it first came out.  Parson's book is all about kitchen science, and  I seem to remember it deals with sticky patties.

"Protein molecules will stick to the pan until they have been cooked long enough to denature the protein," he told me. So this time I strictly followed the frying time recommended by my recipe, and actually set a timer to really get it right. And low and behold, it worked. The patties didn't stick, they didn't burn (once I turned the heat down low enough) and they didn't fall apart. 

And as an extra bonus,  both my children gobbled them up and asked for more. As usual, my daughter ate her salad and my son did not. "No," he told me, " salad has vegetables in it. I don't like vegetables".  I did manage to get him to swallow two bites after bribing him with strawberries, though.

But whatever, we managed to polish off nearly an entire bag of produce box lettuce, along with some cilantro and mint. I've found that sometimes the key to a really good salad is tossing in a couple small handfuls of whatever fresh herbs I happen to have around. They add just enough to push lettuce past the edge of humdrum and boring to unusual, exciting and delicious. So far I have yet to find an herb combo that falls flat, though really strong flavored ones (like sage) must be used in moderation.

As for the chives, grow a pot of them outside your kitchen door. Otherwise they molder in the bottom of the fridge and get slimy. Yuck!

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Salmon Cakes with Greens (adapted from Epicurious)

 1/4 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon chopped shallots

2 teaspoons Dijon mustard, divided

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1 pound salmon fillet, skin removed, finely chopped

2 egg whites

5 tablespoons drained capers

1/2 cup plain breadcrumbs

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

2 teaspoon olive oil, twice

4-8 cups lettuce or mixed salad, depending on who will be eating

2 small handfuls of herbs

Mix together the mayonnaise, 1 tablespoon shallots, 1 teaspoon mustard, buttermilk and juice in a bowl, then set aside. This is the dressing for your salad.

Chop and wash your salad greens and herbs, dry them, wrap them in a towel, place in a plastic bag and put in the fridge. You can even do this a few days in advance.

In a larger bowl, combine salmon, egg whites, the remaining 1/4 cup shallots, capers, breadcrumbs, remaining 1 tsp mustard, salt and pepper. Mix well and shape into eight 3-inch-round patties. Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat. Cook four salmon cakes until their bottoms are golden, about 6 minutes. The cakes will not be easy to remove from the pan until they are fully cooked, so resist the urge to scrape at them if they don't come up in one piece, and make sure to turn down the heat if your pan starts to smoke. When your time is up, flip and cook until golden, 5 minutes more. Toss greens with half the buttermilk mixture; divide salad among 4 plates; top each with 2 salmon cakes. Garnish with a dollop of crème fraîche or mayo and a sprinkle of chives. Serve with remaining dressing on the side.

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Strawberry Pocky Sticks

This was one I just could not pass up today. I guess it says a lot, that I backpedaled halfway down the block after the "Giant" part of the Pocky package I'd seen in a window of Sakura made it into the active regions of my brain. Larger than normal food strikes me as an unusually American passion, I can't imagine people in Japan would want to trade their delicate packs of pocky for one of these huge curling iron sized items. But who knows. Maybe its the next big thing.

For those of you not familiar with Pocky, it is a sort of long, thin, dry biscuit of the type that come in long tubular shaped packages from the U.K., coated with chocolate or a strawberry stuff similar to the "yogurt" that sometimes covers American pretzels. Being Japanese, Pocky has a convenient handle that is free of chocolate or strawberry coating, so that your fingers do not get smudged. 

I first discovered Pocky back in the nineties, during my time working at a tech company affectionately called "The Rocketship" by our CEO, who was later jailed for investor fraud. Or maybe it was his right hand man who went to prison, I don't remember. But that detail is not important. What is important is the glitter and sparkle of the dot-com days. Everyone was rich back then, and we were all high on life, along with a variety of other things. 

My desk butted up against that of Ms. Pinky Weitzman, a woman who I believe is now playing electric fiddle for a band somewhere in New York City. She was long and lean, terrifically stylish with platinum blonde hair and pale creamy skin. "Daahhling..." she would croon, "You just cannot put your code in my database. It wheel not work..." Careening wildly about with a pocky stick dangling like Cruella Deville's cigarette, she would offer me one with a flick of her wrist and disappear back behind the screen of her monitor. Later in the day we would all head out to the incredibly sketchy bar next door for a gin and tonic, and months down the road she and another pal introduced me to my future husband.

Dinner tonight was uneventful - grilled seabass, corn and tomato relish on toast and a sort of zucchini salad. When I complained that the zucchini was too oily, my husband told me "that's because its Greek. Did you know that in Greece almost forty percent of their calories come from olives?" He liked the zucchini quite a bit. The kids loved the fish, toast and grilled corn, but wouldn't touch the rest. 

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Smoky Corn and Tomato Relish (adapted from Tori Ritchie's Tuesday Recipe):

2 ears of fresh corn

1 lb tomatoes

1 garlic clove, minced

1 small red onion (or white or yellow if thats all you have)

1/8 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

1 semi-spicy pepper, an anaheim chile is a good candidate

2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus more for grilling

1 Tablespoon fresh lime juice

salt and pepper

Shuck the corn, then oil the outside lightly and lay the ears on a hot grill. Also put the tomatoes and pepper on the grill, slice the onion in half, oil the cut side of each half and lay them on the grill too.. You can leave the tomatoes there for five to ten minutes, or until they get nice charred grill marks, and the other veggies for longer, until they are a bit charred on all sides (you'll have to rotate them every now and then). If you're making fish to serve alongside this, it is a good idea to put the fish on the grill when you remove the tomatoes, leaving the corn, onion and pepper on the grill while the fish cooks.

After removing the veggies, let them cool for a bit, then cut the kernels off the corn into a big bowl, slice each tomato in half and squeeze each half gently over the sink to remove the seeds. Next chop the tomatoes into 1/2 inch chunks and add them to the corn. Remove the skin from the onion and chop it into 1/4 inch pieces. Peel the skin off the pepper, slice it in half, remove the seeds and membrane, and cut it into 1/4 inch pieces as well. Mix the veggies together and sprinkle with a little salt.

In a small bowl, mix the olive oil, lime juice and minced garlic. Stir it into the vegetables, add some freshly grated pepper and taste for salt.  This should be served on toast, either while still warm or at room temperature.

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Zucchini with Harissa, Olives and Feta (adapted from Canal House Cooking Volume 1):

4 zucchini, sliced into thick rounds

a handful of cured olives

1/2 cup coarsely crumbled feta

a small handful of parsley leaves, chopped

rind of 1/4 preserved lemon, chopped

1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds (or a combo of fennel and cumin seeds)

1 clove garlic

juice of 1 lemon

2 Tablespoons harissa paste (you'll find it at mediterranean markets and Rainbow Grocery)

5 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (the best you have)

salt

Bring a salted pot of water to boil, then add the zucchini and boil for about five minutes, until it is soft but not squishy. Drain the zucchini in a colander in the sink. Toast the caraway seeds in a frying pan over high heat, until they are fragrant, but before they start to color. Remove them from the pan and crush them in a mortar. Add the clove garlic and about 1/2 teaspoon salt and crush it all together with the pestle. If you don't have a mortar and pestle just chop it all finely. Stir in the lemon juice, harissa and oil. Season to taste with salt. 

Put the zucchini in a bowl, then add the dressing and toss to coat. Scatter the feta, olives, parsley and preserved lemon over the top and serve.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (or the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugala salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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Birthday Crab Rolls

My daughter turned five years old yesterday, and what a celebration it was. She had presents from her Grandparents in the morning , singing and candle blowing with a fake cake at school in the afternoon, then dinner with real cake and more presents in the evening. Tomorrow she has another birthday bash (to which we seem to have invited over seventy guests) and still more presents arriving in the mail from her other Grandmother.

She takes it all in good stride, though, with this year being the first in which she understood the concept of time well enough to actually count down the days to her birthday, and tell me "I'm really going to be five tomorrow!" the day before. This year's cake came from Miette, of course, and tomorrow's big party cake is coming from (urp) Safeway (did you know they have a blog too?). There is only so much I can do when my daughter demands that a princess be painted on the top.

In addition to being overpowered in my choice of cake, I had no say in the dinner menu either. My three year old son has been begging me to bring home a whole (preferably live) fish ever since we visited our local massive Asian market, Sunset Super, and wouldn't let me leave Whole Foods yesterday without buying a crab. Luckily, I managed to get away with an already dead one, recently cooked, cleaned and cracked. Phew.

Together we pulled its meat from the shell at home. When he tired of that, my son coated the kitchen floor with dirt and then hurled pot shards three stories down from our deck, while I boiled up some noodles, grated carrots, picked mint leaves and rolled it all up in rice paper. Or whatever you call that impossibly thin edible wrapping material. My little crab packages didn't come out quite as nicely as the ones served at Dragonfly Restaurant around the corner, but with a little practice I'm sure my skills will improve.

Of course neither of my children at the crab rolls - that was left to my husband and me. Instead they dined on cream cheese sandwiches, carrots and plums. And for dessert, cake.

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Crab Rolls (adapted from Jay Harlow's West Coast Seafood):

4 oz rice sticks (aka rice noodles)

24 small rice paper rounds (I used full ones, and only about 12 or so)

1 smallish crab, cooked, chilled and picked (about 1/3-1/2 pound meat)

1/4 cup shredded green onion or garlic chives

1/3 cup mint and/or cilantro leaves

1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded and sliced into thin strips 2-3 inches long

1/2 cup shredded carrot

Nuoc Cham sauce for dipping (see recipe below)

Cook the rice sticks in boiling water until soft, then drain them in a colander in the sink and rinse with cold water. Cut into 1 inch long lengths. 

The easiest way I've found to rehydrate the rice paper (it is sold dry) is to layer them between damp kitchen towels. Let them sit this way for 5-10 minutes, then flip the stack over so that you start with the rice paper layered first. They are very delicate, and once they have stuck together, nearly impossible to unstick, so be careful. They can stay layered in dishtowels for an hour or more.

For each roll, lay out a sheet of softened rice paper and put a Tablespoon or so of rice sticks in the middle. Add a piece of cucumber, some carrots, chives, mint and crab, then fold the two opposite sides and roll it up into a neat little bundle. If the rice paper tears, you can always take another sheet and double wrap the roll to hold everything together.

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Nuoc Cham (Vietnamese Dipping Sauce):

1 clove garlic

1 small red or green chile

2 Tablespoons fish sauce

1 teaspoon rice vinegar or lime juice

1 teaspoon sugar

2 Tablespoons hot water, or to taste

Finely mince the garlic and chile, or pound them together in a mortar. In a small bowl, combine the chile-garlic mixture with the fish sauce, lime juice (or vinegar), sugar and hot water.Stir it up, then taste to see if it needs further thinning with water. Its pretty strong stuff, so taste with caution. Set it out in a bowl for dipping the rolls into.

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Scorcher!

Today was HOT. I love hot here because we don't get much of it. At 7:00 this morning, when I ventured out to fetch some forgotten item out of the car, it was already seventy degrees.  Seventy!  Its a rare day when the temperature passes seventy even in the afternoon around here. So of course, the dinner menu needed a little work. I'm not about to eat comfort food soup when the temperature is close to ninety at dinnertime. 

I was lucky enough to visit my friend Steph at her home in Oakland this morning, where she fed me a tasty potato salad with mint and peas - very refreshing on a sweaty day. She then gave me the recipe, which had been given to her by our mutual friend Meagan in Brooklyn, who years ago gave me a delicious fajita marinade I will post sometime this summer. We grilled some up a few weeks back while all the grandparents were in town with great success. Today, since we happened to have new potatoes (both from our garden and the CSA box), peas and mint in the garden I had the salad again for dinner. We also have favas, so many favas, so I added some of those as well. I figure anything you can do with peas you can do with favas too. 

The potato salad was great, alongside some grilled swordfish with watermelon for dessert. I know...swordfish! Its full of mercury!  And thus is something I shouldn't feed the kids. But they love it, and so do I, so we eat it a few times a year. I've tried calling other meaty fleshed fish swordfish, but my kids always know better. They do eat most fish, though, which is just great. I wouldn't voluntarily eat fish until I went away to college, so their love of it just blows me away. But then I didn't have a problem eating cooked green vegetables like they do, so I guess thats the trade off.

After hearing last week's NPR story on high levels of lead found in kids' juices, I feel a little of the hook for choosing poisonous dinner foods for my children. It seems I just can't escape toxins in foods, and the best way to avoid sick kids is to eat a very varied diet. Lots of different things, with the intent of avoiding a buildup of whatever nasty stuff is found in any one particular food item. So there, swordfish naysayers.

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Potato Salad with Mint, Peas and Favas (adapted from Epicurious.com):

2 lb small new potatoes (red, white, fingerlings, whatever)

2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar

1 Tablespoon minced shallot

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 cup podded (that means removed from the pod) peas (you can sub in frozen if you like)

1 cup podded fava beans 

2 Tablespoons chopped fresh mint

For starters, put  some generously salted water on the stove. While it is coming to a boil, scrub the potatoes, then cut them into one inch chunks (roughly).  When the water boils, toss in the potatoes and let them boil gently for ten minutes or so, testing them occasionally by poking one with a sharp knife. When the knife easily pierces the potato, they are done. Drain them into a colander in the sink and let them cool. Then, put about two inches of water back into your pot and heat it to a boil again. When it is boiling, throw in the peas and favas and let them boil vigorously for four minutes. Drain them into another colander in the sink. If you are using just frozen peas you can omit this step and add them to the potatoes, thawed. 

While the peas and potatoes cool, mix together the shallots, vinegar, oil, salt and pepper.  When the favas are cool, you'll need to remove their skin. Many of them will have already split their skin, so you can just squeeze them out. If not, then pinch a little hole in the skin and squeeze the beans out that way.

Mix together everything except the mint and let it stand or put it in the fridge. Right before serving (you can serve it cold or room temperature) mix in the mint.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (not the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugala salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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Pesto Magic or Grilled Fish with Arugula Salad

 Today my three year old son and I visited Sunset Super - arguably our city's best known asian market. We went in search of lemongrass, which Rainbow did not have last week, and curry leaves, which no place I've ever shopped routinely has had any week.  I didn't find the leaves at Sunset Super, either, which is about what I expected because they are really more an indian item.  I'm not sure where the best indian market is in San Francisco - maybe the Mission?

Even before we arrived, he was asking for fish. I'm not even sure how he knew there would be tons of fish there, both living and dead. The asian market we usually visit is up a few blocks, closer to 19th, and not quite as humungous, but maybe that is what his memory is based on.  Anyway, for whatever reason, he wanted fish.  So that is what we had for dinner, instead of pesto pasta.

He also demanded juice, while we were shopping, and the juice aisle is where we found the most perfect gift for his sister - a Hello Kitty Ramune Soda.  Really, I have never seen her more excited than she was about this soda.  Not at the Disneyland dinner with Princesses we had on her fourth birthday, not over the Hello Kitty underwear Santa delivered at her request, not even for her doll Charlie, whose arrival she awaited with baited breath. This soda is The One.

I'm willing to bet that like me, you are also wondering what a Ramune Soda is.  So naturally, I asked Wikipedia.  It tells me that Ramune is a Japanese carbonated drink in a special bottle that is sealed with a marble and associated with summertime festivals.  So I guess that the big deal about the soda is its funky delivery method, and at least in the case of the Hello Kitty flavor, not the taste. Though my daughter was quick to confirm that yes, for sure, this odd bubblegummy-vanilla sparkler is indeed just what Hello Kitty tastes like. I suppose thats a good thing.

The wisdom in marketing a glass bottle topped with a marble to young girls escapes me, but my husband assures me that it is actually twenty-one year old Japanese girls drinking the soda, not preschoolers.  It comes complete with English instructions for opening the bottle, and a whole list of precautions, also in English, no doubt to prevent litigious Americans from suing Company Ramune, or whoever sells these things, should their young girl choke on an errant marble that breaks free from its mooring.

Getting back to the fish - I didn't want to take home anything still living or whole, much to my son's chagrin, so we settled on a piece of sea bass. In addition to a seafood department the size of our home, Sunset Super features an impressive butcher shop.  Impressive not only in size, but also in scope.  They have everything you can imagine there - chickens with heads, chickens with feet, chickens with no heads, beef kidneys and tongues and stomachs and intestines, pork ribs and backs and shoulders and feet.  More cuts of meat and offal than I have ever laid eyes on in one place in my life. The one really surprising thing I saw was a black whole chicken - which someone other than me also found intriguing enough to photograph and post on the web. How lucky am I?

My husband cooked the fish, following my instructions as I ran out the door. Then, he served it to the kids with buttered rice and a dab of pesto on the side. I usually reserve pesto for putting on pasta, but this was genius.  They sniffed at the fish, pushed it around, declared that it wasn't swordfish, and that therefore they wouldn't eat it.  

"Just try it with a little pesto...dip it in," their Dad told them, smacking his lips in demonstration.  

And like magic, the fish was gone. They even mixed pesto into the rice and ate that too.

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Grilled Fish:

2 steaks (not the fillet with skin) of any white fish (about 1 pound)

1 lemon, sliced in half

olive oil

salt & pepper

Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish. Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Flip the fish over and do the same to the other side. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the grill and whatever else you have to make for dinner (I like rice and arugula salad with this). Cooking the fish should be the last step, aside from dressing the salad.

Heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  

Lay your fish on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  After flipping, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away.

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Arugula Salad:

1 bunch arugula

1/4 lemon

2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (or so)

3 Tablespoons pine nuts

a bit of parmesan cheese, shaved

salt and pepper

Wash the arugula and cut off all the long stems with no leaves.  Spin it dry and put it in a salad bowl.  In a small skillet, toast the pine nuts on medium heat.  They will burn very quickly, so you should devote all your attention to the skillet while they toast.  When they are brown and smell good, remove them from the heat and into a bowl. Right before you serve the salad, squeeze the lemon and toss it with the greens.  pour the olive oil into the bowl, salt and pepper and toss. Sprinkle the pine nuts and cheese over the top of the salad.

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Tuna Melts with Cesar Salad

 

More fish is more fun - at least today at our house when I paired canned tuna sandwiches with a mock Cesar salad, which is basically romaine lettuce dressed with anchovies, lemon juice and olive oil instead of cream.  It takes about five minutes to make. 

Last night's dinner was another take on Nigel Slater's Pasta with Sprouting recipe, from back on March 16, this time with baby broccoli (I guess that would be the little side shoots after the main head is harvested) and taleggio cheese, and the same orecchiette.  I've grown really fond of them - they're a bulk pasta item at Rainbow Grocery, and really good. Jason made that dinner, while I recovered from a massage and heavy shopping.  Pasta with sprouting (or orecchiette and something leafy) is one of my current favorite recipes - especially good for using up at least one of our weekly bags of greens and whatever random cheese chunk is moldering in the fridge.

Tonight I really wanted to use the prize bread I brought back from Bouchon Bakery in Yountville,  and couldn't eat another cheese and avocado item after breakfast burritos and PB&J tortilla wraps for lunch.  Is it possible to have too much tortilla?  So we had tuna melts.  Really easy, really good, really popular.  I highly recommend them.  The kids ate up even after complaining about the crust not being cut off.

The salad was a nice surprise. I love Cesar salad, but I never make my own dressing.  It just seems too much trouble.  So when I saw this recipe a few weeks back I was really excited, but figured it wouldn't taste very good - boy was I wrong.  There is something truly magical about lemon, when paired with the right things, and this salad is a good example.

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Tuna Melts:

four slices rustic french bread

two 5 oz cans tuna (chunk light is my favorite - both for flavor and its lack of heavy metals)

four Tablespoons mayonnaise

one teaspoon dijon mustard

one Tablespoon capers, chopped

four slices monterey jack cheese

Open the tuna cans and drain most of the liquid (water, oil, whatever) off of them.  Dump the tuna in a small mixing bowl and combine it with the mayonnaise, mustard and capers.  Stir it up.  Divide the tuna up between the bread (you may have a bit more tuna than needed), then smear it evenly over each piece. Drop a slice of cheese on top, and put it in the toaster oven until the cheese is done - it should be bubbling and getting a touch brown.

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Mock Cesar Salad (adapted from Canal House Cooking volume 3):

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

2 anchovy filets, finely chopped

salt and pepper

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

juice of one lemon

5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

2 medium or 3 small head of romaine lettuce, washed and chopped

In a jar with a lid, add the chopped garlic and anchovy filets, mustard, half the cheese and juice of one lemon.  Put the lid on and shake it up.  Just before serving, toss the lettuce with some of the dressing - this recipe makes more than you need.  Add the remainder of the grated cheese on top.

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Fish & Chips? You Decide.

 

Those are hot pink potatoes, not miniature salamis.  

Way back in the dot-com days I spent most of my evenings at restaurants in San Francisco.  One of my favorite memories is the fish and chips at an Irish Pubs in North Beach, though, sadly, I can't seem to remember which one.  O'reilly's maybe?  There was a big dog - a huge Irish Wolfhound, but I don't think it was Mad Dog in the Fog.  And the fish and chips - out of this world!  The ones I remember best were a combination of different types of fish - lightly battered nuggets of salmon, cod and something else.  But later, when I returned, they had changed.  Still magnificent, but more run of the mill - just one fish, slightly more batter.

So Sunset Magazine's "Healthy Fast Food" offering of grilled fish and "chips" caught my eye.  Especially since one of the best well loved foods in my house these days is the potato, oven roasted, which is pretty similar to a grilled potato. For the kids, I offered two tartar sauces, one from the recipe, and one from the fridge.  I'm not sure which they preferred.  With a salad from the garden this one is easy, healthy and a sure bet as far as taste.  How can you go wrong with grilled fish and tartar sauce?

Though I have to admit that grilling fish on a rainy evening is dedication. But with a raincoat and towel to wipe rain off the plate, its really not that bad.  Get's you out of the house.  Had it been a nice sunny evening I would have tried grilling the potatoes, but I wasn't about to wait around and test the doneness of more than one item in the rain, especially an unfamiliar one.  So those went in the oven.  But those potatoes, well, they were weird. 

We get all sorts of different colors in our CSA box - blue ones, pink "huckleberry" ones, yukon golds, yellow finns, and we've grown several kinds in our back yard - rose finn apple is my favorite (I'm willing to bet they were called "rose fir apple" when I ordered them for planting last year). This bag, however, I found at Mollie Stone's, along with yesterday's watercress, because Rainbow really didn't have any fingerling potatoes (long and skinny instead of round). I guess they must be out of season. In the bag they looked normal, but when washed and sliced in half, they were hot pink.  Really bright, almost purple. My kids couldn't believe it - and didn't want to eat them. I tried comparing them to the hot pink marshmallow bunnies they love so much, but no dice.  

Speaking of potatoes, I used to think it was kind of fun when rogue potato plants would pop up in my garden, due to a little tiny potato overlooked from the previous season's harvest.  Until  I read the section on blight in Mark Diacono's Veg Patch - one of a series of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (of River Cottage fame) introduced food books.  Potato plants that are not from reputable seed potatoes or were planted in soil that grew potatoes within the past two years are much more likely to suffer from blight, which rots the potatoes before harvest and is blamed for the death of 20-25% of Irelands population between 1845 and 1852.  So now, I dig out those cute little baby potato plants whenever I find them.  And next year I will do a better job of rotating my crops.

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Grilled Fish and Chips (adapted from Sunset Magazine, April 2010):

2 striped bass filets (about 1 pounds)

1 1/2 pounds fingerling potatoes

1 Tablespoons capers

1 lemon, juiced

1 teaspoon lemon zest

1/3 cup mayonnaise

olive oil

salt & pepper

Preheat the oven to 450°. Lay out your fish in a glass dish, then cut the lemon in half and squeeze half of it over the fish.  Sprinkle a Tablespoon or so of olive oil over the fish, then salt and pepper it - about 1/8 teaspoon of each. Let the fish marinate while you prepare the potatoes and grill. Wash and slice the potatoes long ways, then toss them in a big bowl with 2 Tablespoons olive oil and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Transfer them to a cookie sheet, then put them in the oven for 30-45 minutes.

To make the tartar sauce, chop the capers and add them to the mayonnaise, squeeze the other half lemon and add it and the zest to the sauce.  Mix until creamy.

About 20 minutes into the potato cooking time, heat up the grill to whatever temperature you use for fish - our grill is particularly wimpy, so I blast it up to high.  When the potatoes are done - soft inside and crispy outside - turn off the oven and let them sit inside. 

Lay your fish, skin side up, on the grill.  Close the lid and leave it for five minutes or so, then check to see if there are nice grill marks on the fish. If so, flip it over onto the skin side. If not, let it cook longer and keep checking until the grill marks are there.  Once the fish is skin side down, shut the lid again and come back in five minutes to check for doneness.  I think the easiest way is to take a sharp knife and slice into the thickest part of the fish. When it is opaque inside, it is done. Serve the fish right away with potatoes and a salad on the side.

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Beet Soup

 

Mmmm....Beetalicious!

I started building a bean teepee with the kids today.  We stuck the ends of some eight foot sticks into the ground, then lashed them together at the top with string.  The plan is to plant beans - scarlet runner and trionfo violetto - at the base of each stick so that they climb and make a tent for the kids to play in and beans for us to eat.  This will be our third year teepee, though last year's was a bit of a dud.  

Of course we didn't finish today, just like years past.  But this year I've solved my problem of bean seeds rotten from too long in their pre-planting soak or dry and dead from too long out of it.  After soaking them in water for a few hours, we put our seeds in a little plastic cup and covered them with a wet paper towel - pre-sprouting.  Now we can take our seeds in and out of the house without planting as often as we want, as long as the paper towel stays damp.  And when we finally get around to planting them in the ground, hopefully they'll be ready to go.  

Dinner tonight was a really simple soup from - you guessed it - Canal House Cooking.  This is a good one to make a few days ahead, because it reheats well. We only had a pound of beets, so I had to sub in an extra potato (neither of which were russet).  It was fine, but I think more beets would be better.  And I happen to know that waxy potatoes can make things gummy, so stick with a russet if you have one around. Red beets would probably be better too. Our soup was just a bit...pale.  Salad was on the side, essentially the same Niçoise-esque item from last week.  My kids turned their noses up at the soup, but they did eat the tuna, deviled egg and leftover pizza on their plates.  

In other news, I found a wonderful book today while stopping by Crissy Field to check out the early evening light.  Its called Back to Basics: Traditional Kitchen Wisdom and is a collection of old school how-tos (garden building, food storing, canning, winemaking, beekeeping) edited by Andrea Chesman, who I don't think I've encountered before.  She writes books, and a blog, all about seasonal cooking and making things easy for Mom - right up my alley!  Most of her books are about vegetables and grains (read vegetarian) and she has even got one containing 255 recipes for squash.  I'm so excited!  

However, my favorite part of the book so far - without having read it - are the beautiful watercolor illustrations.  I guess they are paintings by Bernard Chau, who is credited as "illustrator" on the copyright page.  I just can't find anything in the book that attributes the watercolors to anyone.  Is this what happens when you do work for Reader's Digest?  On his webpage, I see that Mr. Chau has more images of "crime" in his portfolio than "food". Huh.  Well, I guess thats work for hire - the art editor probably just set him up a still life and said "paint this".  I suppose I shouldn't be too broken up over it, I can't expect all artists to be Patricia Curtan, can I?

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Beet Soup (adapted from Canal House Cooking volume 3):

4 beets (2 pounds)

4 Tablespoons butter

1 large yellow onion, chopped

1 large russet potato, peeled and chopped

rind from 1/4 preserved lemon (scrape out the fruity part inside the rind)

4 cups chicken stock

salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 375°. Wrap each beet in aluminum foil and bake until tender (1-2 hours).  Unwrap the beets, and when they are cool enough to handle, peel off their skins.  Coarsely chop the beets and set aside.

While the beets are baking, melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat.  Add the onions and cook until they are translucent and soft but not browned, about 10 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper. Add the potatoes, beets, preserved lemon and three cups of the stock.  Cover and simmer until the vegetables are soft, about an hour.  For a really smooth soup, let it cool and puree it in small batches in the blender.  (Really, you must let it cool.  Otherwise it will blow the lid of your blender and hot soup will blast into your face and all over your kitchen.  Its happened to me, its happened to the Canal House authors).  If you, like me, are a more impatient type who cannot be trusted to wait for the soup to cool, then just stick a hand blender in it for a while and call it good. If the soup is too thick, add the remaining stock in small amounts until you're happy with it.  Serve hot or cold.

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Voila! Salad Nicoise (or a salad with something for everyone - serves 4-6):

4 oz spring mix salad

1 7oz cans of tuna (chunk light if you like less mercury)

assorted olives 

4 to six eggs

cherry tomatos (if they're in season)

1 avocado

2 Tablespoons olive oil

1 Tablespoons champagne vinegar

1/2 teaspoon dijon mustard

salt & pepper

For starters, hard-boil the eggs.  If you don't already have a favorite way, try this one:

Put the eggs in a pot, cover them with water.  Bring the water to a medium boil (thats not wimpy, but not hard enough to crack the eggs).  Let them boil for a full minute.  Turn off the heat, and let the eggs sit in the water until it is cool.  I've been told that adding vinegar to egg water makes them easier to peel, but I haven't tested this.  I have found that fresher eggs are harder to peel, so I like to stash some away in the back of the fridge to age for easier peeling.  I think too, that aging an egg for a day or two after boiling it makes the peeling easier.

When the eggs are cool, peel them, slice in half and put on each plate.  If you have kids who like deviled eggs but not plain old eggs, scoop the yolks out of the kids' eggs and, in a bowl, mix them with a bit of mayonnaise - usually one teaspoon per yolk.  Peel and slice the avocados, add some to each plate.  Add some olives, then some tuna.  Be sure to leave room on the plates for the lettuce, in the middle of all the other items. Slice the cherry tomatoes and plate them too.

Wash and dry the salad, then let it rest in the fridge while you mix up the dressing.  In a small jar, add the oil and vinegar, then a big pinch of salt and some pepper.  Put on the lid, shake it up.  Pour over the salad and toss it.  If it seems too dry, sprinkle on some more olive oil.  Its handy to keep some in a cruet just for situations like this.  Grind some more pepper over it, add it to the plates, and serve.  Be sure to put salt on the table for this one - I like to sprinkle it on the egg and avocado.

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