Condiglione: Fresh Tuna Salad

I used some leftover pan-broiled albacore to make this dish, which is loosely based on the recipe in La Place and Kleiman's Cucina Fresca.

I broke up the albacore and mixed it with 3 cloves minced garlic, slivered red bell peppers, chopped green onions, halved cherry tomatoes, and chopped fresh basil.  I dressed it with liberal olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper and garnished it with hard-boiled eggs and black olives.  It was a perfect cold supper for a hot day.

Cod a la Portugaise

I wonder where I got this recipe?  I was surprised I hadn't posted it before, as it's so simple and flavorful.

1 onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 sprig fresh thyme, or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 cup chopped tomatoes (canned OK)
1/2 cup white wine

Place the first six ingredients in a large skillet and simmer for five minutes

1 pound cod, cut in serving pieces and seasoned with salt and pepper

Place fish in skillet and bathe in sauce.  Simmer, covered, for five or ten minutes until just done.  Cod cooks very quickly this way.

1 tablespoon butter

Remove cod to serving dish and keep warm.  Boil sauce to reduce by about one third.  Stir in butter and pour sauce over fish.  Serve at once.

Ono with Beurre Noir

We brought Bev a two-pound fillet of ono from Suisan Fish Company in Hilo. It is the most excellent and prized of Hawaiian fishes, and she made a wonderful dish with it. I believe she learned this in France.

Put a stick of butter in a hot skillet and cook until quite brown. Add the fish (cut in smallish serving pieces) and cook, turning once or twice, until done just halfway through. Set fish aside to keep warm. Add a cup or so of white wine to the pan and boil until somewhat reduced. Add capers to taste and season with salt and pepper. Return fish to pan and coat with sauce. Serve at once.

That pale orange side dish in the photo is green papaya salad.

Better Snapper Veracruz

We bought some gorgeous snapper from the Beaufort fish guy who sells up here on Saturdays. He said it was silk snapper. It had a big flavor-enhancing set of ribs in the middle of it, so we got a discount. (We also bought a little half-pound fillet of grouper that Lawson coated in flour and pan-fried for our lunch. I made tartar sauce and bought some nice buns and a tomato. We were very inspired by those flounder sandwiches at Whaley's in Edisto and have been thinking about them ever since, you see.)

I love fish Veracruz-style, but sometimes it seems too -- too cooked, I guess. Too stewed. Not fresh enough. I've always used Aida Gabilondo's recipe or similar variations, which call for pickled jalapenos and browned vegetables and such.

When I found Paul Johnson's recipe yesterday, I was really excited. It's more like a pico de gallo that you dump on the fish and cook all at once. No browning onions or garlic.

Here's my slight variation:

Marinate fish for 30 minutes in salt and juice of 1/2 lime.

Dice and mix:

• small white onion
• 1 T garlic
• 1 pound tomatoes, fresh or canned or both (those Pomi tomatoes always taste less cooked to me. I like them.)
• several fresh chiles, minced. I used two red Anaheims, a dedo di moca and a Tabasco. Any combo would work. If all you have are super-hot chiles, supplement with some bell pepper.
  
• 1/8 cup olive oil
• 2 T capers
• 12 or more green olives
• the other 1/2 lime
• salt to taste

Toast in a dry pan, crush in mortar and add to mixture:

• 10-15 coriander seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon Mexican oregano

Heat oven to 375. Heat pan in oven if it's a stoneware style Dutch oven. Put fish in pan. Dump mixture over fish. cover. Cook for 20-30 minutes, or until slightly steaming and bubbling. Let rest for 5 minutes. Garnish with cilantro. Serve over rice.

It was amazing.

Mediterranean Tomato-Saffron Tilefish

There's a Beaufort-based seafood guy now coming to the All-Local Farmers Market every Saturday, and his fish is amazingly, absurdly fresh. Yesterday we bought grey tilefish, which I've never bought before. It was lovely -- bright spotted skin, big easy-to-find bones, grouper-like color and grain. You could put your nose right down on it and smell nothing except a faint, fresh sweetness.

I poked through some more complicated recipes and came up with this simple Mediterranean preparation, which has some of the flavor of bouillabaisse but is more straightforward. Any blend of garden and canned tomatoes would work; I used a little of both. It's not a super tomato-ey dish.

I'm out of the food-photographing habit, so here's Patty demonstrating how hot it is here lately.


Mediterranean Tomato-Saffron Fish

Preheat oven to 400.

In Dutch oven, saute in olive oil until onions are softened and smaller:
- 3 small Vidalia onions, sliced
- 8-10 saffron threads
- 1 teaspoon fennel seeds

Add and let some of the booziness cook off:
- 3/4 c dry vermouth

Add and cook for just a few minutes:
- 1 ripe tomato, chopped
- 1/2 cup chopped canned tomatoes
- salt
- pepper

Add, cover, put in oven and cook 8-15 minutes, depending on fish size:
- 1 lb. fish

I left the fillet whole, and it took exactly 15 minutes. The bones and skin thickened the broth just a little.

I served it over farro, with which Lawson and I are in love. He says it tastes like he wishes brown rice tasted.

Crusty bread would also be good with this. On the side we ate sliced cucumbers in rice vinegar, and baba ghanoush made with our own eggplant, which are the only plants really doing well this year in our yard. I drank vinho verde. Lawson drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was a good summer dinner.

New Cookbook

One of the best things about Christmas is getting new cookbooks: I received a check from Bob and with it I bought The Book of Latin American Cooking by the famous Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz.

Much of the book is taken up with Mexican cooking, about which I already know a lot--I was looking for Central and South American stuff. The Mexican things in this book, though, tend to be more exotic, very far away from Tucson-Sonoran and Tex-Mex.

Tonight I cooked a halibut steak which Russell and Brittany sent from Alaska for Christmas. I loved the simplicity and flavor of this dish. Here is the recipe.

Pescado con Cilantro

1 pound fresh fish fillets (snapper, flounder, etc)

Salt, pepper

Juice of 1 fresh lemon

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Canned jalapenos, chopped

Sprinkle fish with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

Heat olive oil and saute onions until tender and lightly browned.

Place the fish in a baking dish and cover with the onions. Top with chopped cilantro and jalapenos. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, or until just cooked through.

Grouper Sandwich

Clockwise from upper left: tomatoes from Jason and Laura's garden, homemade tartar sauce (mayonnaise, lime juice, pickle relish, and New Mexican chile powder), a tempura-fried slab of perfect grouper, and a toasted whole wheat bun.

My iPhone is good at just about everything except taking decent food photos.

There's finally a place in town to get decent fish: The Old Timey Meat Market on Rosewood gets fresh fish in every Thursday. So I bought this gloriously fresh one-pound chunk of grouper, and Lawson mixed up some tempura batter and fried it so we could have fish sandwiches.

He became enamored of fried fish on our Alaska trip, where he ordered halibut and chips at least three different times.

As a first-time home experiment, this was pretty successful. He surveyed a bunch of different tempura batter recipes. He combined the common elements, which were wheat flour and water and egg. And then he cut the fish in half and fried it in a bit of peanut oil. It was not the least bit greasy.

Patty wanted some.

Seafood Orgy

Moderation was abandoned. Although I think it's a good idea not to overconsume certain resources, we ate seafood every night on Cape Cod: halibut, scrod, scallops, lobster, haddock!

For Father's Day we had halibut, asparagus, sweet potatoes, and a Razzleberry Pie. Of course, you bought the pie from Marion's Pie Shop, so you know all about it. What a great Father's Day present.

Bouillabaisse

Norm and Jane from Washington came for dinner and to spend the night. Norm is a vintner and brought two delicious bottles of his wine, an unusual Petit Verdot and a Voignier. Here was our Valentine menu.

Bouillabaisse

Homemade Bread

Salad from the Garden

+++

Brownies

Strawberry Ice Cream

Fresh Blackberries

This soup is wonderful for guests because you can make the broth ahead, and then throw in the fish for five minutes right before serving. The flavor of the broth is lovely, starting with fennel and leek instead of the usual carrots, onions, and celery. The recipe is mostly from the 1997 Joy of Cooking.

Bouillabaisse

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

1 leek, cut into 1/2-inch half rounds

1 small fennel bulb, cored and sliced

1 stalk celery, thinly sliced

1 bay leaf

1 star anise

Peel of 1/2 orange

1/4 teaspoon saffron threads

1/2 teaspoon salt

Heat the oil and butter and gently saute the above ingredients for 5 to 10 minutes, until tender but not browned. Then add

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Saute a further 2 minutes, then add

1 tablespoon tomato paste

1/2 cup dry white vermouth

Boil gently for 3 minutes. Stir in

1 one-pound can diced tomatoes

3 cups Fish Broth*

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

3/4 teaspoon salt, depending on the saltiness of your broth

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer gently for 20 minutes. You can stop at this point if you want.

Just before serving time, stir in 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of mixed fish and shellfish, cut in similar sizes so they will cook in the same amount of time--or else put the larger items in first. Cook up to 5 minutes or until just cooked. For this batch I used:

1/2 pound shrimp (I used the shells in the broth)

1/2 pound cod in 1-inch chunks

3/4 pound bay scallops

2 Australian lobster tails, cut in half lengthwise

1 can chopped clams

*I made this particular fish stock by simmering the shrimp shells, the juice from the can of clams, and a couple of tablespoons of fish sauce with water.

PS: We had the leftover soup for lunch today with Grandma and it was still excellent. Be careful not to reheat too much.

Cooking Fish with Eva

Here's another meal we made together last week: red snapper with charmoula, green beans, and gluten-free flatbread.

I liked this flat round of unleavened bread made of brown rice flour, gluten-free baking flour mixture, egg, yogurt, and baking soda. It didn't try to mimick yeast bread, but was flavorful and slightly crunchy. It's from The Wheat-Free Cookbook by Jacqueline Mallorca.

Cooking Habit Live and In Person: Plating

I liked this sequence of photos from when we made dinner together earlier this week, Mom.

First, roasted tomato vinaigrette.

Then polenta -- just coarse cornmeal and water simmered for a few hours and finished with butter and parmesan -- and pan-grilled grouper.

And finally swiss chard, grown and harvested by Dad and sauteed by you with some garlic.

Mahi Mahi Redux

"Redux" is in honor of John Updike. I have to read something of his again. Reading the Rabbit novels twenty years ago, I thought they were so mundane--I have to give them another look.

I bought some gleamingly fresh mahimahi today, and prepared it according to a recipe I found on the internet--I'm always wary, but allrecipes.com has been a good source for me. I baked an acorn squash and boiled two ears of corn, and served the fish on a bed of arugula.

Cod Cakes

Alaskan cod is one of the most reliably fresh and available fishes I can buy in Tucson. I often make it baked Greek-style or with capers, lemon, and parsley. Tonight, however, I simmered it and made it into old-fashioned New England cod cakes.

I flaked the cooked, cooled cod (about 1 pound) and mixed it with 2 medium boiled smashed potatoes, 1/4 cup evaporated milk, an egg, a chopped green onion, a teaspoon curry powder, salt and pepper. I formed the mixture into fat patties, dredged them in flour, and sauteed them for five minutes per side in a little olive oil. (I consulted Mark Bittman's Fish for this recipe.)

Serve with oven fries, tartar sauce, and ketchup. Oh--and don't forget to garnish with arugula.

Okra and Greek-Style Cod

Can you believe that we're now harvesting okra? This is our second batch. I steamed them following your method and they are wonderful.

I also cooked Greek-style cod last night. Of course you can use any flaky white fish in this recipe (I don't think firm types like tuna and swordfish would be quite right).

Green Curry with Flounder

Surprisingly, this was a last-minute collaboration on a night when I didn't think we were going to end up cooking anything.

I softened carrots, a few cloves of garlic, and red bell peppers in peanut oil, then added chopped lemongrass, keffir lime leaves, galangal, and Thai basil, all of which Lawson minced finely. Then I added a tablespoon of premade green curry paste and a can of coconut milk and half a can of water.

I simmered that for about 20 minutes.

Then I briefly boiled some rice noodles I'd been soaking. I seasoned the curry with fish sauce. I added 3/4 pound of flounder to the curry and cooked it for about 5 minutes. At the end I stirred in chopped cilantro and topped it with more Thai basil.

Pantries

It's 100 degrees here at dinnertime, so my thoughts turned again to Middle Eastern food.

I accompanied Grandma to another cooking class by the Turkish women's group on Saturday. They made "Turkish cigarettes," which are filo-type pastries stuffed with cheese or potato fillings and rolled into thin cylinders and then deep fried, and usually served for breakfast. Very tasty. There was also a general potluck involved, ranging from banana bread to green chile burritos, but it was served at 3:00 p.m. and I couldn't get into a full meal thing at that time of day. It was a lovely cross-cultural event, though.

Tonight I made a Greek salad with garbanzo beans, corn bread, and Claudia Roden fish. I was getting the garbanzo beans out of the pantry and musing about how important it is to have a stockpile of ingredients.

Here is a picture of our pantry before remodeling a few years ago, and then after. It takes up the same space! I think my system of organization is brilliant: booze on top shelf; then cans; then jars and bottles; then boxes. In the three drawers below are: things in bags (nuts, prunes, elbow macaroni); pet food and dishes; paper goods such as napkins, and miscellany.

My Idea of Good Evening

We're having a good evening here: the Diamondbacks are winning over the Pirates in the 8th; my students played brilliantly today, at least way more brilliantly than last week; I agreed to perform in a duet for the Ensemble demonstration a month hence, and am deeply into Saint-Saens Pas Redouble; it just rained 1 1/2 inches in a really great storm with lightning all around; and dinner was very tasty.

I used the fish rub from your last post, coriander and garam masala, on a lovely fat fillet of grouper Dad bought at the 17th Street Market. I rubbed on some olive oil first, then roasted it at 450 degrees. It took about 20 minutes. That rub imparts such a perfect flavor, and it seems to seal in the juiciness. We also had green beans with lemon and butter, and a potato salad from Bon Appetit--Yukon Gold potatoes, green chiles, green onions, roasted peppers, toasted cumin seeds, with a dressing of olive oil, wine vinegar, garlic, salt, and pepper.

We are all about potato salad now, and promise a post soon with Grandma's recipe and more.

Coriander-Encrusted Salmon

This recipe from the previously maligned Modern Indian Cooking was for salmon with a sort of cucumber salsa on the side. The salsa was okay -- cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and peppers tossed with lime juice, oil, salt, and a little honey. But the salmon preparation was so excellent and simple that I intend to ditch the salsa and try a variety of salmon accompaniments and versions in the future.

I used two 1/2-lb filets of wild Alaskan sockeye salmon. The recipe is just:

Crush roughly in a mortar and pestle:

3 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 teaspoons garam masala

Salt and pepper the fish and then coat it on one side with the coriander-garam masala mixture. Then spray the encrusted fish lightly with olive oil cooking spray on both sides. This last step wasn't in the original recipe, but I think it was essential. The recipe called for a pan-searing, but I cooked it on a hot grill and it worked great. The spray kept it from sticking to the grate.

On grill, cook coriander side down until the seeds are toasty and not yet burnt. Flip the fish and cook until done.

Anything with cilantro in it will work nicely with the coriander seeds.

Salmon, Red Potatoes, Chard--and Aioli

I took the shortcut tonight and made an aioli-type sauce based on mayonnaise, mixed with yogurt to make it lighter--after all, farmed salmon is fatty enough already, no point in adding an extra cup or two of olive oil. The menu tonight was roasted salmon with basil aioli, roasted red potatoes, swiss chard with onions and garlic, and fresh raspberries.

Over the last couple of days we've had red chile enchiladas with chorizo, guacamole salad; tofu with red curry sauce on a bed of cabbage; and many beautiful cherry tomatoes from the garden.

Basil Aioli Sauce for Salmon

Chop finely, or use food processor:

2 tablespoons fresh basil

2 cloves garlic

2 anchovy fillets

Juice and rind of 1/2 lemon

Several dashes hot pepper sauce

Stir into:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup plain yogurt

Salt and pepper to taste

(Con)Fusion Cuisine

I failed to come up with a unified menu last night. Various things in the refrigerator cried out to be used NOW. I ended up with Japanese, Mexican, Italian, and Iowa foods: Teriyaki Salmon; pasta with pesto; a pico de gallo with garden cherry tomatoes, olives, jalapeno, cilantro, yellow bell pepper and possibly something else; and corn on the cob.

Teriyaki marinade transforms the most mundane farmed salmon, and it's so easy!

Teriyaki Salmon

Salmon fillets

Soy sauce

White vermouth
Chopped ginger
Garlic
Brown sugar or honey

Mix ingredients and marinate salmon for about a half hour. Drain and reserve marinade. Boil it or nuke the liquid for a couple of minutes to make it safe from the raw fish, strain, and serve as a sauce.

Broil, grill, or roast the salmon until just cooked through. Serve with teriyaki sauce and rice.