Just sayin'

Grilled salmon; romaine salad with strawberries, lavender, rosemary, and balsamic vinaigrette; fresh bread with olive oil, sea salt, and cracked pepper.

Brown Study

For me, morels are from another world. Someone else knows them. Not me. Someone else from a morel family knows the secret: these seasonal markers, when the buds on this tree are just so, when these flowers bloom. Someone else takes a path, finds landmarks, turns here at this rock and arrives at this stump. In a town I don’t know, someone recognizes a man but will not greet him because, thirty years ago, his father came back alone to a place her father showed him.

I hope no one ever figures out how to cultivate them, either, because their mystery is part of their appeal. I hope they always stay scarce, ephemeral, and expensive. This forces a person to approach them with some gravity, mindfulness, and respect. For middle-class city dwellers, there are so few truly seasonal foods. Almost everything is attainable with a splurge or a search. It’s a comfort—to me, at least—to know that some things aren’t for sale because they truly can’t be bought at any price. Fresh morels, in any season but spring, are a thing like that.

Fresh morel pilaf, pan-grilled trout, and sorrel sauce

The pilaf
¼ lb fresh morels, rinsed well (they’re gritty!) and chopped roughly
1 bunch ramps or green onions, sliced (white part only)
2-3 T butter or oil
1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water or stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the stock in a small saucepan and keep it ready. Heat the butter or oil in a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Sauté the ramps and morels until the mushrooms release, then resorb, their juices. Toss the rice into the pan and sauté a few minutes more until the rice starts to turn golden brown. Add the hot stock and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to simmering, cover the pan, and cook until the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Season to taste.

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The sauce
Make the sauce while you’re making the pilaf. Be sure it’s ready before you cook the fish. This one is modified from a recipe in Joy of Cooking.

1 carrot, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
6 springs flat-leaf parsley
½ c water
½ c dry white wine
4 T butter, cut in little pieces
1 bunch sorrel, washed and torn or cut into 1” pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, water, and wine in a small saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and cook for 20 minutes. Strain the liquid and put back in the pot. There should be a half cup.
Heat the stock and whisk in the butter. Stir in the sorrel and let it wilt. Season to taste. Set the sauce aside while you make the fish.

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Pan-grilled trout

A trout
A pan

Heat up the pan for a few minutes. The trick is for it to be very hot. Lay the trout in the pan and wait 5-6 minutes; check inside and see if the inside of the bottom fillet is starting to cook. When it is, then flip the trout over and cook for another 5-6 minutes. The skin will be attractively brown and blistered. How fantastic is that?!

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To serve: I think it is fun to make a little arrangement of the trout on a platter and show it to the diners. So dramatic! Why should the cook be the only one to enjoy the fun?

Next, slit the trout down the back and make a cut through the skin across the tail and across the body just behind the gills. Use a fork, the knife, a spatula, and a few muttered curse words to release the top fillet from the trout’s skeleton. Put this on a plate flesh side up and spoon on some of the sorrel sauce. Put a spoonful of mushroom pilaf on the plate and maybe some green frippery at the top.

Lift the head and tail. The skeleton should come off the second fillet, which you can then plate and sauce. So fancy. If you are not creeped out by the head, then don’t forget to pick out the tiny morsels of trout cheek under the gill plate just south of the eyes.

Bon appetit!

Salmon for Introverts

I’ll have a real picture as soon as I can figure out how this damn camera phone works.

Every time my friends John and Mike get an invitation to the same event as me, Mikey asks, “Is Beth going to be there?” The answer is often “no.” My partner, Beth, likes a quiet, intimate setting with a nice meal and a chance for a long conversation.

John and I belong to a circle of friends that, quite frequently, sings bawdy songs at the top of our voices in a space packed with as many of us as will fit.

So to give our introverted partners a chance to bond, I arranged dinner with Beth, John, and Mike at my house. John and I conducted an entire conversation to the tune of “America, F*** Yeah” (NSFW) while Beth and Mike embarked on an in-depth mutual fascination. In another room.

When it was time to serve, we turned to Beth and Mike. They were so deep in a conversation about yoga and modern art that they did not even hear us sing, “It’s dinnertime, F*** YEAH!”

Eh. How did we manage to attract these gentle people, who assert themselves so differently—and so much more quietly—than we do? I don’t know about John, but I used recipes like this to entice my introverted sweetheart into loving me back.

Salmon, Spinach Pasta, and Salad with Beet and Fennel
This meal would have served six. There were leftovers.

The Salmon
2 lb salmon fillets
5 springs rosemary
1 T olive oil
3 T lemon juice
Salt and pepper

Pick the leaves off the rosemary stalks and chop them. Mix all ingredients but the salmon. Rub the seasoning mix on the cut side of the fish. Refrigerate for 1 or 2 hours.

Broil or grill the fish for 8-10 minutes or until cooked to desired degree of firmness.

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The Pasta

1 lb whole wheat penne
2 T olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic
1 lb spinach leaves, washed and dried
1 splash of white wine
½ c Parmesan cheese
A grating of nutmeg
A grind of black pepper

Boil water and heat a pan. Pour the pasta in the boiling water. About 5 minutes before the pasta is cooked, pour the olive oil into the pan and swirl it around. Sauté the garlic for 30 seconds. Toss in the spinach and sauté for three or four minutes. Pour in a splash of wine, cover, and steam for a minute more. Take the pan off the heat.

The pasta should be about done. Drain it well. Throw it in the same pan with your spinach, the cheese, and the nutmeg and pepper. Toss to coat the pasta and serve immediately.

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The Salad
1 cup cooked diced beets
1 cup sliced fennel (stalks and leaves are great!)
1 head Boston lettuce (I used red from Dehn’s Garden)
Balsamic vinaigrette
Moisten the beets with a teaspoon or two of dressing. Toss the greens, beets, and fennel with a little more of the dressing. That’s it!

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Beach House Seafood

So, let’s say you go on vacation. Let’s say you go to a little island in the Gulf of Mexico where you get accommodations that include a kitchen with three pans, a dull knife, and a cookie sheet. Let’s say that on this island, all the good restaurants are expensive and all the cheap restaurants are crap. And let’s say that you have access to either a fish market or a fishing pole.

Wouldn’t you rather just be your own restaurant?

I would rather, yes, I would. With a few staple items at the overpriced grocery store, I can cook various sea creatures using different techniques to highlight their unique flavors and textures.

The groceries:
Get as many of these as are available, convenient, or attractive to you.

• Butter
• Olive oil
• A lemon
• Parsley
• Other herbs, i.e. bay or thyme
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic
• Shallot
• A big bottle of dry white wine
• Cocktail sauce

The sea creatures:
Ideally, you will buy/catch different ones every day. Get something shelly or bony the first night so you can make a nice stock that will only get more delicious the rest of the week.

• Crustaceans (shrimp, crabs, lobster)
• Mollusks (mussels, scallops, clams)
• Fish

The cooking techniques:
Boil/steam: Throw some parsley stems, dried herbs, and shallot peels in some water, wine, or a combination of the two. Bring it to a rolling boil. Throw in your sea creatures. When the water returns to a rolling boil, shrimp and scallops are cooked. Mussels and clams should be boiled until they open.

I like to make a shrimp cocktail and then throw the shells back in the cooking liquid. Simmer this for a half hour and you have a lovely stock that can be used for more shrimp cocktail. Or use it to finish off sautéed fish. Or use it as the base for a sauce.

Grill/broil: This is easy. You just, um, broil things. Scallops need just a few minutes. Shrimps too. Fish can go as long as 7-10 minutes per inch of thickness depending on how done you like it.

Sautée: Heat butter, oil, or both in a pan. Toss in garlic and shallots and cook until translucent. Put in fish skin side up, or throw in crustaceans/shelled mollusks. Cook only a couple of minutes for crustaceans/mollusks. Cook 3-5 minutes per inch of fish, flip over, season the top, pour in a splash of wine or stock from your fabulous shrimp cocktail, cover, and cook the remaining 3-5 minutes per inch of fish.

Pasta: If you boil up a nice linguine or capellini while you’re cooking your sea creatures, everything can be done at once. You can toss the sea creatures with the pasta, as I did with these sautéed scallops. You can put the sea creatures on a serving plate; splash your pan with more stock; then reduce it for a nice little sauce to go on your pasta. Or you can just butter the noodles. Or maybe serve them with garlic and olive oil.

The possibilities are not endless, but they will see you nicely through a week at the beach.

Mangiamo!

Fish Tacos with All the Fixings

This post originally published 8.23.2009. Photos added 9.20.2009.

[REDACTED: Friend, I’m sorry. I just came home from a weekend out of town, and so I did not cook and photograph this dish for you like usual. But I plan to cook it next Friday—and then you could cook it, too, and it would be like we were having dinner together. Cheers!]

Two or three summers ago, I made it my mission to create the perfect fish taco. After extensive research at restaurants, fish shacks, and taco stands around the Twin Cities, I settled on a few (highly opinionated) fish taco axioms:

• Grilled fish, not breaded and fried. Breading hides the fish; it’s for poseurs. Also, the entire arrangement will be wrapped in a tortilla, which is technically a kind of bread.


• Corn tortillas only. No wheat. Wheat tortillas are the wrong size, texture, and flavor. Plus they are morally bankrupt! Tortillas are made of corn! ¿Entiende?


• There should be vegetables, but you should never put iceberg lettuce in a fish taco. In fact, you should never put iceberg lettuce anywhere. Certainly not in your mouth.


• There should be some sauce. A finely chopped pico de gallo is good. There’s a special fish taco sauce, too. At the very least, there should be a lime to squeeze on the taco.


• Finally, it would be a really nice touch to serve some black beans and queso fresco to go along with the tacos.

I used these rules to develop my own recipe for fish tacos with all the fixings. This would be a good thing to serve to friends for a last summer hurrah on the patio. Maybe throw in some margaritas or Negra Modelo and a nice fruit sorbet for dessert.

Fish Tacos with All the Fixings

This will serve four people. There is a lot going on in here, and this is the order in which I think you should fix things.

Prep List:

• Pickled onions


• Seasoned fish


• The sauce


• The fixings


• Grill the fish


• Heat the tortillas


• Assemble the tacos

The pickled onions:

This excellent pickle comes from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking.

1 lb red onions, trimmed, peeled, sliced thin
½ c fresh lime juice
1 ½ t sea salt

Put everything in a glass bowl, mix, and allow to macerate for 2 hours. Maybe stir the onions halfway through and press them down into the juice. They will make more liquid as they pickle. They’ll keep, refrigerated, for weeks. (But when you find out how good they are on a sandwich, they will never live as long as a week.)

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The seasoned fish:

2 t thyme
1 t black pepper
¼ t cumin
½ t cayenne pepper (more if you are a chile-head)
½ t salt
1 lb catfish fillets

Mix or grind the seasonings together. Rub them into the fish fillets. Stack the fillets and set aside 1 hour or more.

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The sauce:

Besides the bare minimum of squeezing a lime over the fish, it's fun to dress up your tacos with sauce. You can use a fresh homemade pico de gallo. You can use any kind of good quality bottled salsa. I also serve this one.

8 oz sour cream
Juice of 1 lime
Bufalo chipotle sauce or any hot chile sauce

Mix them all together, adding chile sauce to taste and lime juice until the sauce is like a thin mustard. I use a funnel to pour the sauce into a squeeze bottle.

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The fixings:

• Half a head of red or green cabbage, cut as fine as you can. (I’d use a knife. Food processors tend to mush up the cabbage.)


• One or two jalapeños, cored, seeded, and sliced into thin rings.


• A bunch of cilantro, picked off the stem if you are patient or chopped if you are not. It is acceptable to have some soft stems in your cilantro.


• The pickled onions.


• The sauce(s).


• Tortillas: They must be the small corn kind. You will need four per person, two for each taco.


• Black beans: These go next to the taco, not on it. If you don’t want to make your own, then Bearitos has a nice fat-free refried black bean.


• Queso fresco: Crumble it and put it on the hot beans. Mmmm.

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Grill the fish:
Grill it two or three minutes on a side, then test it with a knife. If it is almost as cooked as you’d like, take it off the heat. The fish will continue to cook a little on the serving plate.

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Heat the tortillas:
You need 16 small corn tortillas to make 8 tacos for 4 people.

I have one of those hateful glass-top electric stoves. Its only saving grace is that I can do this right on the stovetop. You may prefer to heat up a dry skillet.

Put the first tortilla on the hot, dry surface for about three seconds. Flip it over (use your fingers if you are clever or a spatula if you are cautious) and put the second tortilla on top, then wait three seconds. Flip the stack over, then add the third tortilla and wait three seconds. The tortillas should be getting some dark spots on them from this treatment. Even if a bit of charred tortilla gunk accumulates on the hot surface, you’re still good.

Continue flipping the stack and adding a tortilla until all the tortillas are on the stack. Do the final flip, wait the final three seconds, and then transfer to a warm plate and cover with a clean dish towel.

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Assemble the tacos:
For each taco, lay two tortillas on the plate so they overlap. Take a fork to the fish fillets and flake/break off about two ounces of fish per taco; put this on the tortillas. Squeeze on some lime. Dress with fixings as desired, being careful not to overstuff. Top with a wee bit of sauce(s). Put a nice spoonful of black beans on the plate and put some crumbled queso fresco on top of them.

To eat the taco, fold the tortillas over the bottom and then fold the sides over to make a packet. It’s better to make a lot of little tacos than one giant taco.

¡Buen provecho!