Posts Tagged ‘fish’

28 Dec

About the Fish on Your Plate

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, farmers market, fish and seafood, Ketogenic diet, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

One of my firmest health convictions, besides the one about leafy greens, is that fish is good. Here in the desert I won’t be catching my own in any great quantity, so the question is what fish, exactly, is good. My own choice is based on taste and emotion more than reason. I love salmon and admire the way the Alaskan fisheries are managed, so I eat Alaskan salmon. But if you want to be more rational about your fish, please read the great compilation of evidence from Bill Lagakos at the wonderful Calories Proper blog:

http://caloriesproper.com/fish-blog-take-i/

Then make your choice with real information. And my nag for the day is: DON’T OVERCOOK IT. If your salmon is chewy or has a nasty grey layer just under the seared surface, it’s overdone. Sockeye, my own favorite, cooks in nothing flat, usually two minutes each side over a very hot grill or firepit. If the fillet is especially thick, maybe give it an extra minute on the skin side, but no more. If you buy it with the skin on, your dogs get a healthy treat too. Salmon loves assertive seasonings, and I like to brine it in strong salt water for half an hour before cooking. Then serve some leafy greens alongside and you can feel yourself getting healthier. And happier.

Below are some serving ideas that I borrowed from here and there because the photography is better than mine. My own quickie favorite is to take it off the grill, top with a generous pat of seasoned green garlic butter that I keep in the freezer, set it under the broiler just until the butter starts to melt if you didn’t thaw the butter beforehand, and eat with intense gratitude.

I think the beets and citrus shown here should be roasted a good bit longer than the fish, so that you can actually eat them, but it’s a good basic reminder that blood orange is brilliant with salmon.

Grill some nice fat green or Egyptian onions to serve alongside and your health benefits increase.

In a hurry? Take it off the grill and plop it on some dressed leaves and add a slice of lemon. Dinner in 15 minutes, or ten if you pan-roast and don’t take time to heat the grill.

Personally I would use bronze fennel fronds on top, for appearance and for taste and because it grows well in my yard, but if you’re a dill person, go for it. A generous shower of fresh thyme leaves is also a good finish for salmon, and this is one of the places that I love to use orange balsam thyme, which is otherwise difficult to use.

If you’re one of my local readers, the Fishhuggers come to our farmers markets in the summer and sell the salmon that Kenny catches in Alaska, as well as their own superb grass-fat beef and other healthy goodies.

15 Jan

Kitchen staples: the pantry (and freezer) of the low-carb home

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, farmers market, home food production, kitchen staples, mushrooms, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , .

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There are ingredients and seasonings that I have to have on hand at all times or I get nervous. With them, I’m ready to make a meal out of whatever foodstuff comes to hand. All such lists are intensely personal and idiosyncratic and I make no claims for universality, just usefulness. Due to my very low-carb eating, staples like pasta and flour aren’t on the list for me.

1. Really good fresh olive oil. Olive oil oxidizes fairly rapidly and, in my opinion, should not ever be used if more than a year old. Rather than take chances on freshness, I belong to the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil club; every three months they ship you three (or more if you choose) bottles of olive oil guaranteed to have been harvested and produced within the last 3 months; sourcing from the Southern Hemisphere as well as more traditional source areas makes this possible. I have belonged for years and hope they go on as long as I live and cook. A wide range of olive varieties and oil styles is represented. Pour it over cooked vegetables, dress salads, drizzle it on meat dishes, use as a base for a sauté of veggies. The Cretans and Ikarians thrive on it and so can we. I also keep oil-cured olives around at all times for their meaty umami belt in mixed greens.
2. Red Boat fish sauce. This is not only the best fish sauce available for Asian cooking, but pinch-hits very nicely for Italian colatura (garum.) A dash in vinaigrette gives a wonderful savor.
3. Dried mushrooms. I keep dried shitake, maitake, and porcini on hand at all times, and others at times as the mood takes me. With them, I am always prepared to add texture and flavor to cooked veggies, give a fitting garnish to a good piece of meat by soaking and sautéing them, or make a really good soup on short notice. I am ketogenic and don’t use flour, bread crumbs, or any other starch product, so I intend to try grinding them to powder and using them to “bread” and fry chicken, but that’s still on my to-do list.
4. Eggs. The best eggs I can get. Most of the time I have eggs from my own chickens, and in midwinter when my hens take a rest, I buy from a local co-op. Beyond the obvious omelet, frittata, and scramble, a fried egg is a wonderful way to make vegetables into a complete meal, and egg yolks are a wonderful velvety thickener for sauces.
5. Grass-fed butter. Grass-fed because it’s better for the cows and the planet as well as for me. Butter because there is nothing like it for improving flavor.
6. Coconut milk, which in my book is a joint pantry item with Hand brand Thai curry pastes. On days when I am short of time, energy, and verve, I can pick up some fresh fish or thaw a couple of pastured chicken thighs, soak and slice a few shiitakes, and pull together a healthy meal in under twenty minutes.
7. Freezer item: Wild-caught Alaskan salmon. I pay whatever I have to pay to get good fish, and I always buy Alaskan because their fisheries are well managed. The fillets are thin and thaw rapidly when I haven’t thought ahead about dinner. After a workday that ran later and harder than I expected, I’ve been known to take a frozen fillet still in its vacuum seal into the hot tub with me. Fifteen minutes later, I feel rejuvenated and the salmon is ready to cook.
8. Freezer item: homemade broth from grassfed beef and pastured chickens. I have written at length elsewhere about homemade broth. I really feel that nothing else will do as much to instill food thriftiness and improve your soups and sauces.
9. Nuts of various kinds. Almonds and Macadamias always, others here and there. Because they taste good and you can run for hours on a handful of them if you need to and they add flavor and crunch and specialness to all kinds of dishes.

10. Freezer item: blanched and chopped greens. Mine are a mixture of whatever was fresh and vibrant in the garden and field on any given day. If I had no garden and didn’t forage, I would use mixtures of spinach, chard, and Tuscan kale, and blanch and chop them and vacuum-seal before freezing. I find that I eat a lot more greens if I have them available in a handy form, and can make horta or whatever in a matter of  ten minutes rather than having a more prolonged process to go through.

11. Good red wine. Because life contains joy and is worth celebrating.

12. Very dark chocolate. Because see #11.
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11 Aug

A Mushroomy Meal

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, fish and seafood, Ketogenic diet. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

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Sometimes it just comes together. The Universe hands you one. I walked into my local wonderful co-op this morning to get a lemon and they had a little basket of exquisite local porcinis, which a gatherer further north found after our recent major rainstorm. They were actually affordable (more or less.) I nabbed the whole pound and went home thinking that it was a shame to cook them on a blistering August day, but I planned to eat them anyway. Then it turned dark and cloudy and cool this evening. Perfect! I pulled some sablefish out of the freezer.
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I sliced the porcinis in half lengthwise, then cut a “steak” out of each half that was nearly half an inch thick. I salted the mushroom steaks, and also the ends of caps and stems left over. I sprinkled the thawed fish liberally with salt and added some blackening seasonings to help it stand up to the assertive mushrooms. I chopped a clove of garlic and got some chicken glacé out of the freezer. You can buy glacé de poulet for about $6 for a quarter cup from http://www.olivenation.com, or you can make and freeze your own. Chicken glacé with fish? Hell yes. I learned this when tasting shrimp dishes in Mexico, which often have some chicken bullion concentrate added. It keeps the plate as a whole from getting too fishy, and makes a bridge between fish or seafood and some side dishes that wouldn’t usually go with it.
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Everything happens very fast from here on. Preheat the oven to 275 and put your fish in it. The fish can spend anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes in the oven without harm while you sear the mushroom steaks as long as your oven is accurately regulated at 275. Heat your biggest skillet over high heat with the hood fan sucking air furiously. Put a hefty glug of good olive oil in the hot skillet and lay the porcini steaks in one layer. When well seared on one side, turn them and sear the other side. Remove to warmed plates putting the mushroom steaks on one side of each plate, add some more olive oil, and sear the remaining bits of porcini. When seared, add the chopped garlic and toss about furiously for maybe 30 seconds, then add the chicken glacé and a glug of good white wine, maybe a shot glass full. Boil hard until it thickens, salt to taste, and remove to a bowl. Wipe out the skillet very quickly, reheat over high heat, put in more olive oil, and sear the fish pieces quickly on each side. They should have been in the low oven about 15 minutes, and should be done when seared, but check and cook another minute if needed. Plate them across from the mushroom steaks and pour the mushroom sauce down the middle.

Eat with gratitude and a light but flavorful red wine. Give thanks for the rain and the edibles that appear behind it.
If you can’t get porcinis or they are the usual obscene price, you can use fresh shitake caps cut in half (all stem removed. Really.) Or use portobellos but use a spoon to scrape out the gills, which turn a nasty black-muck color in the pan.
So far my efforts to grow edible mushrooms outdoors haven’t come to much, but I’ll keep trying, and I’ll reward our local foragers whenever I can afford to.
Incidentally, if two people eating a pound of porcinis sounds gluttonous to you, well, uh, no kidding. All I can say in our defense is that we eat basically one meal a day, plus snacks. And I think that wretched excess is a wonderful thing when practiced in moderation😉

12 Jul

A Quick Summer Lunch, and more on fried grape leaves

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, Ketogenic diet, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

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Since writing about frying grape leaves crisp in the Crazy Salad post, I have become more and more interested in the range of flavors and textures produced by frying and toasting leaves. Grape leaves remain my favorites, because of the exquisite lemony-sorrel burst that follows the delicate crunch.
Before you try cooking your leaves, please read the part of the Crazy Salad post that deals with selection of leaves. The short version is : chew up a piece of leaf from the exact vine that you are thinking of cooking. If it chews easily, proceed. If you are left chewing what feels like a bit of wet paper between your teeth, rethink or find another vine. That fibrous quality will not go away when cooked in any fashion. I have liked the leaves of my wine grape vines best.
This is an easy and quick impromptu lunch or light dinner, vaguely Greek in its inspiration. Here I used a garnish of fried grape leaves and capers to add tang and herbaceous pizazz to a nice piece of black cod fillet. For each person eating, you need a 4-5 oz piece of Alaskan black cod fillet or salmon fillet, a handful of capers in salt, 5-6 fair-sized grape leaves, a clove of garlic, a small handful of lightly toasted pine nuts, a quarter of a lemon, salt, and 1-2 glugs of good olive oil.
Prep: Rinse the capers of loose salt, soak them in cold water for about 20 minutes, drain, and squeeze them dry one handful at a time. Rinse the grape leaves, shake them dry, snip the stem away, and stack them up for quick slicing. Slice them crosswise into strips about 1/4 inch wide. Salt the fish pieces, not too heavily because the capers will still be quite salty. Chop the garlic.
Cook: Heat a good nonstick skillet that can easily accommodate the fish pieces over medium heat. When it is hot, pour in 2 good glugs of olive oil. I would guess that this is about 2 tablespoons or a little less. Throw in one strip of grape leaf, and if it sizzles and changes color and crisps in several seconds but doesn’t burn, you are good to go. Otherwise, fiddle with the heat and try again. When the heat is right, toss in the grape leaf strips and stir-fry rapidly until they have all changed color and crisped and there are browned but not blackened spots. Scoop them out onto a paper towel to drain. Check crispness. Limp leaves will not give the right effect. Set them aside.
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Wipe out the pan quickly, heat it again, put in the same amount of olive oil again, and add the chopped garlic and the capers. Sauté until the garlic is cooked but not browned at all and the capers have darkened a bit. You aren’t going for crisp this time because it would burn the garlic. When the garlic looks cooked, squeeze in the lemon juice and add the pine nuts. Cook a couple of minutes more and pour out into a bowl.
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Reheat the pan, add a touch more olive oil, and put the fish fillets in skinless side down and cook over medium-high heat until they color an attractive gold in spots. Now turn skin side down and cook to your preferred degree of doneness. Personally, I like salmon medium-rare but black cod cooked until it flakes. Plate the fish, put the caper mixture over the top of each, and finally top with lavish drifts of fried grape leaves.
This is a good healthy dish for ketogenic and low-carb dieters and Paleo dieters, as well as for everyone else.