Salmon Tarragon on a Bed of Vegetables: Better late than never

Steaming salmon over a bed of vegetables in wine keeps fish moist and delivers delicate flavor. Recipe below.

This is the salmon dish I was going to prepare last week, before painting the living room got in the way. So it’s a week late—and given my history with fish, it’s much later than that.

Fish and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. I grew up in the midwest—St. Louis, to be exact—before reliably fresh fish was readily available in just about any supermarket. Fish for my family was frozen, breaded ocean perch, fried up and served with canned stewed tomatoes, cold from the fridge, and my grandmother’s sour German cole slaw. Even though we weren’t Catholic, this dreaded meal appeared without fail every Friday. So Friday became my day of semi-fasting at the evening meal, breaking up the fish and tomatoes with my fork and redistributing them around the plate, while consuming as little as humanly possible. I don’t think I fooled anyone at the table—I just outwaited them. Eventually, I would be excused so dinner dishes could be washed.

If this weren’t enough to put me off fish, every winter also brought daily tablespoon-sized doses of cod liver oil, which tastes exactly like its name. I can’t remember now what my mother thought this vile, viscous liquid would ward off. What it in fact warded off was any hope of me liking fish for many years to come.

So of course I married a fish lover. Marion, to her credit, was patient and gentle with me as she gradually reintroduced seafood to my palate—much as one would be with any rescued abused creature. She only served fish occasionally and then, only milder-flavored species. That she is a superb cook also helped. But it took years before I willingly chose fish in a restaurant if any creature that had walked the earth was also offered on the menu. And even more years before I attempted to cook fish.

Now I really like fish—like cooking it too. Thanks, Marion! After you try this simple, quick, delicious dish, I think you’ll thank her too. Continue reading “Salmon Tarragon on a Bed of Vegetables: Better late than never” →

Scallops with Sautéed Spinach: Simply Impressive

Scallops are as impressive as they are easy to make. Recipe below.

Okay, let’s all just admit it. One of the big pleasures of cooking is serving a dish that is so delicious, beautiful, sophisticated or [D] all of the above that your guests are blown away. And when said dish is also quick and brainlessly easy to make, you’ve got a real keeper.

Dishes with scallops tend to fall squarely into this camp on all counts. Both the larger sea scallops and their smaller brethren bay scallops have a delicate, slightly sweet and decidedly unfishy taste. And like mushrooms and tofu, they readily take on flavors of herbs, sauces and other seasonings.

Visually, their plump, drumlike shapes—think marshmallows [sea scallops] or miniature marshmallows [bay scallops]—lend themselves to an array of beautiful presentations.

And in terms of simplicity, it just doesn’t get much easier than scallops. In fact, the hardest part of cooking them may be trying to rinse away any tiny particles of sand that can get lodged in the scallops while they’re inside their shells [yes, they are shellfish, so check with guests for any shellfish allergies before adding them to your menu].

I rinse them under cold running water while gently brushing a finger over all surfaces, feeling for grains of sand. It’s a mostly successful method, but occasionally you may bite into a teeny grain that escaped your attention. Big deal. It’s sand, unlike the euphemistically named “vein” in shrimp [which, as we all know, is the shrimp’s, well, guts]. I did look online to see if there was any secret to washing scallops that I didn’t know about. Pretty much everyone just said, “wash scallops to remove grit.” One person did opine that if you’re getting grit on your scallops, you should change sources for buying them—but with so many others telling you to rinse the grit away, one can only wonder at this person’s rarified fishmonger sources. If anyone has a secret tip, I’d love to hear it.

Scallops aren’t just easy to prepare—they’re quick. About the only way you can really screw them up is to overcook them, in which case they’ll come out tough and chewy. So you’re forced to cook quickly [we’re talking minutes here] and not belabor things.

Here’s a quick, impressive recipe that’s actually two great dishes. You can make them separately, but they’re especially wonderful together. Continue reading “Scallops with Sautéed Spinach: Simply Impressive” →

Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food

Campanelle with Sausage and Red Bell Pepper proves what a blank canvas and invitation to improvise pasta can be. Recipe below.

Sometimes a cookbook can greatly influence how you cook, even if you never make a single recipe from it. We had a pasta cookbook around the house for years and finally got rid of it in one of our periodic purges when we realized we never used it. Ever. But the author said something in the introduction that completely changed the way I thought about pasta, so it wasn’t money wasted, as far as I was concerned.

His family lived in Italy for a year when he was a boy. Their housekeeper made pasta at least once a day, every day, for that year. In that time, she never made what many of us think of as the classic Italian pasta with red sauce, not once. And she never repeated herself.

When I got over being stunned and amazed by this feat—and it wasn’t a blinding flash of inspiration, but rather a long process of seeing various recipes in various sources, perusing menus in Italian restaurants and, finally, just facing ingredients on hand in my own kitchen—I realized that pasta can be like the perfect basic jazz melody that invites countless amazing improvisations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good red sauce. It’s just that there are so many other more interesting things to be done with pasta. There are various cream sauces, for instance, and dishes that involve baking the pasta. I’ll save those for another day. Today I’m going to cover a breathtakingly simple technique that will give you all the room in the world to improvise and create your own wonderful meal. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food” →

Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?

Indian biryani curry paste gives an exotic twist to classic American pot roast. Recipe below.

It’s funny the things that stick in your brain. I routinely forget to pick up the dry cleaning or that we’re out of cottage cheese or that I was supposed to get the oil changed. But I still remember the day we talked about food in my grade school French class with Mademoiselle [okay, I forget her name too—something French, since she really was from France].

She, being from France and probably wondering exactly how she’d ended up teaching a bunch of squirmy American eleven-year-olds in St. Louis, Missouri, began to wax nostalgic about French food. We, being squirmy American eleven-year-olds from St. Louis, Missouri, were horrified. Sauces were involved. Shallots. Innards. Finally, one of the girls in the class cracked, saying something insightful, like, “Ewwwww.”

Mlle. [Je-ne-sais-quoi] rolled her eyes and said, “Ah, yes. For Americans, everything must taste like fried chicken.”

Despite the fact that, unlike all my other teachers, she was actually young and pretty and spoke with that wonderful accent, I was offended. What the hell was wrong with fried chicken? Being eleven, hell had entered my vocabulary, albeit under my breath unless I was around trusted fellow hell sayers like Carl Halford and Mike Prokopf.

Besides, didn’t we Americans have pizza? Okay, I had never tried it, but my brother Mike had eaten it at Little Charlie’s house and pronounced it good. And didn’t we have chop suey? This ersatz Chinese delicacy hadn’t yet been widely outed as an American invention, so it counted. Okay, I hadn’t personally tried that either—Mike and I always ordered hamburgers when our parents forced us to go to some sketchy Chinese dive downtown.

But that was then, this is now. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?” →

Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale

Herbes de Provence adds a nice complexity to my current version of Chicken and Wine. Recipe below.

No, the title doesn’t refer to the theory—still hotly debated, apparently—that birds evolved from dinosaurs [although the thought of dining on a dinosaur’s distant relative is pretty cool, you have to admit]. It has to do with how cooking and recipes naturally evolve over time.

This recipe is one I’ve made pretty much since I began cooking. And just as my cooking has, it’s evolved and become a little more refined, a little more complex over time. So it’s fitting it should be the very first recipe on Blue Kitchen.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with cooking times, tweaked the herbs and messed with the sauce in various efforts to freshen up a meal that family and friends already loved. There’ve been a couple notable failures: Adding chicken stock to the sauce for more flavor—the flavor it added was chicken soup. And adding a little dried thyme—everyone agreed the “thymeless classic” was better.

There has also been a notable success in the last couple of years: Adding Herbes de Provence, a wonderfully aromatic blend of [typically dried] herbs and lavender flowers used in the cuisine of the Provence region of the south of France. The mix of herbs varies—the blend I use contains rosemary, French thyme, tarragon, basil, savory, cracked fennel, lavender and marjoram. This simple addition gives the dish a complexity the bay leaves alone couldn’t deliver.

Chicken and Wine, as I prepare it, is quite distinct from the classic French coq au vin. It uses white wine instead of red, for one thing, and the cooking time is much shorter; coq au vin pretty much demands to be cooked a day ahead and allowed to swap flavors in the fridge overnight. This dish is best when served immediately after cooking.

There’s a comfort food aspect to this dish that makes it a great family meal. But it also has a kind of rustic elegance that makes it good company food too. So here’s the recipe—at least how I’m making it right now. Continue reading “Chicken and Wine: An evolutionary tale” →