Two delicious: Pan-grilled fish, soba noodle salad

Fresh, flavorful and quick: Pan-grilled Citrus Yellowtail and Soba Noodle Salad. Recipes below.

Last week, I posted two recipes for cooking fish that ranged from simple to simpler. I kept them simple because I didn’t want anything masking the taste of the Hawaiian yellowtail I’d been asked to try by Kona Blue Water Farms. This week, two more recipes. First, Marion shows just how well this fish plays with other flavors. Then she streamlines a complex side dish into something quick, simple and simply delicious.

Terry and I both love to cook, but our tastes in cookbooks and food authors don’t particularly overlap. He avidly reads Anthony Bourdain; I go for obsessive re-readings of M.F.K. Fisher. His cookbook tastes run to the school of It’s Better If It’s French. My favorite cookbook is an obscure, grubby, out-of-print one about Szechwan food.

So we think it’s pretty interesting that, when Terry received that lovely shipment of Hawaiian yellowtail, we each, independently, turned to the same author. Ming Tsai—chef, restaurateur, star of two televised cooking shows and author of some very nice cookbooks—really has been our guide in understanding this amazing fish. When it was my turn in the kitchen, I found a pair of recipes in Ming’s Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai that became the foundation for a meal.

By the way, this morning a friend called and asked me what this fish tastes like. It tastes like standing on the edge of a high bluff looking straight out over the open Pacific, with the surface of the water like light beaten silver, and a faint cold morning wind washing over your face, and the wind has come four thousand uninterrupted miles straight to find you. It’s that clean and beautiful and pure.

The original and very delightful version of this recipe calls for ponzu sauce and snapper, and the fish, once cooked, goes on to become part of a salad with pea sprouts and a Dijon vinaigrette. Here is my foreshortened, non-salad take, abbreviated into a simple grilled dish. This recipe goes quickly once you begin it. Make sure your side dishes are in progress before you start on this. Continue reading “Two delicious: Pan-grilled fish, soba noodle salad” →

Almost sushi: Herb-crusted Hawaiian yellowtail

Coriander-crusted Hawaiian yellowtail fillet, barely sautéed and served with wasabi mashed potatoes and a mixed green salad. Recipes below.

A quick note: The two fish recipes in this post call for a specific type of fish. They can also be made with others—I’ll mention some possible substitutes with the recipes. The wasabi mashed potato recipe doesn’t call for fish at all.

I was recently invited by Kona Blue Water Farms to sample some of their sushi-grade Kona Kampachi. This is their name for their own sustainably farmed Hawaiian yellowtail or Almaco Jack, a crisper textured cousin to the Japanese hamachi popular in sashimi and sushi.

Doing a little research, I discovered these 5- to 6-pounders aren’t just your typical farm-raised fish; as CNNMoney.com’s Business 2.0 puts it, “Hawaii startup Kona Blue is pioneering deepwater aquaculture to farm ocean fish and take the pressure off wild species.” The Seattle Post provides further details, explaining that they do this by growing the fish “in large, space-age cages submerged in 200 feet of ocean and by controlling what the fish eat. The fish are given no antibiotics or medications, just a pellet feed containing fish meal, fish oil and wheat. The fish meal and oil come from sustainable wild fisheries and the wheat comes from an organic source.” Healthwise, Kona Kamachi is rich in Omega-3 fish oils, and independent testing showed “no detectable” levels of PCBs or mercury.

Taking pressure off wild species is a particularly timely topic. Just the other day, The New York Times ran an editorial entitled “Until All the Fish Are Gone” about “the disastrous environmental, economic and human consequences of often illegal industrial fishing.”

Next, I took a look at who’s selling and cooking Kona Kampachi. The answer was restaurants and seafood stores in nearly 30 states across the country. Here in Chicago, respected restaurants Blackbird, Meritage Café & Wine Bar and Rick Bayless’ Topolobampo are among the dozens who serve it. And leading purveyors like Dirk’s Fish & Gourmet Shop and Burhop’s Seafood carry it for home cooks.

All of the above was enough for me. Yes, I wanted to try it. In the interest of full disclosure, Kona Blue generously sent me a, well, generous sample for free. I warned them I wasn’t afraid to bite the hand that fed me—if the fish was less than wonderful, I would say so. They didn’t seem worried. And as it turns out, they had no reason to be.

A big box arrived at my office Friday. When we got home, I immediately tore it open. Inside, I found two fresh fillets, each a little more than 1-1/4 pounds, carefully wrapped and nestled in multiple ice packs. When I say fresh, I’m talking the kind of fresh we don’t take for granted in the Midwest, even in a big city like Chicago. The smell was absolutely clean, with just the wonderful briny hint of the ocean that only the freshest saltwater seafood can deliver.

Also in the interest of full disclosure, the first thing we did was slice the little tapered end off one of the fillets and devour it immediately. This was supposedly sushi-grade fish—that demanded testing, didn’t it? Marion sliced it into thin little pieces, and we had some lazy man’s sashimi. Just the fish and a little soy sauce. And soon we were skipping the soy sauce. It was that fresh, that good, satisfyingly meaty.

Now then, what to do with the rest of the fish? At a party, I had discussed our impending bounty—okay, maybe I bragged a little—with our friend Karen. I said that since it was sushi-grade, one thing I wanted to try was based on a tuna recipe long ago read but never tried, in which the fish was barely cooked on one side only and served cooked side up. Karen had just seen Ming Tsai do something similar with Japanese hamachi on his TV show Simply Ming. Since my half-remembered tuna recipe was long gone, this sounded like a great place to start.

The Ming recipe is simplicity itself. Fish fillets seasoned only with salt and pepper and then coated with a crust of coarsely ground coriander seeds and seared for a mere 30 seconds per side. I’d already rejected various recipes with soy sauce or orange juice or countless other ingredients that sounded delicious but might mask the flavor of the fish itself. But this sounded like it would let the fish shine through, with the citrusy brightness of the coriander as just a flavor note.

Ming serves his version of this dish sliced over a shaved fennel salad. I was just here for the fish. So I served my fillets whole, along with a simple salad and wasabi mashed potatoes. You’ll find the recipe below, along with one for the potatoes. You’ll also find more of a description than a recipe for the even simpler preparation I served the next night. Continue reading “Almost sushi: Herb-crusted Hawaiian yellowtail” →

Meaty secrets and Argentine chimichurri sauce

Salt-tenderized steak with chimichurri sauce and a side of spicy roasted potatoes. Recipe below.

My Brazilian buddy Patricia over at Technicolor Kitchen recently surprised me with a present from the trip she and her husband Joao took to Europe this past fall: a lovely package of coarsely ground flor de sal [“flower of salt” or sea salt] from Portugal.

As much as I love food and ingredients, I hate to admit that my go to for salt is just the plain old salt shaker. It’s there. And it’s iodized—and who wants a goiter, right? We have kosher salt [somewhere] and some finely ground fleur de sel, but I seldom think of them when I’m ready to season a recipe. Patricia’s gracious gift gave me the kick in the pants I needed to think outside the shaker.

Next I needed a recipe to do it justice. Well, one found me. Poking around on various food blogs and search links [okay, I was scoping out links that had brought people to Blue Kitchen—happy?], I happened on a wonderful post from last August by Jaden over at Steamy Kitchen that involved coating steaks in a heavy layer of coarse salt for 15 minutes to an hour before cooking them, then rinsing and drying them before throwing them onto the grill or into a hot pan or broiler. I gasped just like you did just then—isn’t salting ahead of time supposed to dry out steaks?

Turns out it does at first, a little. But then reverse osmosis takes over, drawing salt deep into the meat, seasoning it throughout and making it amazingly tender. Or as Jaden puts it, turning cheap “choice” steaks into Gucci “prime” steaks. In her post, she thoroughly and wittily explains the science behind it and gives lots of helpful tips. So check it out later. Below, I’ll give you a highly simplified version of what may well become my go to method for preparing steaks. In fact, check out the Kitchen Notes below to see how else I’ve made use of this cool tenderizing technique.

Parsley? On steaks? Well, parsley is a key ingredient of chimichurri sauce. But here, it gets together with dried crushed red pepper, garlic and lemon juice to become something altogether different, lively and big. I first discovered chimichurri sauce at Tango Sur, a lovely little meat-centric Argentinean restaurant here in Chicago. Argentineans know thing or two about beef. I mean, we’re talking the land of gauchos and the pampas. So when the steaks arrived at the table, I ignored the side dish of sauce for a few bites and just savored the meaty goodness of a rare steak treated right. Almost out of idle curiosity, I dipped the next bite into the sauce. Oh. My. God. This was steak to the power of ten. I didn’t even remember the name of the sauce from the menu, but suddenly I was obsessed with it. The garlic hits first, but it is closely followed by the fresh, subtly peppery taste of parsley and the heat of the crushed red pepper; the lemon juice is a bright foil to the olive oil that holds it all together.

Noise, a crush of incoming diners and the late hour drove us from the tiny restaurant before I could get another look at the menu. A little creative digging on the Internet told me chimichurri sauce originated in Argentina, but spread throughout much of Latin America [indeed, my Ecuadorian friend and former colleague Cristobal fondly remembered his mother adding it to soups when I described it]. Further digging not only turned up a recipe, but showed me it was wonderfully easy to make—suspiciously so, in fact. Five simple ingredients and time to let flavors swap around. The first time I made it, I was skeptical that something so easy could deliver the transcendent flavor I’d found that night at Tango Sur. But deliver it did.

I’ve since discovered other versions of this amazing, big-flavored sauce, many using vinegar in place of the lemon juice and even crumbled bay leaves, but I keep coming back to the original. Once you try it, I think you will too. Continue reading “Meaty secrets and Argentine chimichurri sauce” →

The bayou meets Brazil: Cajun shrimp and rice

Brazilian rice teams up with spicy Cajun shrimp for a satisfying dinner on a cold night. Recipes below.

Wintry weather can put me into a stew-soup-chili-hearty-heavy-food rut. And while I do love all these foods [and jones for them in warm weather], when I saw a lively sautéed shrimp first course in the January issue of Food & Wine, it sounded like just the break I needed—something I could morph into a satisfying main course. Light, but big-flavored with a lively kick of lemon. And when I turned up the heat a bit with cayenne pepper, it got even more interesting.

Because it was intended as a first course, the recipe didn’t say what to serve with it. My first thought was pasta. After all, with the garlic, lemon juice and parsley, this Cajun-inspired dish that was meant to transport you to the Louisiana bayou was coming dangerously close to Italian for me. But then I remembered the wonderful Brazilian rice that was part of the Brazilian rice and beans Patricia over at Technicolor Kitchen had posted here at Blue Kitchen a while back. That sounded perfect.

And it is. The rice is a nice, deceptively simple balance for the spicy shrimp. With the sautéed onion, it brings much more to the party than rice alone, and its snowy whiteness is the perfect visual foil for the colorful shrimp dish.

Best of all, this whole meal comes together fairly quickly and easily. Add a salad and you’ve got a dinner that blends cultures beautifully and delivers more flavor and appeal than something this simple should be able to get away with. Continue reading “The bayou meets Brazil: Cajun shrimp and rice” →

Tomato-free Italian: Rosemary sage chops

Fresh herbs and garlic give these pan-roasted chops a satisfying depth. Recipe below.

Italian chefs and home cooks are rightly renowned for their way with tomatoes. Others may well use the tomato—the French even dubbed it the pomme d’amour, or love apple, for its supposed aphrodisiacal powers—but the Italians own it.

Unfortunately, as a result, we sometimes forget that there’s a whole world of Italian cooking beyond insalate caprese and bolognese sauce. At least I do. So I was happy to stumble upon Tastes of Italia magazine recently. A number of recipes caught my eye in this issue. I’m sure my takes on more than a few of them will turn up here sooner or later. I’ll start with this one that had me thinking outside the tomato.

This recipe for juicy, quickly prepared chops calls on three other stalwarts of the Italian kitchen—garlic, sage and rosemary. I’ve already pronounced rosemary my favorite of the herb world, and as far as I’m concerned, just about any savory dish can be improved with the addition of garlic. Sage falls more into the category of good intentions for me, though. I always feel I should explore its pungent flavor more, but never quite get around to it. So when I saw this recipe that married it with garlic, rosemary and pork, I had to try it.

The chops are pan roasted, cooked in a covered skillet with the herbs, garlic and some olive oil. Covering the pan holds in moisture, keeping the chops from becoming too dry or tough. This is especially important with today’s pork production methods that create leaner meat; the reduction in fat may be good for our waistlines, but it also makes the meat more prone to drying out. Sometimes when I’m searing chops, I’ll add a little vermouth to the pan when I turn them and cover it to finish the cooking. This also introduces some moisture to the meat, along with a very subtle flavor note, thanks to vermouth’s fairly neutral taste. I may try that the next time I fix these chops as well. Continue reading “Tomato-free Italian: Rosemary sage chops” →

A hearty, hot soup for chilly nights

Loaded with lentils, vegetables, chicken and plenty of spices, this crowded Curried Lentil Soup makes a satisfying meal by itself. Recipe below.

Broth is all well and good in soups, but I like my soups crowded. Even as a kid, I would scarf down all the noodles and little cubes of chicken in my Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and leave a bowlful of broth, aggravating my mom and missing out on the liquid benefits of soup. Now that I’m all grown up, I can appreciate a nice slurpy bowl of miso soup on occasion. But crowded soups—soups packed with vegetables and chunks of meat and maybe some noodles—are still what I really crave.

This soup fits the bill perfectly, a true meal in a bowl. It’s got lentils and a whole host of vegetables, including spinach. It’s got nice chunky bites of chicken. And it’s got spices—curry powder, cumin, red pepper and fresh ginger—to fire it up a bit and make it as interesting as it is satisfying. For the curry, I used Hot Curry Powder from The Spice House. Any Madras curry is a good choice for its heat.

It’s easy to make this vegetarian too. Just leave out the chicken and use all water or vegetable stock in place of the chicken stock.

Speaking of chicken stock, I lucked out big time. Marion made some homemade stock recently to freeze and I nabbed some of that. Just before Thanksgiving, we’ll post her recipe for chicken stock as part of a cold sweet potato soup that has become a delicious tradition of our Thanksgiving dinner. If you don’t have homemade stock for this lentil soup, be sure to use low sodium chicken broth. You can always add salt later—you can’t take it out.

With soup season in full swing, this crowded lentil soup is a hearty, flavorful meal with enough heat for the chilliest night. It’s also relatively easy to get on the table after a busy day. Continue reading “A hearty, hot soup for chilly nights” →

Dangerously good: Linguine Non Carbonara

Linguine Non Carbonara, a delicious, non-traditional take on pasta carbonara. Recipe below.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a post about a dish that wasn’t just more than the sum of its simple parts—it blew right past them. This one does the same thing in spades. How can something so insanely delicious not even use any spices, unless you count salt and pepper?

The dish in question is Marion’s decidedly non-traditional take on pasta carbonara. It’s dangerously good on a couple of levels. First, it is highly addictive. From the first time Marion made it for dinner guests years ago, it became a go to meal when we had people over—even people who had already had it, at their insistence [in the form of a polite request, of course].

It’s also dangerous because it’s, well, dangerous. No poisonous fish parts in it [am I alone in thinking that is about the dumbest culinary choice ever?], but it’s an artery-clogging party for your mouth. Marion dispenses with the heavy cream found in most American takes on carbonara [but interestingly, not used in the traditional carbonaras of central Italy]. But you start with a pound of bacon, okay? You cook things in bacon grease. And you add eggs and cheese. This is why we only have it once a year or so now. It’s also why, when we do, we enjoy every last tiny morsel of it. All right. You’ve been warned. Time to let Marion take over the kitchen.

The way this recipe entered our household has passed into the mists of time. I think that maybe it might have been something I found in a magazine, possibly, could be around 1980—that makes some sort of sense, although so do several other interpretations of what passes for my memory of this. It called itself Spaghetti Carbonara and it contained many of the elements that I still use to cook this dish. By the time I figured out that this dish is not even slightly a true carbonara—for one thing, it’s got vegetables in it—it was too late for us. We call it carbonara, just as we have dubbed every one of our daughters’ dates The Boy and call Schumann’s compositions ballet dancin’ music [Terry’s note—this term dates back to a comment by a little first grader during my teaching days, not any philistinian tendencies on our parts]. It’s our lingo, and we’re sticking to it.

Bacon takes the lead in Linguine Non Carbonara, but it isn’t the neighborhood bully. If you wish, you can use wonderful applewood-smoked bacon from organically grown pigs, each of whom has a real name, but one of the nice things about this recipe is its pragmatism: the most average grocery-store bacon still lets you create a super dish. The only real caveat I have is: use a good olive oil, decent zucchini, peppers, and shallots and a good Parmesan cheese that you grate directly into the dish at the last step.

Yes, there are veggies aplenty in this carbonara. You know—vegetables, salutary, nutritious, radiating their sunny health benefits throughout your being. Well, don’t let the jolly presence of vegetables fool you. Any lurking health elements they may possess are eradicated by the lavish use of the bacon, and the sautéing, and then the great lashings of egg and cheese. All you have left is extreme deliciousness.

Linguine Non Carbonara is best accompanied by a big California chardonnay. On Sunday, we had this with a Girard from the Russian River area, which stood up to the pasta very nicely indeed. Continue reading “Dangerously good: Linguine Non Carbonara” →

Lightening up, speeding up a New Orleans classic

A lightened version of a New Orleans classic, Red Beans & Rice. Recipe below.

Last week I talked about cold soup. This week I do a 180, with hearty, spicy red beans and rice. A couple of weeks ago, we had a cold, gray spell in Chicago that gave me a hankering for some. I started with two recipes—one way too simple, the other a little too busy sounding—and created my own. But you don’t have to wait for cold weather to make it—anyone from Louisiana will tell you that any day is a good day for red beans and rice.

A traditional dish throughout southern Louisiana—and particularly linked to New Orleans—red beans and rice was actually born out of two traditions. Many families couldn’t afford to buy meat for their meals every day, but a ham dinner was a Sunday tradition. And that meant there would be a ham bone left over for Monday.

Mondays were also the traditional day for doing laundry—this was back before automatic washing machines and two-income families. So as load after load of wash was done, either by hand or in old-fashioned wringer washers [my grandmother actually still used one of the later models when I was a kid and hung her wash out to dry in the backyard], it was easy to have a big pot of beans with that ham bone simmering on the stove for hours, with just an occasional stir as you passed through the kitchen. And that made red beans and rice the perfect traditional Monday night dinner all across southern Louisiana.

Besides being amazingly flavorful with all those Cajun or Creole seasonings, this dish was practical. Beans served with rice was a great source of protein when people couldn’t afford to eat a lot of meat. And a big pot of beans could feed a big family cheaply. It was reasonably low in fat too, depending on how much actual meat had survived the Sunday dinner.

The way this dish has evolved, though, it’s anything but low in fat. Some recipes still call for a ham bone—or more often, ham hocks [which epicurious.com describes as “the lower portion of a hog’s hind leg, made up of meat, fat, bone, gristle and connective tissue,” usually cured or smoked or both]. But now it also almost invariably includes some kind of smoked sausage—classically, andouille or else kielbasa or some other smoked sausage. Read “fat bomb.”

I’ve lightened up this New Orleans classic considerably, without sacrificing flavor or stick-to-your-ribs heartiness. First, I use a lighter sausage with less fat. It’s still not exactly Weight Watchers, though—if you check the nutrition chart, you’ll see even the light versions contain an impressive amount of fat. And for that reason, I use half the amount of sausage a similar recipe calls for and substitute chicken breast or turkey cutlets.

I’ve sped it up too, with the help of canned beans. It still takes a little over an hour to pull together, but most of that time is just letting it simmer to blend all the flavors together. In other words, maybe time to cycle through one load of laundry if you’re feeling in a traditional mood. Continue reading “Lightening up, speeding up a New Orleans classic” →

Two continents, one plate: Biryani chicken breasts

Indian biryani curry paste gets a little Tex-Mex help in firing up spicy Biryani Chicken Breasts with a side of Coconut Rice Pilaf. Recipes below.

THIS IS AN EXCITING TIME FOR FOOD. There are more options now than ever before, from global grazing to eating local. And palates are more adventurous than ever before, as the minds and mouths of diners open up to cuisines and flavors from just about everywhere. The success of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations is a perfect example of this growing culinary curiosity. Continue reading “Two continents, one plate: Biryani chicken breasts” →

Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs

A mix of Asian seasonings and indirect grilling combine to create flavorful, tender Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs. Recipe below.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week I wrote my little anti-grilling manifesto, and here I am doing a grilling post this week. It’s not that I don’t like grilling or the wonderfully smokey taste of something done right on the grill—it’s that I don’t like not being in control, not feeling like I know what I’m doing. Continue reading “Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs” →