quick and easy seafood – Blue Kitchen

Incredibly fresh, sustainably caught walleye fillets from the Red Lake Chippewa reservation require little more than salt, pepper and tarragon, then a quick sauté in butter to be delicious. Recipe below.

Fish are the last wild food. Well, they’re the last wild caught food humans eat on a large scale. And unfortunately, we’ve been eating them on too large a scale—according to the World Health Organization, we’ve doubled our per capita fish consumption in the last 50 years. Many species are in serious decline, and the fishing industry as a whole faces major challenges.

In his book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, Paul Greenberg says this growing appetite for fish cannot be sustainably satisfied by wild fish alone and that fish farming or aquaculture will actually overtake wild catch in the next few years. Aquaculture is not without its own problems—efforts must be made to greatly reduce its environmental footprint. That’s why the success of the Red Lake Fishery’s wild caught walleyes is particularly heartening. Continue reading “The delicious taste of sustainable success: Sautéed Walleye Fillets with Tarragon” →

Green garlic adds its subtle touch to a simple, sublime supper. Recipe below.

green-garlic-pasta

A quick note: Green garlic inspired two recipes this week. After you finish this post, be sure to stick around for Pan-grilled Crostini with Green Garlic and Chevre.

This is not at all what I had in mind for this week’s post. But then there we were at the Logan Square Farmers Market on Sunday, looking at beautiful bunches of green garlic at the Videnovich Farms booth. Green garlic is young garlic harvested before the cloves form. They’re similar to scallions and leeks in appearance, and the entire plant is edible. The taste is much more delicate than mature garlic.

I’d never actually cooked with green garlic before, so my first stop was the Internet. And the first thing I found was a New York Times article—“Garlic Defanged”—in which San Francisco chef Daniel Patterson confessed his dislike for garlic [well, actually more of an irrational fear of it], then sang the praises green garlic as “its sweeter, more likable offspring.” This was not a promising start for me. I love garlic. A lot. In fact, I’m sometimes frustrated that the big olfactory rush of garlic hitting a hot pan is usually greatly diminished by the time you’re plating whatever you’ve cooked.

But Patterson goes on to call green garlic “a transformational ingredient, one that can remain in the background while making the elements around it better.” Okay, I was interested again. I studied the recipes he includes in the article, particularly one for Linguine with Green Garlic Clam Sauce. It seemed to have a little too much going on to let the green garlic shine through—to me, it had to play a bigger role, if a subtle one, in whatever I ended up cooking with it. Continue reading “The milder side of garlic: Linguine with green garlic and shrimp” →