Fish Tacos

I didn’t know what I wanted to make for dinner the other night when I went to the Italian market, which is often how my grocery shopping begins. I had a vague idea that I would buy some fish to complement whichever of my veggies I decided to pull out of the fridge, but no real plan as to how they would be combined. One of the wonderful guys behind the fish counter at Agata & Valentina cut a couple of Spanish mackerel filets right off the fish for me, and I thought maybe I’d just broil them, drizzle with harissa, and serve with fresh bread and barely cooked sugar snaps. But then when I made my second grocery stop, I forgot about that menu because I saw soft corn tortillas, and I could practically hear them screaming “fish tacos” at me. Luckily, the mackerel was amenable to this change in plans, and so was C.

I sliced up some cucumbers, radishes, and red onion on the mandoline, as close to paper thin as I could get them. Then I tossed them together with a little salt, a little agave nectar, some rice wine vinegar, and let them sit.

Meanwhile I chopped lettuce, heated up the tortillas (a minute per side in a hot, dry cast iron skillet), and dealt with the fish. The filets still got broiled, with just a little vegetable oil, salt, & pepper, and then pulled apart into bite-sized chunks. 

Then it was just a matter of assembly. 

Fish Tacos
serves 3-4

1 lb fish filets (mackerel, tilapia, catfish–anything flaky and not very expensive)
vegetable oil
salt & pepper
1 medium or 2 small cucumbers
1/2 red onion
4-5 radishes
1/4 c rice vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar (or a bit less of agave nectar)
4-5 lettuce leaves
8-10 small soft tacos (corn or flour)

Slice the cucumbers, radishes, and onion very thin (a mandoline makes this very easy). Toss them together with the vinegar, salt, and sugar, and taste to see if you need to adjust the flavor. Let this sit while you prepare everything else.

Turn on the broiler. While it’s heating up, place the fish filets on a baking sheet, skinside down. Line it with foil if you want to make your clean-up easier. Drizzle the fish with a little vegetable oil, and sprinkle with a bit of salt & pepper. When the broiler is hot, put the fish in. Start checking it after 5 minutes, though it might take several minutes more, depending on how thick it is and how close to the heat source it gets in your oven. If you poke the fish at the thickest part with a sharp knife, you should meet no resistance, and it should be totally opaque.

Shred the lettuce. 

Heat a cast iron skillet (or other heavy pan) over medium-low heat. Warm the tortillas one at a time, a minute per side. 

Let your guests assemble their own tacos. Serve with the hot sauce of your choice.

Spring Green (and Red)

There’s this bread that I learned to make from smitten kitchen. It’s a version of Russian black bread, the ingredient list is 17 lines long, and it’s amazing. And believe it or not, I usually have nearly all 17 ingredients lying around–a shallot, apple cider vinegar, molasses, baking chocolate… And this Patricia Wells recipe gave me the perfect excuse to make it. 

Truthfully, it’s just a salad and a sandwich. But it’s with butter lettuce and radishes (two things we were getting in large quantities for a couple of weeks) and calls specifically for a dark rye bread. I am quite fond of sliced radishes on buttered bread with a little sea salt, and this is kind of an elaboration on that theme. Plus a salad.

You’ll need radishes that have good, fresh, green leaves still attached. Take the best of those (if they all look good, then use maybe 1/3 of the bunch) and chop them up finely. Slice the radishes themselves into rounds, and then chop the bulk of the pile–about 3/4–into little strips. Dry the chopped leaves & little chunks of radish as best you can, with a paper towel.

Then get some really good quality butter, and smash in some lemon zest. Once it’s mixed, add the radish/leaves mixture, and a bit of salt, and smoosh it all together. Spread it thickly on slices of bread, and sprinkle with a little more salt. There’s your sandwich portion of the meal.

For the salad, it’s just a mix of butter lettuce, the sliced rounds of radish, and a creamy lemon-chive dressing (1/2 & 1/2, lemon juice, salt, and chives) which I suspect would also be very good made with buttermilk instead of cream & lemon juice. 

As a whole, it’s a wonderful early summer meal for a hot night when you don’t feel like turning on the stove. It helps if you have homemade bread and European butter and fleur de sel and all that jazz, but no worries if you don’t. In any case, go heavy on the butter and light on the salad dressing, and enjoy.

(And, if you have extra dressing, it goes wonderfully with zucchini that’s been run through the julienne slicer, tossed with a little salt, and left to drain a bit in a colander.)

Transitive Property of Pickling

I did not know what to do with those funny rat tail radishes this year. The novelty had worn off, frankly, so plain old crudite was out. The Days of Endless Salads were drawing to a close, and I didn’t have any brilliant ideas for, you know, actually cooking them. And then I saw a post on one of the, ahem, 39 food blogs in my google reader, adapting David Tanis’s pickled turnip recipe to use for kohl rabi. And I started thinking, “Hm, turnips and radishes are practically the same thing, aren’t they? And a rat tail radish is just a radish in bean form. So this pickling recipe should be perfect for them!” All of which makes perfect sense to me.

So I pulled out my copy of A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes (which I hadn’t cracked open in far too long) and mixed up a batch of the brine.  It’s a cider vinegar base, with a bit of olive oil and a pantload of herbs and spices, including thyme, oregano, turmeric, coriander, fennel…

I trimmed the tapered bit off the radishes, because I’ve noticed that they are a little tough at the end, and I didn’t think even the pickling process would change that, but otherwise left them whole.

The various pickled things I’ve made in the past usually involved cooking the vegetables somewhat, either by roasting, or by pouring the hot brine directly onto them. And then basically you wait a day and, presto, pickles! But Tanis wants these things to actually go through a pickling PROCESS. How tedious. So into a jar they go, and wait a week.

In retrospect, I should have stuck a post-it note on the jar to remind myself just when I put them in. In any case, I got bored waiting by Monday and decided they were ready. VERY spicy, which is probably in part because the radishes themselves have quite a bit of kick, and partly because this is yet another recipe that calls for a certain number of teaspoons of red pepper flakes, rather than, say, 1 dried red pepper, crushed. (Am I the only person who keeps them whole in my spice rack? Does no one else run into this problem of measurement? Or does everyone else have the patience to crush one up and measure it out?) Point being, I probably put in a bit more than necessary.

End result: not as delectable as the carrots, and not going to be as useful as the peppers (which, for the record, AMAZING draped over a grilled cheese sandwich. and now I’m hungry).  I feel slightly compelled to make the chicken terrine in aspic that is the main course from this menu in A Platter of Figs, though, if only to experience the proper effect of that pairing. But who’s going to eat a dish of jellied chicken with me? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Theories & Experiments

I have this theory that if I go more than a week or so without having people over for dinner, I start to get all twitchy. But it’s hard to test, because generally, I don’t go more than a week without having a dinner party of some kind. Sometimes it’s a big fancy to do, with 8 people and multiple courses, but more often it’s just a simple dinner with, for example, two dear friends whom I’ve known since we were born. 

M. and R. were having a pretty rough week for reasons I don’t need to share, and it was a chilly, rainy, March-like day on Tuesday. So the comfort of a roast chicken seemed the way to go. I had picked up a bunch of radishes in the greenmarket on Monday, and I’ve been reading about roasted radishes everywhere this month, so I thought I’d give that a try. And for dessert, the plan was one of my typical missions, responding to a challenge to make red velvet cupcakes, but since I’m me, I needed to find an alternative to red food dye.  So there’s your menu.

And now a brief aside: someone, years ago, presented to me the pyramid theory of relationships. According to this theory, there is one person in the world, one in 6+ billion (what’s the count these days?), who is essentially your soul mate. And if you should be so lucky to find this person, the capstone of your pyramid as it were, you would be so blissfully happy that you wouldn’t even know what to do with yourself. But then, there are a small handful of people (the next level of the pyramid) where, if you found any of them, you would be such an incredibly happy couple that you’d think you had found that first person, the capstone. And so on down the levels, with more and more people fitting each decreasing level of happiness (I visualize the world’s population all standing on each other’s shoulders). The trick, of course, is that you don’t ever really know where someone is on your pyramid, so you never really know if there’s someone out there better suited to you. (The other trick is that most people are not on the same level of each other’s pyramids.)

Anyway. I’m not sure how deeply I buy into this theory, but it has stuck with me for many years. And the thing is, I have no idea who originally presented it to me. None. I’ve asked around and no one is taking ownership. This method of roasting a chicken is similar (see? I had a point in telling that story), in that I no longer remember where I read about lining the roasting pan with slices of bread and sticking the chicken on top.

But in this case, I can attest with certainty that it is a brilliant idea. Stuff the chicken with something flavorful (a lemon sliced in 2, a few cloves of garlic, some fresh herbs), season it with salt & pepper and drizzle with olive oil, and pour a good amount of olive oil on the bread, too. Shove some of the fresh herbs under the skin of the chicken, too, if you like. And what you wind up with is something like deconstructed stuffing. Or (as M. suggested makes more sense) un-reconstructed stuffing. Either way, an hour at 400F later, it’s amazingly good. The bread will get a little singed, probably, but it doesn’t really matter. Also there is no basting, because all the juices that you’d normally use for that get soaked up by the not-stuffing. And if by some chance you don’t eat all the bread at dinner, chop it up as croutons the next day for the best salad you’ve ever had.

(It should be noted that R. served as my staff photographer for most of the night, which is a good thing for several reasons. One, I often forget about the camera altogether when I’m cooking, which makes blogging about meals kind of tricky. Two, he has an excellent eye, even with my little point-and-shoot.)

Now let’s move on to the radishes. I had used the greens for dinner for myself on Monday, in a stir-fried rice inspired by a recipe from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables (more on this book later–Farmer John runs a CSA somewhere in Illinois and on the cover of the book he is wearing a bright orange feather boa, which should be enough to make you want to buy the book right now). But that left the plump jewel-like radishes themselves. Leite’s Culinaria (a blog you should read if you don’t) offered up a recipe from Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster’s Market that seemed designed for this dinner.

Clean the radishes, leaving on a little nub of the greens, and if there are any that are ginormous, cut them in half. Toss them in something oven-proof with a bit of olive oil, a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and some thyme (yay windowbox!), and roast at 400F for the last 10-15 minutes that the chicken is cooking. And you’re done.

Then came the tricky bit: dessert. I love dessert, and I love to bake, but I’m a better, more confident cook than baker. I have mentioned, perhaps, that I’ve been bringing in the extras from recent baking experiments to the dojo where I practice aikido. This makes everybody happy, because it means I don’t wind up eating an entire loaf of banana bread myself (with the justification that it would otherwise go stale), and the uchi deshi, who spend 32 hours a week training, and are therefore perpetually hungry, get homebaked whatever-the-hell-I-felt-compelled-to-make-that-week.

Last week, when I asked one of the other members if he had any requests, he said, without so much as pausing to take a breath, “red velvet cupcakes.” And initially, I said, “um, no, that’s not really my thing.” But then I thought about it, and realized that it’s mostly not my thing because of the food dye (standard recipes call for 2 entire bottles of red dye in a batch of cupcakes). So I started hunting around for alternative, natural recipes. And pureed beets seems to be the thing to do.

I started with a recipe from Beauty Everyday, but thanks to the keen eye of M., who is a much more experienced baker than I am, we made some substantial alterations. She suggested cutting down on the sugar and the eggs, and also realized that the volume of icing was totally out of proportion with the amount of cake we’d be making. So I wisely stepped aside and let her take the culinary reins.

After the last step of folding in the pureed beets, we concluded that the batter was sufficiently cake-like to proceed. So into the muffin tin went this beautiful, almost magenta mix.

And we crossed our fingers for 17 minutes as we sat down to dinner.

But it turns out we needn’t have been so worried. The recipe was a hit (though it occurs to me that if you slather cream cheese icing on cardboard, it would be declared a success). The comparison we came up with is that it’s like carrot cake, just with beets, and chocolate flavored instead of spiced.

And most importantly, the cake is indeed red!

Final side note: I learned in my search for this recipe that originally, the color in red velvet cake came from a reaction between the cocoa powder and the acid of the buttermilk. It wasn’t a super bright red, more like brick or rust. But then cocoa powder began being manufactured using a process called “dutching,” which serves to stabilize it but also changes the pH so much that the reaction couldn’t happen. And by that time, red food dye (a.k.a. cancer juice) was widely available. And then there was no going back, because Americans for some reason like their food to be as brightly colored as possible.

Ok, class dismissed.