Fishing Expedition

While going through some pictures today, I realized I never, in fact, posted about several things I had intended to, and did not include some very nice pictures of risotto. Here are the pictures of [risotto]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/105), to get them out of the way. Notice how the pan in the background is tilted up on its side, sitting on the overturned spoon rest. This enables you to get more stock out of the pan with the ladle.

Risotto of ham and peas

About fish. Not long ago, I [posted](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/82) about baking a whole fish, but I neglected to tell you about the actual preparation. It was simply baked with vegetables, but I started with a whole, intact fish, which is a *very* economical way to buy fish if you need a lot of it. I paid $5 a pound for this fish which would have been $14 in fillets. Besides, when you cut your own, you get a whole other meal- free.

Fish on ice

Now, let’s go through the process of prepping your whole (round) fish. (Flat fish are a somewhat different process.) I like to cut the fins off first, then scale it. That way, you’ve working with a cylindrical object, there’s less to get in the way of your scaling. For scaling, you’re going to need- in my order of preference- a heavy-duty, restaurant style cooking spoon (about 18” long), a fish scaler (there are different kinds, they often look like a hairbrush with teeth instead of bristles), or the dull side of a long, sturdy knife (though this can be dangerous). To cut the fins off, use a scissor or very sharp knife, cutting in the direction opposite how the fins unfold. Be careful, the fins on many fish can be hard and sharp.

In case you are unaware, most fish are covered in a layer of brittle cartilaginous plates called scales. In an adult wild striped sea bass, they are oval, about ½”x3/8”. They change in consistency slightly as they dry out, which you will see since your countertop, sink, floor and self are about to be covered with them.

You should really remove them before any sort of cooking, although there are preparations where it doesn’t matter. If you are new to working with whole fish, you should scale them no matter what, since a) you need the practice and b) you might run your hand down the fish against the grain of the scales and possibly hurt yourself.
NY Striped Bass
In restaurants, this is usually done in a large sink, often with the water running. I can’t abide the waste of that much water, but if you have a big enough sink, it will still ease cleanup. If you choose to do this in the sink, however, put a screen in the drain, neither your drain nor your disposer will be happy about this amount of fish scales.

Starting with the head of the fish away from you, holding it by the tail, find where the scales begin. The scales grow in a “grain” from the front of the fish to the back. Holding your spoon firmly by its bowl (meaning the part you’re not used to having in your hand), firmly run the handle of the spoon under the scales and up the length of the fish’s body. Scales will come off in clumps. You will immediately realize this is a lot more work than it sounds like, thus fillets are $14 a pound. Continue ad nauseum until there are no scales anywhere on the fish.

Next comes gutting: just like it sounds. Round fish have cavities in their bellies that start just under their chins and run 1/3 to half way up their bodies. Most of the viscera are contained here. Insert a sharp knife under the chin and cut a shallow slit the length of the cavity. On some fish, the guts will stay in place until you pull them out, on some they will explode out onto the counter. Either way, you’ll need to reach in and get everything out of there, and wash the cavity until you don’t see any blood remaining.

clean fish cavity

If you’re going to fillet the fish right away, you can leave the gills. If you’re going to hang on to this guy for a day or if you’re cooking him whole, lose the gills. Open the gill flaps on either side of the fish and cut out the gills with a sharp knife or scissor. Again, wash the cavity until it’s free of blood.

Now you’re ready to fillet or cook away.

Sunday Dinner Part One- a little late

I’ve learned a valuable lesson in blogging: the whole point is that the entry is momentary. IE, it’s a blog entry not an article. I have been working on the entry below since Sunday evening, and this morning it hit me that it’s ok to do these things in installments. Enjoy. More to come.

Cooking has become a decreasingly frequent activity for me because of moving, renovating and moving again (and getting ready to renovate again), among other things. Recently, however, part of my batterie de cuisine has seen light for the first time since October. Some very familiar pots and pans came out recently to dull the sleeping-with-another-man’s-wife sensation of cooking in a foreign kitchen.

To celebrate this coup, I enlisted a veteran taster to make an evening of it. On another day, say a Monday, Wednesday or Saturday, we could have taken a short walk to the greenmarket, but being a Sunday, we were left to go to our local Whole Foods. (I could take this as an opportunity to rant about said ersatz health food store, but I’ll leave that for every other waking moment of my life.) Here’s what we came up with:

Mozzarella Salad with Tomatoes Just like it sounds. Extra virgin olive oil, sea salt (coarse), black pepper. What else can you say about it? It’s not really tomato season yet, and it shows. To drink, we opened the Toro mentioned below, had a few sips and let it air out. We also drank water like it was going out of style: the new kitchen isn’t air conditioned yet.

Steamed Striped Bass with Tapenade on Dinosaur Kale The steamer basket is still in storage, so I did the the old Jeff Smith: four tinfoil balls in a frying pan full of water. Balance a plate on top, and just like that, a steamer. (You could also turn a little heatproof bowl upside down, but they tend to rattle, and I’m jittery enough when I cook.)

The cuisinart is also in storage, and the blender happened to be out so I learned not to make tapenade in a blender. It seems to go right from the too-big-pieces stage to the liquid stage. Eh, it’s certainly not hard to make by hand. Ordinarily, tapenade is what some people would call a “pantry item,” meaning something you always have around, or something you always have the makings of around, but since I formulated the idea while still at the store, I managed to forget that the kitchen still is not yet wholly mine, and therefore the pantry is not yet so equipped. Usually it is a salty punch of a spread/sauce made of chopped oil-cured olives, anchovies, capers (tapeno: the provençal word for caper), olive oil and- learned from maitre cuisinier Jacques Pépin- a dried black mission fig for sweetness. This time it was something different, but not bad.

A slice of steamed fish was anointed with a dollop of oily tapenade and situated on a bed of sauteed “dinosaur” kale. Washed and shaken, but not spun, dry- with the stems REMOVED- the kale was cooked with olive oil, salt, pepper and, just before plating, a squeeze of lemon.

Not that it has anything to do with anything, but dinosaur, tuscan (cavolo nero) and lacinato kale are botanically identical; they are just names. I include this tidbit because it took me 2 years to determine this definitively.

What did we drink? Albert Mann Cremant D’Alsace, a dry, minerally sparkler. Like prosecco’s teutonic cousin, it was crisp and austere, but refreshing and refreshingly free of the sweetish confines of a lot of chardonnays, and a totally different animal than all that pinot grigio every magazine editor seems to have been drinking lately. (Everyone keeps telling me there is a wave of bone dry non-oak American chardonnays about to wash me from the shores of incredulity, but here I stand, incredulous.)

TTFN.