Everything from a Salmon III: Chowdah

Thursday 5 July

The whole poached salmon made its final appearance, as chowder. While breaking up the salmon at the end of the first meal, we save the poaching liquid, leftover cream sauce, mirepoix, any scrappy bits of salmon, and any platter juice in one big jar. What I love about this is that it's so rich that it congeals into a sort of fish jelly.

So into a pot go some onions, to brown lightly in butter, or with a rasher or two of snipped-up bacon, if you have it - we didn't. Then add diced potatoes, with just enough water to barely cover. Cook them with lots of salt till tender. In the meantime, take the three cobs of bi-color corn you had deliberately left over from vedge-fest, the day before yesterday, and scrape them off the cobs with a knife. When everything else is tender and done, add them, all their juice, and the fish jelly with all the stuff in it, plus any scraps of salmon that may have been hiding elsewhere. When it's hot, add milk to the consistency that seems right to you, thickened, of course, with lollops of cream. And when that's hot, pour it into bowls and put your head down in it.

This means we've had seafood every night from last Thursday on, except for Tuesday's vegetables. Oh, and we didn't finish all the chowder. Like Achilles and the Tortoise or Napoleon brandy, there's always just a little bit left.

The Glorious Fourth

Wednesday 4 July

Jean and Donald kindly invited us, Susan, and Mike over for an Independence Day celebration, which was supposed to begin with a pleasant swim in the pool. This was unfortunately forestalled by an enormous monsoon-like thunderstorm, so we sat, dry and happy, in their pleasant parlor instead, and relaxed with wine and cheese (brie, blue, feta, and cheddar), spicy hummus, crackers and chips.

When we proceeded to the red, white, and blue-bedecked table, we cleared our palates with a green salad with ginger dressing while Jean and Donald pampered us, constantly topping up our glasses and filling our plates. The main course was a superb salmon (!!!), served as broiled fillets topped with pesto and decorated with lime slices. What I think is a close approximation is published here.
Accompanying the salmon was a palette-like platter of colorful broiled vegetables: green and yellow squash, eggplant, onions, mushrooms, sugar-crisped carrots, and red, green, and yellow peppers. Oh, and some rice, which supplied the white. Everything was tender and tasty.
Of course, the pièce de resistance (what is this, Bastille Day?) was dessert. Here Jean could return to her patriotic color scheme: fresh strawberries and blueberries, home-baked shortbreads, and whipped cream to cement them together. So we patriotically ate till our eyes popped.

Though the rain was still threatening, when it got dark we drove out to Oak Park and enjoyed the fireworks display. It was a festive crowd, and the screech of rockets was almost drowned out by the delighted screams of small children. Despite a bit of drizzle, we oohed and ahhed through the entire display, and Mike, who was smart enough to bring a camera, got some pictures.
Then Jean brought us back home and forced us, yes, FORCED us, to eat Frango chocolates and drink cognac - or absinthe (whose reputation for deadliness is not unmerited). She is the hostess with the mostes', no doubt about it. So thanks, Jean and Donald!

Vegetable Medley

Tuesday 3 July

After so much fishy goodness, we turned to the vegetable kingdom. (We once tried to convince a vegetarian friend to become an ichthyophagous vegetarian like another friend, Janet, by claiming that fish are as dumb as vegetables. This piece of sophistry was unsuccessful.)

We set about cooking various vedge using three types of heat: boiling, frying, and roasting (not in fact as bad an idea for a summer's day at it might first appear).

1. Beets, roasted. Tender, baby beets went into the oven at 475º first, since even baby beets take longer than anyone else.
2. Beet greens, sautéed, with shallot and garlic, following the advice of Chef Julie at Nectar, whom Barbara ran into at Findlay Market. Needed a splash of wine and to be covered. Monter-ed au beurre (monty-o-burr-ed?) at the last moment. Amazing how a sink-full of greens cooks down to two heaping tablespoons each. Tasty, but not perfect like hers.
3. Corn, boiled: 5 ears of bi-color corn in a pot of boiling water. Saved three for chowder. Served them painted with a chili-lime butter.
4. Garlic, roasted: Garlic is a vedge round these here parts. A handful of cloves tossed, unpeeled, into the beet roaster. Went pretty fast, 'cuz they were nearly caramelized by the time the beets were done.
5. Asparagus, roasted. Once the beets were done, we extracted them to a bowl to cool and substituted the asparagus.

What's amazing is how perfectly the beet skins peel off when rubbed in paper towels (it also would help to have Julia Child's asbestos fingers, though). Maybe Helene would like beetskin paper to go with tomatoskin and onionskin?

Somehow, eating only vegetables makes you feel virtuous - until you start breathing roast-garlic breath on everybody.

Salmon Cakes, or Salmon Redux II

Monday 2 July

One of the things we like most about making whole poached salmon is the leftovers, and the leftovers of the leftovers. We always get three meals from a whole salmon: the salmon proper (der Lachs an sich), then cakes, then chowder (see above).

This was also the showdown, the Cake-Off: Salmon Cakes vs. last night's Crab Cakes. The salmon cakes, again with mayo and a little chopped red onion and celery in the mix (not too much, this ain't tuna salad), won, we think, by a small margin, though they were helped along by a caper deglazing sauce, and a cuke and tomato salad on the side.

Crabfest

Sunday 1 July

Ever since we bought the salmon, we knew we were going to have a fishy week of it. So, since we didn't finish off the crab enchiladas, and we also had some crab left over, we decided to have Crabfest '07. We made up some little crab cakes (as usual, with a little chopped red onion, and mayo to bind) and had them with the nuked crab enchiladas. Not bad, but as we always say, Vaden's Ginger makes the best crab cakes in the world.

Whole Poached Salmon

Saturday 30 June

Barbara caught this big salmon at Kroger's (it didn't fight much), so we invited Julie and Liz over for an impromptu Saturday Night Sit Down.

The recipe is simplicity itself, straight from Julia's The Way to Cook. Make a big batch of mirepoix of vegetables, cut in 1/4 inch dice, with the usual suspects: carrots, celery, and onions. Sauté the carrots first in lots of butter, then add the other guys. Put the vedge down as a bed in a fish poacher, or a pan big enough for Mr. Fish (who can be curled up if you need to). Stuff the cavity where the guts used to be (check first for guts) with sprigs of thyme, parsley (if you got it, ours is bolted now), and here's the secret: TARRAGON.

Pour in an inch of wine, cover and cook over a low flame or two, for about 40 minutes. I set the automatic probe thermometer to 140º, but alas, the only defect of the automatic probe thermometer is that you can't hear it out by the garden where we were having margaritas for which Julie brought the fixins. We're planning to combine the A.P.T. with a baby monitor, and become gazillionaires. We also had chips and a freshly made pico de gallo: just diced-up tomatoes and red onion, plus chopped fresh coriander, lime, and salt. The theme of the evening was obviously vegetables diced into tiny cubes.

We rescued Mr. Fish, pulled off the skin and the brown bits. Set aside most of the tiny dice of mirepoix, then poured all the sauce into the cleverly reserved and NOT washed up pan in which we'd initially sautéed the mirepoix. Then we added more of the magic tarragon, and some chopped up leaves of sorrel. Reduced the sauce, added cream, and returned mirepoix to the pan at the end to heat up. Some of the resulting sauce got poured over the plattered fish for decoration, and the rest got passed at the table, with nice pieces of the salmon fillets. Served with a lovely Verdicchio di Castelli di Jesi, which Liz brought.

Dessert was Graeter's Peach ice cream, which we think is our favorite flavor, especially since it's only available in fresh-peach season, that is, right now. We topped it with some local black raspberries, rising from their bath of Triple Sec like some goddess or other on the half-shell.

Squid and Squash (Blossoms)

Friday 29 June

Barbara planted a bunch of monstrous-looking yellow squash and zucchini plants in the garden this spring, all for the sake of (eventual) squash blossoms. Actual squash is only a side benefit, a result of her letting a few get away and develop beyond the point where you can batter-fry the tiny little things. After all, you can buy squash anywhere, but squash blossoms are rare, precious, and also delicious.

I came up with this batter one summer in Rome, when Barbara was away on a dig. I had no recipe but I tried to duplicate what we had had together in various restaurants, especially those in the Jewish Ghetto of Rome. So separate an egg (for this big batch of stuff, three). Whisk up the white until foamy. They don't have to be stiff, like for a soufflé or anything. Then whisk enough flour into the yolks to make a stiffish paste. Fold the whites in to the yolk paste. Add a pinch of salt e eccolo!

I delicately opened the flower petals with my fingers, spread the blossoms wide, and gently slid in a sliver of mozzarella mated with a fragment of anchovy. Stroked and twisted each flower closed, the green veins making gothic tracery on the orange leaves Each swollen pod, full to bursting, dipped in the batter . . . OK, Mr. Obvious Man will stop now.

We used the old electric skillet, better known as the chicken pan for its role in making fried chicken (which we never do). But we needed more protein, so after the squash blossoms were done and keeping hot in the toaster-oven, a handful of squid rings went into the remaining batter and were soundly fried.

Served squid on one side of the plate, squash blossoms on the other, with a wedge of lemon in the middle. All we needed was the Adriatic - or at least the Tiber.