REALLY SMALL FISH

Recently I had dinner at Portland’s trendy and excellent restaurant clarklewis. The occasion was the visit of the esteemed California printer and publisher Peter Koch and his wife Susan who gave a presentation to an eager audience of youthful acolytes of the printing arts. Portland artist and publisher Sarah Horowitz hosted the evening and selected the restaurant which is conveniently close to EmSpace, the site of the presentation. 

It will strike no one as a surprise that “bookies” are notorious “foodies.” Sitting between Peter and Sarah and across from Susan, I was positioned in the crossfire of witty and informed chatter about everything under the sun. Including, of course, food adventures. 

Sand dabs were on the appetizer menu and I was over the moon. “What are sand dabs?,” asked Sarah. I explained that they are a small bony flatfish and they seem to show up on the West Coast about now. They weigh between 4 and 12 ounces in their West Coast variety. Properly filleted and simply dredged in seasoned flour and fried in butter, they are, to my palate, as elegant as scallops though quite different in texture. At the old San Francisco restaurant SAM’S, where I first tasted them, they came golden and arranged in a radiating circular pattern with a sprinkle of parsley and a lemon wedge.  Last year when they were briefly offered at New Seasons Market they could be had for $4.98 a pound. 

Really little fishes are on my mind lately because I have been pursuing them with my rod and reel this Spring and Summer. After landing a really big fish, a beautiful wild chinook, early in Spring, I broke out my spinning gear in pursuit of lake trout (skunked repeatedly) and shad (skunked on the Clackamas, skunked on the Columbia.) Oh, how I yearned for shad roe with scrambled eggs. But it seems that in both cases I was simply too late. 

Undaunted I drove out to Sauvies Island where I could fish for the little channel catfish. They are golden and quite beautiful in their weird way. God knows they make, I would learn, the same disturbing sounds that their big East Coast cousins make. 

This was old fashioned pitch-out-your-line-with-enough-weight- to-stand-up-to-the-current-and-present-your-worm-on-a-long-  leader fishing. After a few casts I was feeling comfortable with the process. If I lost a rig to a snag, I added a little more weight and got my line further out. Then it happened, that definitive tap, tap, tap that says this is not a nibble, this is a strike. And I brought in the golden catfish. I was beside myself with happiness. Finally! 

The Vietnamese man who was fishing with his wife came over with two needle nose pliers and showed me how to safely remove the hook. I had my prize. I was tempted to simply packed up and head for home. But, no, I still had plenty of worms and I was getting action. Fifteen minutes later I felt a barely perceptible tug. I set the hook cautiously and reeled in the prettiest little eight inch perch. And that was it. I headed home with dinner on my mind.

I gutted both fishes, scaled the perch and fried them up whole. What a contrast, the perch moist and firm, moderately crispy. A few grains of salt was all that was needed. Gorgeous. The catfish’s flesh soft, the skin very crisp. I put a pool of Frontera Habanero Salsa next it, dragging morsels through the spicy sauce. I have had experiences like this before. Catching trout from my canoe on Red Fish Lake in Idaho and frying them up for breakfast on a campfire. Pulling a sea trout (NOT a small fish!) out of the late morning surf on Assateague Island and tossing it on the bbq, the only accompaniment Eastern Shore strawberries the size of plums and sweet to perfection. Nothing transcends such moments. 

I guess my affection for small fish is genetic. We always had herring, both pickled and in sour cream, on New Year’s Eve. It was good luck, you know. And my Dad was obsessed with sardines. During WWII he was stationed in India for a while. His Army Airforce group was flying support in the China-Burma campaign. At night the guys played cards for tins of sardines, a scarce commodity and their only protein source if they were to escape the regimen of Australian mutton that was the mainstay of the mess there. My dear Father could, at times, have upwards of a hundred tins of sardines on the shelves downstairs in our family house. I personally never allow myself more then ten. 

The appreciation of little fish is not unique with me, of course. Witness the anchovy and its mercurial properties. The late book collector Gian Chiti would bring me a dazzling variety from fancy shops in Milan when he came to Portland on his yearly visits. And venture into James Beard’s AMERICAN COOKERY and fix his recipe for savoury baked smelts.  He rhapsodizes over this dish from his childhood “served cold with a simple salad.” 

Yes. Little fishes, little fishes... To know their pleasures...

Charles Seluzicki

Kitchen Spa Day

I spent my weekend (non-traditional) in the kitchen after an exhausting (traditional) weekend involving monster hours between two jobs, a class and a research paper. When I'm tired, my thoughts scattered, my need to be passively entertained is exceedingly high and I'll stare at the TV too lazy to change the channel, I won't order out food. I'm fine going into the kitchen for a few hours, time in a comfortable, familiar setting makes me less exhausted.

So I dinked around in the kitchen on my days off. Baked peaches, mascarpone (Mascarpone was easy, I need to do that more. It never fails to impress: and I was cooking for myself), pesto, maraschino cherries, Caesar dressing, beef stock, grilled 5# of hosin chicken for bun mi of the future and speaking of bun mi, I pickled 2 liters of diakon and carrot for these future sandwiches - all this activity is a giant effort to have food for the upcoming week ready, a week that is paradoxically nowhere as busy.  

Actually, the beef stock was for the upcoming week but not for me. The dogs are getting a little older and I have to wet their food a little to help them get down. Chicken stock is easy and cheap, but too many days in a row with chicken and they get itchy. So I made beef stock for them, they gave it good reviews. Which surprised me since I kept wanting to apply the cookly arts to simmering beef bones - Should I roast the bones, salt, herbs/boquet garni, caramelized onion and carrot? No, this is to wet their kibble not to make pho or french onion soup. Intellectually, I knew this but instinctually, I really wanted to apply my craft for them. 

 

I also made my own maraschino cherries. I don't always enjoy the chemical aftertaste of traditional maraschinos and for a product based on cherries, they c/should taste like the fruit they are named after. But I like that initial taste of sweet and almond. When I seek out a less processed product, the flavor is always lacking, sometimes the texture too. So, I wanted to try my hand at the official fruit of Oregon State (Go Beavers!). 

Not having access nor the inclination to the processes and additives of canned foods, I knew less chemicals meant more booze was needed to preserve the fruit. A combination of almondy Amaretto (Whose flavor actually comes from bitter apricot pits. The prunus family; cherry-almond-peach-plum-apricot is might incestuous, flavorwise), Kirsch/Cherry Brandy and simple syrup.   

I'm hoping my Old Fashioneds in February are that much better, but in the short term, I have been working on a variation of a cocktail, it's a Shirley Temple but with booze. First round turned out well. 

Next week, Charlie Seluzicki has some words for us, tune in. 

The Taste of Blueberries; The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Totally Not Blueberries

I was really enjoying my blueberries. Shoving fistful after fistful into my mouth, when I had a thought, what exactly do blueberries taste like? They don't taste like a regular berry with that phenoly-clove flavor. They don't taste blue. Neither part of the fruit's name is helpful, I was left solely to the guidance of my tastebuds.

Which, with another birthday on the near horizon are not quite what they used to be. I have come to believe my taste was at its pinnacle between ages 35-38 – still young enough to be useful and well trained enough to be more accurate than a CSI lab. As I age, I find salt, acid and spicy are the 3 components of flavor that get my tastebuds excited. Not so amazing Thai and Vietnamese food are my favorites these days.

So even if I'm at a point in my life where subtitles are lost on my tastebuds, I'm not sure it's me. A survey of coworkers found that no one quite knew how to describe them. Kiwi was the best answer. And that makes sense – kiwis are essentially a commercial breed of Chinese gooseberries. Gooseberries are berries – kinda, they are botanically a currant, but it's flavor we are talking about – this is how wine can be described across a spectrum of flavors – grassy, blackberry, floral, cherry, oaky yet grapes are obviously not grass, flowers, berries, cherries although wine does spend time in oak.

Developing Flavor

I did extensive taste testing and the nice thing about blueberries not having a very specific flavor is that after all the pints I put away, I never got sick of blueberries. The flavors/taste – the skin is astringent, slightly bitter, the flesh sweet, an undetermined sweet, it's easier to identify beet sugar than it is to pick up the blueberry-centric sweetness. There is a nice pop when you chew and a slight melon-kiwi aftertaste.

Other than that nothing really. Then I started to think about the things I like blueberries with – lemon curd in blintzes, with yogurt, and in the bottom of a lemon drop – like an olive and a martini. And before you start to speculate that lemon drops aren't a cocktail fitting a man, I would argue it's the perfect combination of sweet and sour and vodka before I would ever argue that I'm not much of a man.

So here is my conundrum – blueberries don't have a very distinct flavor. I like the fruit best when they are mixed with other highly acidic sweet food (yogurt, although unsweetened in my house, is very high in lactic sugars), foods that could be argued overwhelm whatever natural blueberry taste there is. So why do I like blueberries as much as I do?

I want answers people.

Unrepentant Hoisiner

So there are at least two women I would have married. A few more I probably could have or worse would have wed but for now there is only my shortlist of possibilities: For openers, my pressure cooker is something that I have claimed to love so much, even after 15 years of cohabitation, I would totally betroth. As matter of fact, I would even gay marry, despite it being completely ungendered, if only to piss off social conservatives.

Also outside the realm of legal unions – getting hitched to Hoisin Sauce. I know what you're thinking, I'm just infatuated, it will pass, but you're wrong, you don't understand, I could easily spend the rest of my life with it. Maybe you object to the union because you believe in Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle's sound advice about only cooking with things that have 5 or fewer ingredients and contain only words you understand or can pronounce. I can totally say acetic acid and potassium sorbate and I know they are both preservatives.

Even if you don't have hoisin in your kitchen, you've seen it. Mu Shu Pork, Peking Duck, the chocolate brown liquid with the ketchup like consistency that accompanies Phở . That is hoisin.

Hoisin is Chinese in origin, although it is used extensively in Viet cuisine. It's popular enough to be found in the 'ethnic' aisle of my grocery store – ethnic is somewhat accurate, it is the row of groceries that houses foods from Mexico, China, Vietnam, Thailand, one or two Korean items and all the specifically made kosher foods. Italy gets it's own section, go figure. Still there has to be a better term than ethnic, the phrase is antiquated enough that it makes my oriental rug cringe every time it's uttered.

Hoisin also doesn't make into most encyclopedic food books located in the Saucytorium. Alan Davidson has an entry on Hippopotamus as food but skips hoisin. I know which one I am more likely to eat. Even in the UK, where Mr. Davidson wrote from, hoisin has to be more common than hippo. Most of my other go-to books left out an entry on hoisin – damn them and their western bias. Harold McGee did manage two sentences in On Food and Cooking, telling the reader it is made from the leftovers from soy sauce, thickened with starch and flavored with garlic and spices.

The starch is usually sweet potato or wheat although sometimes glutenous rice is used. The spices vary although most brands use a combination that is reminiscent of 5 Spice or Phở Seasoning. The garlic is pronounced, a gentle soy flavoring is like the bass line driving the flavor.

Andrea Nguyen, author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, cautions to use Pho sparingly and chastises people who reflexively squirt it into Phở for ruining a perfectly good broth. Ms. Nguyen and I have never met but we have this in common – just taste the food before you dump your condiments all over it. Maybe the french fry doesn't need ketchup – just sayin'.

I use my hoisin when grilling foods, because it rocks. Even in the most tomato based BBQ sauce/Mop, Hoisin adds a umami taste, builds on the Malliard reaction and adds just the right amount of garlic and spices to round out flavors. My favorite? Grilled chicken thighs with hoisin in French Bread with pickled carrots & daikon radish and fresh cilantro. I know I'm awful fond of sandwiches but that's the best.

Wow July Already

When I first registered this domain name and set out out to blog, I never thought I would be able to go a month without blogging here. For openers I was laid off, was recovering from heartbreak and was in a low-energy place that most people would call depression, except that word is so all encompassing and loaded, I rather not use it to diagnose, just ballpark the issue.

This blog was my plan out of the mental and economic space I was in, so I wrote, I got better at writing, I got out of the house, I got a paying job and then some paying jobs writing. All and all, my plan worked and the plan was to retire the blog when I got to the point I wanted to be. Except once I got there I didn't want to let go of this space, I still enjoy writing about food, farms, meals, plants, crops and cooking, which is good, I just feel bad I don't have time to post here anymore.

Corn, You're Not Even Trying. Look at the Peas, they are!

Sometimes my Saucyman posting is little more than a good intention because I write for the market, like this entry on their blog, which was fun to write. And this, my monthly submission for the newspaper about what's in season was published here. Other times it's because I'm busy. Last week my dad was here, that's him at the ocean above. It's summer in Portland, the season less intense than predictable months of heat and humidity but in a way it becomes more intense with social obligations, plus the things you want to do, movies, beer, friends, cookouts which isn't to say social obligations are a chore, but they are obligations. All this activity in turn makes me want to spend time alone, yesterday I read Girl Gone – Franzen scale bourgeois loathing, entitlements and self-awareness only with action, okay action greater than defining the lint in your belly button after a prolonged session of navel gazing. Today it was gardening. Tomatoes good, herbs stubborn, corn only mid-calf and my knee wants to point out it's the 4^th of July.

So I want to do better, don't know if I will have the time and energy in the long haul but for July it will get better. Later in the week, why I would totally marry hoisin sauce and not just because it's got good health insurance.