Food, Family, Friday: Tilapia in a Mustard Glaze

Tilapia is the Rodney Dangerfield of fish.  It gets no respect.

In the last third of the 20^th century, Rodney Dangerfield turned every average working class guy’s just-trying-to-make-ends-meet struggle for respectability into comedy gold.  In the 1980s he took his act to a new generation by turning it into movies like “Caddyshack,” “Easy Money” and “Back to School” where he played that same everyman hitting it rich and lampooning stuffed shirt, old money rich people from within their own cloistered institutions.

His classic line – “I don’t get no respect” – lives on now on Youtube for yet new generations.

And Rodney’s basic notion of getting no respect despite trying hard and doing what appears to be the right thing at the time brings me back to tilapia.  Tilapia produces more food than it eats – and it’s a vegetarian.  That means that it can be ecologically produced in farms as it is in the United States and elsewhere.  It is one of the few farmed fish that gets a positive rating from the Monterey BayAquarium’s Seafood Watch guide (albeit noting that farms in Asia are not as ecologically efficient as those in the western hemisphere).  It’s one of the least expensive fish you’ll find in the seafood case and you can find it everywhere.

Yet, tilapia gets no respect.  It has nice texture, but it does not bring a lot of its own flavor.  It’s salmon’s boring, plain-faced cousin.  It doesn’t show up at the party wearing the killer skirt and strappy, high-heeled sandals.  It wears sensible shoes and a wool coat because it’s cold outside.

From a home cook’s perspective, tilapia simply needs a makeover.

Tilapia can be dressed up in any number of ways.  If you’re looking to get dinner on the table without too much fuss, this is what we do.

Ingredients:

1 piece of tilapia per person

whole grain mustard

lots of garlic, chopped

olive oil as needed

Pat the fish dry.  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the garlic and mustard.  Whisk or stir in the oil a little at a time.  You’re not making vinaigrette, so there is no magic to how fast the oil goes in.  But, you only want enough oil so that the mixture will coat the fish.  Leave it quite pasty.

Coat both sides of the fish with the mustard mixture.  Bake it 15 minutes and check to see if it flakes.  Give it a little more time if needed but check it again by 17 minutes.

Serve it alongside rice or simple pasta and some veggies.

And show some respect.

Food, Family, Friday: Sockeye Salmon Saltimbocca

I love salmon.  Like most salmon lovers these days, I try to eat it with as little guilt as possible.  Did it roam free?  Is it really just a science experiment with fins?  Were other fish harmed in its production?  They are all meaningful questions.

To eat Sockeye salmon you either need to shop with a GPS and a map of salmon fisheries or trust the people you’re buying it from.  The species has had an up and down time of it in the northern Pacific Rim in recent years.  But, buying it is just the first challenge. 

For me, the guilt does not really begin until after I cook it.

Sockeye salmon is a much drier salmon than your typical Atlantic or even King salmon.  Cooking it is more of a challenge, one that I fail at more often than I succeed.  The margin of error between “done” and “dry” is slim indeed.  Depending on the contours of the fish itself it could be virtually impossible to grill that salmon to an even state of doneness from thick to thin sides.

But, it’s Sockeye time of year, the reports have been more favorable on fish populations and Whole Foods had fish from rivers with more prosperous salmon runs.  I know that because I waterboarded the fish guy at Whole Foods on where the fish came from (my GPS was busted).  So, I decided to buy some Sockeye. 

All of which begs the question: Now what?  Because now that I have threaded this needle of conscience (waterboarding aside), I must face yet another uncomfortable reality: I suck at Sockeye.

My solution was Salmon Saltimbocca.  It’s inspired by a wonderful Italian dish originally made with veal (and you should see the butchers at Whole Foods run when I ask questions about the free range veal).  If you break saltimbocca down to its core elements, it is just a template that can be adapted to whatever protein you have handy. 

In my case this version lightens it up in calories by using salmon rather than red meat.   I also cut back on the butter you would typically have in an Italian restaurant.  Lazy chefs can easily cover up mediocre cooking with lots of butter.

Harrrrumph.

Along with the butter, Saltimbocca is all about: sage, spinach and prosciutto.  Prosciutto is one of those elements that makes everything taste great.  In the Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it to earth.  But, the myth does not report the inside scoop: that fire thing was just a distraction while his Italian cousin Luigi carried off the prosciutto. 

By wrapping the Sockeye in prosciutto, I could protect the delicate flesh from the heat and it would hold its own moisture while marrying its relatively assertive flavor (by fish standards) with the prosciutto.

That was the theory.

Salmon Saltimbocca

~ 1.3 pounds sockeye salmon, skinned

small handful sage leaves, chopped

1 small bunch spinach

a whole bunch of garlic, chopped

~ 1 to 2 tbsp butter (hey, it’s gonna feed four people)

So, first I had to take the fish off the skin.  This is a combination art and science.  Put the flesh side up on a cutting board.  Use the longest, sharpest knife you have.  Now comes the mental part of the task. 

You cannot go into this thinking that you’re cutting the skin off the flesh.  In reality, you are scraping the flesh off the skin. 

Find a spot, usually a corner on the thin end, and make a small cut so that you can get your knife down to the skin but don’t saw through it.  This is a skill you develop by feeling your way and when you get to the skin it will feel different from the flesh.

Get your knife parallel to the cutting board and then angle it slightly so that the blade is lower than the non-cutting edge.  Now saw slowly back and forth with a gentle forward pressure, scraping the flesh up off the skin.  If you started on a corner, you want to work your way so that you are generally centered width-wise on the fish even if you’re still sawing back and forth as you progress.  Peg the skin down with your other hand as you go so that you keep some tension on it.  The goal is to get as much of the flesh off the skin as possible.  You will no doubt sacrifice a little flesh, but however much you leave behind this time, take that as a baseline and do better next time.  This is something that takes practice.

And voila! 

If yours doesn’t look like this the first time, well, mine didn’t either but that was a while ago.

Cut the salmon into pieces for serving.  Wrap the salmon in the prosciutto.  Get thin prosciutto and you can easily mold it to where you need it to be.  Tear some pieces and patch it together to cover it all if you have to.  It will all hold together.  Set the prosciutto-wrapped salmon aside while you get the pasta fixings going.

Wash, chop and get your spinach ready to go.  Chop some sage.  How much?  Depends on how big the leaves are.  Sage is a core element of this dish.  But, a little sage can go a long way.  So, basically, I pull leaves until I think I have enough and then pull a couple more.

If that sounds inexact and unscientific, well heckfire this dish is not supposed to be made with salmon to begin with.  I’m improvising on an improvisation here.

In the same vein, chop as much garlic as you can stand.  Then chop some more.

Boil some pasta according to directions.  Splurge on some good artisanal pasta for this dish.

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.  You need a skillet which is going into that oven for just a few minutes.

Pour a middling amount of olive oil into the oven-ready pan and heat it over a medium to medium-high flame.  Place your salmon-prosciutto packages into the pan and let them sizzle.  Depending on your stove this is probably three to four minutes, but you want the prosciutto to brown some on the bottom. 

Turn the packages gently and keep them on the stove for just a moment or two, then put the pan in the oven.  Total time in the oven will be another four to five minutes.  Again, you’ll have some color on the bottom and where the salmon is peeking out it will look pink and ready to eat.

Remove the salmon to a plate and keep warm.  Off the heat, add the butter.  Don’t put the pan back on the heat until the butter is melted.  Add the garlic.  Once it is fragrant, add your chopped sage and stir it together.  Moments later, add the spinach and stir it until the spinach is wilted.  While the moisture from the spinach is all swizzled with the butter, add your pasta and combine it all.

Serve the salmon packages on a bed of the pasta.

It was wonderful.  As little guilt as possible.  Sorry about that waterboarding thing. 

Garlic-a-Go-Go: The Dirty Harry Method

My daughter’s gift is grace.  She moves lightly, like an angel on a cloud.  She dances ballet – en pointe no less {NOTE: That’s French for “on your toes” for all the Dads out there}.  She is also a synchronized swimmer, the water gratefully accepting her flowing presence as a kindred spirit.

But, ask her to help with the garlic and she turns into Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan, clearing the streets of San Francisco of all punks, laughing maniacs and garlic cloves.  The latter she obliterates, till there is nothing but a smudge of a whisper of where garlic might once have been.

I take credit for inventing the Dirty Harry method of crushing garlic, but my daughter perfected it.  If you watch all the cooking shows (well, not humanly possible to watch all the cooking shows but you know what I mean) you see the chefs crush garlic with their knives.  That’s fine when Giada de Laurentis has one or two cloves to chop, but we go through a lot of garlic in this house.  It’s not unusual for anything worth cooking to be worth an entire bulb of the aromatic jewels.  So, about a year ago I figured there had to be a way to speed up the process of prepping the garlic.  Some cloves can be stubborn and resist the side of the knife and your fist.  So, I got out the meat hammer and just started whacking them.  It worked just as well as Dirty Harry’s .44 magnum – ya hit ‘em once and they stay down.

Say it with me now, and get all squinty-eyed:

“I know what you’re thinkin’, did he clobber six cloves or only five.  Well, with the heady aroma wafting into my nostrils, I kinda lost track myself.  But, bein’ this is a meat hammer, a pound and a half of steel on a stick, you gotta be asking yourself one question – do I feel hungry?  Well, do ya punk?”

Somewhere at the non-Clint Eastwood end of the guy spectrum, even Alton Brown would appreciate the Dirty Harry method as it takes the meat mallet out of the uni-tasker category.  And, yes, I know that Clint Eastwood has likely never said the word “wafting.”

So, one evening I invited my daughter into the kitchen for a little father-daughter bonding.  As usual, she was quietly reading a book and stumbled into the kitchen, her brown hair framing her delicate face.  She’s a quiet, intelligent, loving early teen with a heart full of compassion for creation.  I instructed her in the basic technique: “Hold the mallet above the clove and WHACK IT!”  I expertly crushed a clove and peeled the remaining skin from the flesh.

She took the mallet gingerly, examining it in detail.  From her petite frame, she poised a trembling hand above an unsuspecting clove and I thought I would offer encouragement since violence against anything is just not in her nature: “Now the mistake you’ll make the first time is not hitting it hard enou –“

I was cut off by a deafening sound as a heavenly-scented mushroom cloud rose above the cutting board.  As the cloud cleared, I heard someone laughing a bit maniacally, like a Dirty Harry villain, and saw my daughter place another clove in front of her like loading a .44 magnum round into the chamber.

Again, she annihilated a clove with a loud “AIYEEEEE” banshee cry. 

Then the phone rang.  It was the folks from the European Union’s nuclear accelerator in France wondering what was going on.  I told them the planet was not in jeopardy, I was just cooking.  I congratulated them for being en pointe and hung up.

Across the rubble of the kitchen, my daughter stood, breathing heavily.  Garlic covered everything, like a light dusting of tasty snow.  Suddenly, she was my demure, quiet daughter again.

“Anything else?” she asked with a smile.

“No.  No, I’ll take it from here thanks.  Go read your book.”

“OK, Daddy.”