Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

A Quick Dinner from Leftovers

I know I have touched on this a bunch of times before, but it bears repeating: having leftovers in the refrigerator really helps put dinners on the table quickly. A case in point: I had a couple pieces of Steelhead Trout to cook for dinner and on rummaging the fridge, I found some roasted haricots verts, a little black olive tapenade, and a half a jar of piquillo peppers from various recent dinners.

Steelhead Trout with Piquillo White Beans and Haricots Verts

While the fish was cooking, I reheated the green beans and blitzed a can of cannellini in the food processor with the four or five leftover piquillos. By the time the fish was done, the plate was ready to assemble, a really tasty and nice looking dinner in under seven minutes.

Spaghetti Squash with Bison Ragù

Being limited to the house by COVID started us off the wrong path, gaining a ton of weight through the summer when we are normally a lot more active than we were this year. We've really been watching what we're eating and drinking since the end of August and we're down over a combined 30 pounds now.

We're eating a lower-carb diet and the carbs we are eating are complex carbs such as beans and oats. In addition, we are watching our fat intake, eating mostly lower fat proteins. In recent weeks, we are shifting to a mainly seafood and vegetarian diet, so the meat that we are eating is limited to what we have stored in the freezer.

We still had a pound of 90% lean ground bison in the freezer and what better to do with ground meat on a cold day than a ragù? We also have a local produce store that is seasonal, closing just before Thanksgiving each fall. In the last week or so, everything is marked way down and we stocked up on storage vegetables: onions and several winter squash, including a few spaghetti squashes. So it is natural with our low-carb outlook to want to put our lovely bison ragù on ersatz spaghetti, roasted spaghetti squash.

Spaghetti Squash with Bison Ragù

Don't get me wrong: this dish is not handmade pasta with long-cooked salsa bolognese, but it is a waist-friendly dish for a cold day, delicious in its own right.

Soffritto for Ragù

Sauce Starting to Cook

Note Color Change in Finished Sauce

When I am making a long-cooked full-fat ragù, I first cook cubes of meat in plenty of fat to brown it well, then remove them from the pan, leaving behind the fat in which to cook the soffritto with garlic and dried basil. My soffritto is generally equal parts onions, carrots, and celery, and I typically have a higher vegetable to meat ratio than is traditional, because I am often trying to stretch a little meat a long way.

Once the soffritto is soft, I deglaze with white wine and reduce that to nothing, then add a good amount of heavy cream and a bunch of peeled and seeded tomatoes along with the meat. The sauce will then cook for several hours until is ready to go, the meat being shredded just by the action of stirring the pot. You need to be attentive to stirring the pot towards the end because the sauce will be really thick and can burn easily enough.

Right, so that's the traditional method that takes hours to make. But what if you only have 45 minutes to get dinner on the table and you want a low-fat sauce?

I start by browning lean ground meat, in this case bison, as best as I can with a little pan spray. When the meat is cooked through, I add the soffrito right in with the meat and cook for a few more minutes until the onions turn translucent.

Then I splash the pan with a little white wine for form, not because there are any brown bits on the bottom of the pan to scrape off into the sauce. I omit the cream to lower the fat, but also because I find that cream takes hours to integrate into the sauce and become that je ne sais quoi for which salsa bolognese is renowned.

The tomatoes go in and the sauce cooks for as much or little time as I have before needing to get dinner on the table. The sauce above cooked for about 45 minutes. You can see the color change from beginning to end.

Kitchen Basics: Roasting Spaghetti Squash

Spaghetti Squash Ready for Oven

Stringing Roasted Spaghetti Squash with a Fork

Roasting spaghetti squash is dead simple. The only tricky part is splitting the squash in two lengthwise, principally because the squash wants to roll on the cutting board. If you are uncomfortable with the squash rolling a bit, wedge a dish towel under both sides to form a cradle for it.

Drive the tip of your knife into the top of the squash and lever the blade down like the handle of a paper cutter. Then remove the knife and reposition it to the end of the cut you have opened, repeating until you split the squash in two.

The stem end is often a really tricky proposition in that the stem will not split, so start at the stem end and work your way to the other end, leaving the stem intact. When the two haves are nearly separated and joined only by the stem, you can break the two halves apart with your hands.

Using a spoon, scrape out all the seeds. You can roast and eat the squash seeds if you like or put them in the compost pile so you have baby squash coming up everywhere in the spring!

Oil the cut surfaces of the squash and place the cut faces down on a sheet tray. Place in a moderate oven (350F) and roast until you can easily pierce the shell with a knife, half an hour or longer.

Remove from the oven and let cool to the point where you can handle the squash. Using a fork, scrape out the squash strands lengthwise down the squash, leaving an empty shell.

You can pitch the shells or for something different, you can combine the squash with other ingredients and stuff it back into one of the halves, then rebake it for twice-baked spaghetti squash. If your stuffed squash wants to roll on your sheet tray, wedge both sides with a ball of aluminum foil.

Thanksgiving 2020: Lasagna

Once again, it is Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday. While this infamous year of 2020 has been terrible for many reasons and thankless in many regards, we should all be able to find something in our lives to be thankful for. Despite all the negatives this year, Ann and I are grateful that we and our kids are well, that the girls have not contracted COVID despite working in healthcare, that Carter has chosen a direction for his life by enlisting in the Army (and is currently at boot), and that we are able to make ends meet, even if times are lean.

Our 2020 Thanksgiving celebration will be truly odd, one spent without friends and family. None of our friends want to risk exposure by coming for dinner any more than we want to by going to their homes. Ditto for family, but our family is all back East and getting together wouldn't have been possible anyway. Still, Thanksgiving is a time to gather and celebrate and we will miss that this year. Damn this virus!

Back in September, Ann and I got to kicking around Thanksgiving and what to do, knowing that hosting friends and family was a long shot. I had, some years ago, proposed doing an off-the-wall Thanksgiving meal: a paella, all the traditional turkey and flavors rolled into one totally non-standard pan of rice cooked over a fire in the back yard. That didn't fly at the time and we shelved the idea for the future, maybe next year. In a similar spirit this highly non-traditional year, Ann asked, "Why not make a lasagna?"

Thanksgiving Lasagna: Delicious!

Why not? Ann and I have cooked decades of traditional Thanksgiving dinners, so really, why not something totally off the wall?

For me, a lasagna will be almost new territory, my experience with lasagna being scant. It's not a dish that I ever eat and the first and only lasagna that I ever made was in 1985! You cannot count those times at the restaurant when we would cook a two-foot long sheet of pasta and weave it back and forth in a bowl, putting a filling between each fold, and rushing it to the dining room. Giant pain in the rear to plate? Check. Cool dish and fun presentation? Check. Lasagna? Definitely not.

After a couple days of imagining what a Thanksgiving-style lasagna could be, I proposed to Ann to do two layers of turkey in gravy, and between those a layer of sage pork sausage in béchamel and a layer of "turkey stuffing" ricotta, ricotta flavored with all the aromatics that go into traditional Thanksgiving stuffing. Ann said, "It needs mushrooms." And so I will add some dried porcini to really amp up the pork sausage béchamel (you know that's a fancy term for what we call sausage gravy and put on our biscuits down South!). Finally, I decided to top the whole shebang with cornbread breadcrumbs to give it a great top crust.

This plan entails a bit of prep work: roasting turkey with our traditional pancetta butter under the skin, making cornbread and cornbread breadcrumbs, making turkey stock, making turkey gravy, prepping and sweating the mirepoix for the ricotta, making the sausage, and then the sausage béchamel. This is all before par-cooking any lasagne and building and baking the lasagna, the fun part in which Ann and I will make a little mess in the kitchen.

Fortunately, almost all of the work can be done in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, leaving just the easy and fun part for the day of. The best thing about spreading the prep out over several days is spreading the resulting dishes out over several days too. There is nothing quite like making a complicated meal requiring hours of work only to be confronted by mountains of dishes afterward.

The results were fantastic. Sometimes dishes that take a lot of effort to prepare are not worth the effort. This was not one of those times. A highlight for the both of us were the super crunchy cornbread breadcrumbs on top.

Monday November 16, 2020

Because of COVID, I have no desire to be out at the grocery store shopping along with the crowds the week of Thanksgiving, so I am doing all my shopping the week before. Everything will keep or can go in the freezer. The turkey parts that I want, necks for the gravy and stock and thighs for the turkey layers, are frozen when I buy them at the store, so they go right back into the freezer once home.

My timing at the grocery store proves to be impeccable. After searching for turkey thighs without luck but having been told that they would be for sale, I approach a man stocking a meat case and ask him about them. As he finishes slicing open the box in front of him, he reaches inside and pulls out a package of frozen turkey thighs for me. I am almost too early to get them. I am so glad that I do not have to make another trip to the store with COVID spiking again.

Sunday November 22, 2020

Thanksgiving prep begins today, five days out from the big event. I take the turkey thighs out of the freezer to thaw over the next couple of days. Today's job is making the stock from which I will ultimately make the gravy. First thing this morning, four pounds of turkey necks that I thawed over the last couple of days go into the oven at 350F to roast. After an hour or 90 minutes, I flip them over and roast them another 45 minutes to an hour. Timing is not critical as long as they brown well on all sides.

Turkey Necks Ready for the Oven

Turkey necks are one of my favorite parts of the bird and are a source of fine and flavorful dark meat. I always make my stock from them and after picking the meat from the roasted necks, the meat goes into my Thanksgiving gravy, as it will this year once again. Besides being great for stock, necks are also delicious eating on their own. One of my favorite ways to prepare them is to brine them and then smoke them low and slow until they are deliciously golden and falling apart, a sinful treat.

Turkey Stock Mise en Place

Great gravy requires great stock and great stock requires a lot of patience. After the necks roast for the better part of the morning, the stock takes the entire afternoon, coming down from a gallon to about five cups, all told.

To make the stock, the roasted necks go into a stock pot with all their pan drippings; the tough outer leaves of a leek; a medium onion, chopped with peel on; a heart of celery, chopped; two of my last remaining sprigs of lovage; a bunch of English thyme; and a sprig of sage. This gets covered in water and left to simmer all afternoon. The house smells like Thanksgiving which is so appropriate because it is gray and 37 degrees and raw and miserable outside. The kitchen should be and is a haven, a pleasant respite from outside.

Turkey Stock and Neck Meat

After cooking at the barest simmer all afternoon, the stock is ready. Ann helps strain the stock and I put it into containers for the refrigerator. Once the necks cool enough to handle, I start picking the meat, a favorite task of mine because it reminds me of picking necks with my mother. It is extremely difficult to pick all the meat from the neck bones with your fingers, leaving delicious morsels to eat for anyone willing to suck on the bones. I helped my mom picked neck bones just for this reason, so that I could snack on the remaining meat. I give Ann a few necks bones to try; they are delicious.

Monday November 23, 2020

Today I just have a couple of things that I want to get done: making the cornbread for the cornbread breadcrumb topping for the lasagna and making the pancetta butter to use in roasting the turkey thighs.

Cornbread Hot out of the Oven

Cornbread is a thing of beauty and I have some locally milled corn that will make delicious cornbread. This cornbread is destined to be crumbled and dried out in the oven for a topping, so I am not worried about making hipster, fluffy, tender, melt-in-your-mouth cornbread by adding a lot of leavening and fat. In fact, I am making old school pioneer-grade cornbread: equal parts flour and cornmeal, a bit of baking powder, a bit of salt, an egg, and enough milk to make it into a batter. I measure nothing: this is how I always make cornbread, by feel. The result is outstanding and Ann and I cannot resist nibbling.

Pancetta Butter

It is tradition now at our house, our 12th Thanksgiving together, to stuff pancetta butter between the skin of the turkey and the meat before roasting it to yield a moist, tender, and flavorful result. Being empty nesters, we no longer cook an entire bird to feed a crowd of friends and family. We switched to thighs a few years back because they are so much better than breasts which are prone to dry out and be flavorless. Even so, our tradition remains and we put pancetta butter under the skin of the thighs. All the resulting pancetta-flavored fat in the roasting pan becomes the base for amazing gravy.

I put four ounces of diced pancetta in the food processor and process until I cannot get it any finer. This ancient Robot Coupe from Ann's mother is not even close to being in the same league as the dual 2.5 horsepower processors we had at the restaurant, but it suffices for the few times a year when I actually use a machine to prep food. Those big commercial machines are just too big for home use, but I do miss the horsepower.

Next I add four ounces of butter and process until smooth. I pull a rock hard stick of butter out of the fridge and set it near the vent for the oven to soften a bit while the necks roast. To process a compound butter, you want the butter pliable but not soft; room temperature is great. In another flash back to the restaurant, I think how weird it is to have butter in quarters. We used to get one-pound solid chunks of butter in 36-pound cases and we'd use several pounds a day. You can imagine what a pain in the neck it would be to unwrap all those quarters which is why the trade uses whole pound or larger blocks.

I put the pancetta butter on a sheet of film wrap, roll it into a log, and put it in the refrigerator for use tomorrow in roasting the turkey.

Tuesday November 24, 2020

I have a few things to do today: roast the turkey thighs, make cranberry sauce, and toast cornbread breadcrumbs. None of these things take a lot of time and in between, I have plenty of projects around the house to keep me busy. 

Turkey Thighs with Pancetta Butter Under Skind

My four turkey thighs weigh 6.6 pounds, exactly 3 kilos, will take 3 hours to roast at 350F, and will yield a 2-liter container stuffed full of pulled turkey. I put an ounce of pancetta butter under the skin of each, give them a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and put them in the oven. Despite not setting a timer, there is no possibility that we could forget them and overcook them: after 45 minutes, the smell of roasting turkey is driving us insane!

Cranberry-Orange Relish

My old standby cranberry relish is a single orange, a bag of cranberries, and enough sugar to bring the relish into balance. Since when did cranberries start being packed in 12-ounce bags? They used to be a pound, but I admit that during my restaurant days, we would buy them by the case, probably 10 or 15 pounds at a pop. It has been a very long time since I handled cranberries in retail packaging.

Cranberry-Orange Relish

1 seedless orange
12 ounces of fresh cranberries
1/2 cup (or more) granulated sugar, to taste

Quarter the skin-on seedless orange lengthwise and then halve each resulting quarter widthwise into eighths. If you see a large core or area of pith, cut it out; otherwise, into the food processor it goes, skin and all. Blitz the orange into small pieces as you can see in the photo above. Then in go the cranberries and a half a cup of sugar. A few brief pulses is enough to create the sauce you see above. Taste and adjust the sugar to your liking. Ann and I like our sauce rather more tart than sweet. This sauce is better after it has worked in the refrigerator for 48 hours, so don't be afraid to make it well in advance.

Cornbread Breadcrumbs

The cranberry sauce made, I crumble the cornbread onto a sheet tray and put it in the oven below the turkey. I turn the crumbs at ten minutes and remove them at 20 minutes. After they cool, I put them in a seal-top bag so that they will not go stale on contact with our rain-laden air.

Roasted Turkey Thighs: That Skin!

At two hours and twenty minutes, I check the turkey thighs. The skin is a little pallid and a knife does not pierce to the center as easily as it should. I go off and do some work in the garage, coming back to remove the thighs after three hours. The smell on coming back into the house is intoxicating. Just look at that skin! I confess that Ann and I did sample a bit. We may be watching what we eat very carefully, but this is Thanksgiving and were we to pass on eating some crispy insanely good turkey skin, you would have to revoke our foodie cards!

After the turkey cools for a couple hours, I pull it off the bone and put it in the fridge. Then I pour all the fat into a container and deglaze the pan with hot water, scraping all the bits up. The water goes in with the fat and the whole thing into the refrigerator. I will pull the fat off the top of the juices when I go to make the stock. The fat and the leftover pancetta butter along with flour will form the roux and the roasting juices and stock I made yesterday will finish the gravy on Thursday.

Wednesday November 25, 2020

With one day left before Thanksgiving, I have a relatively small list of things to get done with most of the work devoted to prepping vegetables and herbs. I knock out two trivial tasks first: rehydrating porcini and grating pecorino romano for the top of the lasagna.

Rehydrating Porcini

Grating Pecorino

Next up is the vegetable prep for the stuffing-flavored ricotta cheese layer. Our stuffing always includes leeks, onions, and celery. For herbs, I go out to the yard and cut parsley, sage, lovage, and thyme.

Veg for the Stuffing-Flavored Ricotta

Once I prep the celery, onions, and leeks, I start in on the herbs by first chopping the parsley and lovage and adding that to the vegetables. I then start in on the thyme and sage, part of which will go in the ricotta vegetables and part of which I will use in seasoning the sausage.

Sausage Seasoning: Garlic, Red Pepper Flakes, Sage, and Thyme

Over the years, I have made a lot of sausage of many kinds. The one that reminds me most of my childhood in Virginia is flavored simply with garlic, red pepper flakes, thyme, and sage. But surely, I use much greater quantities than most people for I love assertive sausage. Garlic is not common in Virginia sausage, which tends to sage and black pepper, but I have to have it.

Ricotta Veg and Herbs and Sausage, Ready for Tomorrow

After all the prep is complete, Ann and I make a run to the wine store to pick up a case of local Pinot that has come in as well as to look for a bottle of Barolo to accompany our lasagna. We drink local Pinot all the time, but for this special meal, we want to drink our splurge wine, Nebbiolo. If we could afford it, we would have a cellar full of Gaja Barbaresco. We can't and rarely can we even pop for a good bottle of Barolo, but for Thanksgiving, we take the plunge.

Ricotta Mix

Back home, I get to sweating the vegetables and herbs and then mix them with the ricotta. After I season the ricotta with salt, I mix in a couple of eggs and put the mix in the refrigerator to await tomorrow. Tomorrow, the ricotta mix will taste twice as good as it does today.

And that's it. That's all the prep that I can do in advance, spread over four days. Tomorrow, I have to make gravy and mix it with the turkey, cook the sausage with the mushrooms and make a thick béchamel, and par-cook the lasagne. After that, Ann and I will assemble the lasagna and put it in the oven.

Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2020

Ann and I decide that we'd like to eat late afternoon, four or so, which means that we need do nothing in the kitchen before one in the afternoon. After working out in the garage and doing some yard work on the first non-rainy day in many days, I come in, wash up, and get to cooking.

Roux for Gravy

Step one today is to make the gravy which will sauce the pulled turkey meat. The roux (flour) base of the gravy will help set the turkey layers. First, I separate the fat from the top of the container of pan drippings from roasting the turkey. The fat layer is solidified from its stay in the fridge for a couple of days, so it comes out easy enough. I put it on high heat and let it cook for several minutes as it boils off all the congealed stock clinging to the fat.

When the pan stops crackling, I add the flour, two big heaping spoonsful. A word of warning: adding damp flour to smoking hot fat is not something you should do haphazardly. The hot fat will flash the water in the flour to steam immediately and it may erupt violently in a volcano of superheated roux. There is a reason in the bayous that they call roux Cajun Napalm. Perhaps you should add flour to cool or cooler fat.

I cook the roux as I have for thousands of gravies and pots of gumbo until it becomes a pretty brown. When it reaches my desired color, I add all the roasting pan drippings and most of a quart of turkey stock. In no time over high heat, it has become gravy. I season it and mix all but a tiny bit into the turkey. Then, I let my taster-in-chief sample and season the turkey-gravy mix while I move on to the béchamel layer.

I spray my lasagna pan, a standard half hotel pan, with pan spray and smear the remaining gravy on the bottom of the pan to keep the first layer of noodles from sticking and/or drying out.

Pork Sausage, Rehydrated and Chopped Porcini, and Pancetta Butter

To start the béchamel layer, I first must cook the sausage that I made yesterday. I put the sausage, the leftover pancetta butter, and chopped porcini into a large skillet and start it cooking.

I rehydrated the porcini yesterday and first thing today, I drained and chopped the porcini, then started bringing the porcini stock down to concentrate it. Alas, I got caught up in doing errands outside and my flame was higher than I thought it was. I came in just as the smoke detector started blaring, the first time for a good reason, of all the hundreds of times it has gone off. I have a burned pan and no mushroom stock to show for my backyard chores. There's a lesson in here somewhere. I move forward without any porcini stock to add to the béchamel, though I could have made more simply enough.

When the sausage is cooked through, I stir in a spoonful of flour well as it cooks for a couple of minutes. Then I add milk, probably a pint or so, maybe a couple ounces more. I cook the béchamel until it becomes very thick. My official taste tester checks it out and proclaims it awesome. She says, "Make this next time we have biscuits and gravy!" I am proud that a Manhattan-born Italian girl recognizes it for what it truly is, what we Southerners call gravy. The Italians would call this besciamella and the French béchamel. 

Sausage Gravy Cooking

All three of the layer fillings complete, there's only one thing to do and that is cook some noodles and get after it. I count out 22 lasagne, four for each of the five layers, and two spares. I cook my noodles until they just become pliable, four minutes, rather than the 8-10 minutes the package suggests. I cool them immediately under running cold water to stop them from cooking further. I have no fear that the noodles will not finish cooking in the oven: I have cooked literally tons of pasta in my life, one, two, or five pounds at a time.

The noodles done, I build the lasagna. I thought Ann would help assemble, but instead she was filming it all live for her friends on Facebook. The layers went in in quick succession from bottom to top:

gravy

pasta

turkey

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

ricotta

pasta

béchamel

pasta

turkey

scant layer of mozzarella

pasta

very thin layer of béchamel (to keep the pasta from getting hard)

pecorino romano

cornbread breadcrumbs

The oven preheats to 375F while I assemble the layers and is at temperature just as I am ready to put the lasagna in to cook. I cover it with foil and set the timer for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, I uncover the pan and let it go for another 20 minutes to brown the top.

Lasagna Ready to Bake

Lasagna out of the Oven

After cooling for an additional 20 minutes, the lasagna is ready to serve. I cut it into 12 portions, each of which is a massive meal for one person. We head to the table, a pretty table that Ann has set for just the two of us, and start in on our pieces of lasagna. After all the work, it turns out so well, but is so filling that we immediately feel the need to walk around the block before dusk turns to dark.

Thanksgiving Napkin Rings

We sip on glasses of Barolo while the lasagna bakes and finish the bottle with dinner. Though we mainly live on Pinot Noir, we are Nebbiolo fiends. We love it for what it has in common with Pinot: light body and high acidity. And we love it more for how it differs from Pinot: firm tannins and extraordinary complexity of nose and flavors. For us, this particular bottle is in the middle of the pack of all the Nebbiolo we have tasted. It ranks even lower on the price-to-value scale. We are spoiled: we judge it an adequate wine, but the unspoken verdict is that we are disappointed. It should be much better for the price we paid. Still, a bottle of Nebbiolo in a sea of Pinot Noir is a breath of fresh air.

Barolo: It's What's for Thanksgiving

And so ends Thanksgiving 2020. Maybe, just maybe, I'll fire up the paellera and do a Thanksgiving paella next year. We'd need a crowd though: one of my paellas feeds 12-16 people. Now where can I get some turkey wings to put in the paella?

Steelhead Trout with Curried Zucchini Noodles

Ann loves zucchini noodles. I'm pretty ambivalent about them, but she really seems to love them to the point where she asked me to buy a turner for our home kitchen. Long before the "zoodle" craze, we were turning squash and lots of other vegetables into noodles at the restaurant. We often turned raw beets to toss with arugula and goat cheese in a wonderful and unexpected salad.

With our primary farmers market closed for the season now, our selection of vegetables is really hit or miss, but if there is nothing better looking at the grocery store, the summer squashes always seem to be decent looking.

Quick Dinner: Steelhead Trout on Curried Zucchini Noodles

The other night I was looking for a dinner that I could pull off in 15 minutes and armed with two zucchini and 3/4 of a pound of steelhead trout, I decided to make Ann's favorite form of zucchini as an accompaniment to the fish.

Annie Helps Turn the Noodles

So many people blanch zucchini noodles in water, but in most cases, I think that this is a fail. It only seems to dilute the noodles. If they are going in a sauté, I prefer to put them in raw. It takes almost no time on the heat to cook them through.

For this dish, I started half a sliced onion going in a large skillet and once they it translucent, I added the the zucchini and a large spoonful of very fresh Madras curry powder. In less than two minutes, they were on the plate as a base for the fish.

I don't really use pre-prepared spice mixes in my cooking, but I have a weakness for yellow Madras curry powder. I know that it is not in any way Indian or even authentic, but it has a flavor that brings back memories of my mother's (fairly not good) chicken curry and of one of my favorite quick noshes, Singapore noodles.

Pinot Noir for Pregame

As we were turning the noodles, we opened a stellar local Pinot Noir. McKinlay is unknown even to most people locally, yet they consistently produce some of the most amazing Pinot in Oregon.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade

Each time we go to or through Newberg, a town about 20 minutes from the house, we make a point to go to the fish market there. Although the prices are spendy, the quality is extremely good. On this trip, I bought a small piece of halibut for our dinner. 

With a mild white fish such as halibut, I love a salty element to complement it and tapenade is high on my list of salty condiments, being a mixture of olives, capers, and anchovies.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade
and Roasted Haricots Filets

Tapenade Ingredients: Capers, Kalamata Olives, Garlic, Thyme

While we used to buy salted anchovies by the kilo at the restaurant, I have no access to them here in the Willamette Valley. To compensate, I will often add a splash of fish sauce to those dishes that require anchovies. In this case, I had plenty of fish flavor from the halibut, so I went ahead without anchovies. For this quantity of olives and depending on the size of the anchovies, I would probably peel one filet off the backbone for this tapenade. If the anchovy were tiny as sometimes happens, I would use perhaps both filets.

Finished Tapenade

To make the tapendade, I just chopped all the ingredients and mixed them right on the cutting board. Tapenade really is that simple. I don't like to put small quantities in the food processor: the texture is better when cut by hand.

Green Beans Tossed in Olive Oil, Ready to Roast

French Black Steel Puts a Beautiful Crust on Fish

My Secret Fish Spatula

Years ago, I had a couple nice French fish spatulas, which seem to be all the rage among chefs, but they just never suited me. In the professional kitchen, you have a personal relationship with your tools and if something doesn't work, it is time to move on. I ended up giving my fish spatulas to two of my junior cooks.

My preference is a big perforated pancake spatula that I have cooked with for 30-plus years that suits my hand and has turned tens of thousands of pieces of fish and scallops. There are a couple of times when the big spatula is not the best tool for the job: in a pan that is loaded with closely spaced scallops and when cooking long, slender pieces of fish such as the halibut in the photo above.

In cases like this, I go into my pastry toolbox and get out a Matfer offset icing spatula which is a perfect tool, even if designed for another use. Being a sauté guy, I have turned way more fish with this spatula than I have iced cakes!

Halibut Deserves a Great Pinot Noir

Please don't tell me that red wine and fish don't go together. Please. Besides being utter nonsense, it is also utter nonsense. In America, we really focus on what wine goes with which food. Is it any wonder that a great many people are put off of wine because all these "rules?" Granted that some fish and red wine is a train wreck and some wine and food pairings are astoundingly more than the sum of their parts, but I had a real eye opening in France many decades ago. The French do things differently: except in the non-wine producing areas, everyone drinks the local wine with whatever they're eating, pairing be damned.

A case in point: on one trip to wine country, we ended up in a small restaurant in the town of Romanèche-Thorins, home to Georges Duboeuf, in the Beaujolais. For the table, we ordered a simply roasted Bresse chicken. And what did we drink? The same thing that all the other tables were drinking: Cru Beaujolais, red wine with roast chicken, something that breaks all the so-called "rules" in the US.

In any case, halibut is a mild meaty fish that loves to be paired with a lighter red wine. The earthy and salty flavors in the tapenade really help marry the wine and the fish. And of course, we're drinking local because we live (intentionally) in one of the very best wine growing areas of the world. For our halibut, we chose a wine from a small producer made from Coury clone Pinot Noir from one of the great vineyards in Oregon, planted in 1971. It was a great pairing.

Chicken, Nopalito, and Black Bean Tacos

I like to make these tacos when I have chicken left over in the refrigerator from some previous dish. By bulking out the chicken with onions, nopalitos, and black beans, seven or eight ounces of chicken will easily and fully feed two people by making a dozen tacos.

Chicken, Nopalito, and Black Bean Tacos with Pineapple Salsa

Garlic, Nopalitos, Chicken, and Onions

Start with a large yellow onion cut into strips, a couple cloves of minced garlic, a cup or so of pickled nopalitos, and something under a half a pound of pulled cooked chicken. In a pan filmed with oil, cook the onions until they become translucent. Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two longer. Next into the pan go the chicken, nopalitos, and a drained and rinsed can of black beans. Splash the pan with a little water just to get all the flavors to mingle and stop cooking when the onions are crunchy-soft. I could eat tacos of just these onions!

Pineapple Salsa

We eat a lot of fish tacos at our house. Probably once a week, I get some local rockfish, put a dry rub on it, and cook it for tacos. The variables in our tacos are the slaw (I make a big batch every three weeks or so) and the salsa, which I generally make to order. Tangy tart pineapple salsa is just wonderful on fish tacos and it could not be simpler to make.

Tangy, Salty, Fresh, Spicy Pineapple Salsa

This is a classic salsa in my book, containing nothing but a fruit, an onion, cilantro, spice, lime juice, and salt. Click here for a tutorial on dicing pineapple.

1 pineapple, diced
1 serrano chile, finely minced (deseed for less heat; I do not)
1 bunch green onions, diced
1 bunch cilantro, destemmed and chopped
juice of half of one lime (or more depending on how sweet or tart the pineapple is)
half a teaspoon of Kosher salt, or to taste

Certainly you can substitute any onion for the green onion and any spice for the serrano. It's your salsa; make it your way.

Kitchen Basics: Dicing Pineapple

Pineapples can seem daunting to prepare because of their odd shape, but with a couple of tricks, they become child's play. Following is a photo essay on prepping pineapples. The end result here is diced pineapple, which I ultimately used for salsa, but using these techniques, you can cut your pineapple into whatever size pieces you desire.

Lay the Pineapple Flat on the Board

Remove Both the Top and Bottom

Standing on End, Remove the Sides in Strips
Cut Deep Enough to Remove the "Eyes"

Once Peeled, Slice in Half Lengthwise, Then Again Into Quarters

Remove the Core on the Bias

Four Quarters Ready to Slice

Bottom to Top: Quarter, Strips, Halved Strips, Dice