Roasted Rockfish with Mapo Dofu

Ann asked me to make Rockfish with Mapo Dofu sauce on Monday and so I obliged her, stopping by the store on the way home and getting some tofu and a rockfish.

Roasted Rockfish with Mapo Dofu

My kitchen Spanish was not good enough to keep my fish unmolested when I turned it over to the fish guy to scale with the instructions, "limpio y entero, con cabeza, por favor" and so it came home without fins or tail. Oh well, it would have been worse had I ordered it in English.

The Guest of Honor

I decided to do a vegetarian mapo dofu substituting shiitake mushrooms for ground pork, sautéing them in a bit of sesame oil with lots of garlic and ginger. Then I added pickled mustard stems, spicy bean paste, a sprinkle of freshly ground Sichuan peppercorns (in the spice mill cup), and a splash of soy sauce. After this cooked for a minute, I added a little water and the tofu, thickened the sauce lightly with a touch of corn starch slurry, and adjusted the seasoning, adding a bit more spicy bean sauce because I thought it wasn't spicy enough in the la sense, chile spice. It was plenty spicy in the ma sense, numbing and tingling, from the Sichuan peppercorns.

Mapo Dofu Mise en Place

Steelhead Trout with Orange-Bean Sauce

After pigging out for the holidays, we're both feeling the need to eat lighter and so I brought home some salad fixings and a side of Steelhead Trout.



I Love Salad

I don't fix that many salads, which is a bit odd, because I love them a lot. This one is very simple: torn butter lettuces, grape tomatoes, blanched haricots verts, and some croutons I made from a piece of stale baguette found on the counter, all tossed in balsamic vinegar and a drizzle of olive oil.



Steelhead Trout with Orange-Bean Sauce

Many people are not familiar with Steelhead Trout, a sea run form of Rainbow Trout. For all intents and purposes, you treat it like salmon, which is to say that I left it skin on after pulling the pin bones and then seared it hard on the skin side to crisp and gently finished it on the other side, so that it was still medium in the middle.

I'm not usually a sauce guy: I like to buy the best proteins I can find and let them stand on their own merits, so it is highly unusual that I made a sauce for this trout. In retrospect, not sure why I did. It was fine, but the fish didn't need any help. The sauce is a reduction of orange juice with finely minced fresh garlic and fresh ginger, thickened with a tablespoon of soy bean paste, and glossed with a teaspoon of sweet butter.