Halibut Cheeks with Spring Vegetables

While we love living in the exquisite beauty of Bend, Oregon, it is not without its issues. Among the biggest issues for foodies like Ann and me is the lack of foodstuffs: we're not near the ocean and we live in a very arid area that is not conducive to a lot of agriculture.

Halibut Cheeks with Spring Vegetables

Last week, we returned to McMinnville over in the Willamette Valley, a lush agricultural region close to the ocean, and where we lived before moving to Bend to be closer to the mountains and areas to hike. We took advantage of our trip to visit the McMinnville Farmers Market, a wholesale produce outlet, and our favorite fish market. We also stocked up on Willamette Valley wines while we were there.

One happy result of the trip is that we returned to Bend with halibut cheeks, asparagus, and sugar snaps. I resolved to cook all three items and finish them in a white wine, caper, and butter sauce.

Wondra-Coated Halibut Cheeks Cooking

Vegetables Cooked Separately from Fish

Before starting to cook the fish, I bought a pot of water to a boil in which to briefly cook both the asparagus and sugar snaps to doneness. Cooking each vegetable separately is a bit of labor, but it ensures that each one is done correctly because each vegetable has a different optimal cooking time. Another reason for cooking them separately is that if I cooked them in the same pan with the fish at the same time that I made the pan sauce using white wine, the acid in the wine would turn the brilliant green vegetables a boring and drab olive color.

Once I started cooking the fish, I started poaching the vegetables, sugar snaps first, asparagus next. When the asparagus was done, the fish and sauce was done and I mixed the lot in bowl before serving.

The halibut cheeks got a thin coat of Wondra flour seasoned with salt before going into a skillet. I turned them when they were half done, about three minutes, and after just a minute on the second side, I added a half a cup of dry white wine and a big spoonful of capers in brine to the pan. While the fish finished up, the wine reduced and also thickened just a bit as a result of the flour on the fish.

Finally, I removed the fish from the pan and reduced the liquid over high flame for just a few more seconds. After turning off the flame, I stirred in about three tablespoons of cold butter in small cubes and gently whisked them into the sauce, making effectively a beurre blanc.

The result was a dish as good and as simple as you can find in any bistro anywhere.

Valentine's Day 2022

As forecast last post, I took six weeks off from blogging to get us relocated from McMinnville, OR to Bend, OR, from the rainy and damp Willamette Valley, across the snowy Cascades, to the arid high desert of Central Oregon. We just got moved into our new house over the weekend. The fact that I am sitting here typing this post is a sure sign that we now have a functional office set up. In fact, getting our internet connection was a big fustercluck, Bend Broadband being a monopoly with terrible customer service.

Sitting at our New Bar for Valentine's Dinner

After spending about twelve hours unpacking and storing our kitchen goods, we were able to use our new kitchen for the first time on Valentine's Day. It's probably safe to say that needing to use the kitchen for Valentine's dinner speeded up the unpacking or at least informed the order in which we unpacked boxes. We could have gone out to celebrate, but we've been out a lot over the last week and don't feel all that well eating somewhat poorly. And then there's COVID, which thankfully is on the decline. We're still trying to avoid being indoors.

Those two reasons aside, Valentine's Day is possibly the worst day of the year to go out. Restaurant staffs, both front and back of house, are stressed, and nobody is doing the best work. Having spent a career in the business, I would never recommend to anyone to go out to eat on Valentine's Day. Yet still, I love to celebrate the day with Annie, unlike all those Valentine's Days where she sat home alone while I catered to all the people celebrating with us at the restaurant, only to stagger home like some nearly dead thing. What a terrible Valentine's Day for her, the chef widow! And so we planned a special meal at home, just for the two of us.

In cleaning out our freezer in preparation for moving, I found a couple of filets mignons that inspired Ann to ask me to make steak tartare for Valentine's. And then remembering the fabulous Argentine red shrimp that we had in Alaska, she also asked for a simple dish of pasta, shrimp, garlic, and butter. How easy was that menu planning? So simple, unlike at the restaurant where we were expected to create seven-course, high-end menus of exotic sounding but approachable dishes for our guests, one regular and one vegetarian.

Our home-cooked celebratory meal gave us a brief chance to test drive both the shopping in Bend and our new kitchen. We came from farm country with minimal shopping opportunities and a house with a top-flight kitchen to a new town with ample shopping opportunities and a sub-optimal kitchen. Now having used the new kitchen, I think we're going to have to gut it and start over in the near term. The awkward layout, barely functional storage, and silly downdraft range on a way-too-small island do not augur positively for my affection.

Steak Tartare, Broadley 2010 "Claudia's Choice"

Steak tartare is one of my favorite ways to prepare beef filet, simply because filet has very little character on its own. Although I find the texture a bit too soft for my liking in tartare, adding capers, shallots, salt, pepper, Dijon mustard, olive oil, and egg yolk is a great way to give the very bland beef a bit of fat and flavor.

Ordinarily, I would have served a lemony Chardonnay blanc de blancs sparkling with this dinner, but I just wasn't foresighted enough to have purchased any. Our usual preference in Champagne tends to the more berry flavors of Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, and so that's what we have at the house. And with the moving, buying more wine just to schlep it across the Cascades was a non-starter. As it was, the back of Ann's car was wall-to-wall with cases of wine. Although sparkling would have been my go-to pairing for this dinner, the bottle of 2010 Broadley Pinot Willamette Valley "Claudia's Choice" was  delicious.

Pasta and Shrimp with Garlic Butter

Our main course could not have been any simpler or frankly, better. Our usual diet is low carb, so pasta is a special treat for a special occasion. We were both smitten with Argentine red shrimp up in Alaska this summer when we both tasted them for the first time. These wild-caught shrimp are superbly tender and have a taste much more akin to lobster than typical shrimp. Researching on the internet, Ann found that these shrimp which were unavailable to us in McMinnville are a stock item at the Bend Trader Joe's, a store only dreamed of in McMinnville.

While we were there, we decided to get pasta as well, our nuts-and-bolts grocery store (WinCo) not having a very good selection of brands or cuts. Although our normal instinct would be to make this dish with a long cut, Ann was intrigued by a bag of Trader Joe's brand pasta labeled fusili corti bucati, like little hollow springs. I have had very long versions of this pasta, but never the corti ("cut" or short) version.

I liked the shape well enough, but the pasta itself did not cook very evenly and it was missing that really good al dente bite that I expect of great pasta. Time will tell if this is a one-off or if Trader Joe's brand is only good if we are desperate for pasta.

After several weeks of minimal dining as we packed our kitchen in preparation for the move, and then the few days around the move when we had no kitchen at all, it's great to be back at the range, even if it isn't the most functional!

Halibut Cheeks and Asparagus alla Piccata

Just getting around now, on the first rainy day in ages, to posting some photos from the spring. Been super busy working on remodeling the kitchen and getting the gardens in shape for the summer. There are just too many temptations in good weather, such as walks downtown to grab a hazy IPA, to want to sit inside in the office and post to the blog.

Halibut Cheeks and Asparagus alla Piccata

This was a celebration of the very first asparagus of the year and the re-opening of halibut season. Just a simple dredge of Wondra on the halibut cheeks and then a pan sauce of lemon juice, white wine, shallots, and capers. Simplicity at its best, which is all that premium quality fish needs or deserves.

Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

We're lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to have White Sturgeon in both the Willamette and Columbia Rivers; they are pretty amazing gamefish. There are strict limits on fishing for sturgeon as it is a highly protected and regulated population. Small amounts of sturgeon make it into the market and every now and again, I buy a piece as I did this week. Sturgeon is a mild, meaty white fish that lends itself to pan roasting.

Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

If you have ever broken down a prehistoric-looking sturgeon, you will know that they have really tough, leathery, and inedible skin. At the restaurant, I would remove the skin and the subcutaneous fat layer because people were paying big bucks for presentation, but at home, I prefer to leave the skin on. I think it helps keep the fish moist while cooking.

This 8-ounce portion is about one and a half inches thick, meaning that it is going to take a good long while to cook through. You do not want to cook a thick piece of fish solely on the range top where the surface in contact with the pan would be subject to serious overcooking by the time it was done to the center.

The procedure for a thick piece of fish is to to brown it well on the show side in the pan, flip it, and sear it for a moment, then finish it in the oven. I cooked this portion for about four minutes on medium heat to sear it without setting off my smoke detector, then flipped it for another minute and turned both sides to the pan just to slightly cook them. Then I put it in a hot oven (400F) for 8 minutes and it was just done through to the center.

Knowing when to take it out of the oven is, naturally, the trick to fish cookery. After cooking tens and tens of thousands of pieces of fish, I know instinctively how long a piece of fish will take to cook and which fish take longer and which fish take shorter time to become cooked. Sturgeon really wants to tense when it hits the heat, meaning that it is going to take a relatively long time to cook. In fact, one good way to know when such a fish is cooked is when it has relaxed and released the tension.

A rough guide is 10 minutes per inch of thickness for the fish to be done to the center (as opposed to, say, salmon, that you still want to be a bit less well done in the center or tuna that you just want to color on the sides). At an inch and a half, this piece would take roughly 15 minutes. I cooked it four on the show side, one on the skin side, and roasted it another 8, for a total of 14 minutes. It rested for two minutes while I finished the sauce and it was perfectly done.

Just before I put the fish in the oven, I splashed the pan with white wine and added a large spoon of capers and the juice of half a lemon. When the fish came out of the oven, the liquid was mostly evaporated. I removed the fish from the pan, deglazed the pan with a splash of water, and brought the sauce back down before spooning it over the fish.

And once again, I was reminded how delightful sturgeon is to eat and how lucky we are to have them as a natural resource.

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 Paillards with Artichoke Piccata

I've said it before and no doubt I will say it again. I don't really like flavorless, cottony chicken breasts. But Ann asks me to buy them for her for some of her recipes because they are a low fat, high quality protein. I get it, but I'd rather eat fewer thighs than more breast.

I got home from the store the other day bearing her chicken breasts and I was starving and looking for something other than leftovers for lunch. I decided to cook one of the chicken breasts and make it flavorful. It's a rare day when I actually cook lunch.

Chicken with Artichoke Piccata

Chicken breasts are so huge anymore than they are nearly impossible to flatten so that they cook evenly. Even cooking is essential with low-fat chicken breasts: you do not want any overcooked meat that is stringy and tough.

Paillard: Split, Pounded Chicken Breast

To help with this, I create what we call in the trade paillards ("pie yarr") by slicing the breasts in half into equally thick portions, then flattening them to even thickness. To flatten each paillard, I cover it with a piece of film and then using a heavy frying pan (my black steel French pan called a poêle) I gently pound the chicken breast out to even thickness. It takes a little practice to flatten chicken breasts without tearing them and to get them to even thickness. It helps to start in the center and work your way out to the edge, just like making a flatbread such as naan or pita.

Cook Until the Breast Turns White all Around the Edge

When I am frying a protein, I put it show side down in the pan and I do not move it until I am ready to flip it. This will give the best color for the show side, something that is important in restaurant presentation, but not so much at home. Still, old habits die hard. When you are cooking any protein, you are going to cook it longer on the show side than the flip side. Because the protein is cold throughout, it takes longer to warm the protein to the center when cooking the show side than it does to cook the flip side when the protein is already warm.

When you are cooking a protein, you are watching as the bottom side cooks. You will see the flesh turn from translucent to opaque all around the edge. When the opaque layer starts to move towards the upper surface, you will know that it is time to flip the protein.

In the photo above, the upper paillard is just about ready to flip. The lower one is not. You cannot see any white chicken on the righthand side where it is the thickest.

Build the Sauce After Flipping Show Side Up

After flipping the chicken paillards, I start to build the pan sauce. In goes a clove of garlic to cook for a few seconds, followed by a tablespoon of capers and a little caper brine. Next in go two cups of quartered artichoke hearts and the juice of half of a lemon.

Just as the chicken gets cooked all the way through, remove them from the pan. Over time, you will learn to feel with your fingers when a chicken breast has cooked all the way through. If in doubt, cut a slit in it with a knife and check visually. Remove the chicken from the pan and bring the sauce down as tight as you want, then stir in two tablespoons of chopped Italian parsley and plate.

In the restaurant, we would probably finish the sauce with a pat of butter, but at home, we are not trying to consume all those extra calories.

Chicken Paillards with Artichoke Piccata

The procedure for this dish is detailed above. This is a recap for two servings.

2 flattened chicken breast paillards

salt and pepper

olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon nonpareil capers and brine

2 cups quartered cooked artichoke hearts

juice of half a lemon

2 tablespoons minced Italian parsley

Season the paillards with salt and pepper. Film a skillet with olive oil and sear on high heat until half-cooked.

Flip and add garlic to the pan. Let the garlic cook for a few moments so that it is not raw.

Add capers, artichokes, and lemon juice in quick succession.

Remove the chicken when done. Reduce the sauce as necessary. Add parsley and plate.

Halibut Cheeks Ed's Style

"Oh my god, this is the best fish I ever put in my mouth!"

"Do people know about halibut cheeks?!?!"

"I'm glad we're eating this at home. I'd get kicked out of a restaurant for making obscene noises!"

                        —Ann Chiappetta

I didn't realize when I bought a pound of halibut cheeks at the fish market that Ann had never had them before. It is so hard to remember what we've eaten together versus what I cooked for guests at the restaurant. Still, I am surprised that she was never at the restaurant on a night when I had halibut cheeks on a tasting menu. I would surely have sent one to her table.

To answer her question: yes, seafood connoisseurs know about halibut cheeks, while thankfully, much of the dining public thinks that they are gross, because of the name cheeks. Just as veal cheeks are the best morsel on the young steer, halibut cheeks are the best morsel on the fish that is among the best of all fish. I say thankfully, because they are a rare item and the fewer people that will eat them, the more there are for the rest of us.

Because of the negative reaction to the name cheeks and to forestall objections to them and other delicacies such as sweetbreads or headcheese, I never published menus in advance for the tasting menus and the servers always told diners what the course was, after they finished it. Sad, but true.

Halibut Cheeks Ed's Style

Halibut cheeks are so divinely good, sweet, and tender that they do not need elaborate dishes built around them. Simplicity is best when it comes to them, and a lot of other food items as well. This week, I served the cheeks in a style that came to be known over the years as Ed's Style. Not only is it a signature of my cooking, but the moniker gives people an easy handle by which to order a dish.

Imagine the difficulty a diner might have with the following mouthful, "I'll have the halibut with tomatoes, artichokes, basil, caramelized garlic, and white wine." So much easier to say "Halibut Ed's Style." Of course, the diner could always save everyone time and order the "halibut." The ticket, when it hits the kitchen, is going to say just that: halibut. But, I digress.

Basil, Essential to Ed's Style

When I brought the cheeks home, I had no idea how I was going to prepare them. No idea, that is, until I saw this big bunch of basil in a vase on the counter. Immediately my mind leapt to Ed's Style, so critical to and entwined with this dish is fresh basil.

Halibut Cheeks, Roughly Two Ounces Each

When halibut cheeks came in to the restaurant from our supplier in Seward on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, they would be of all different sizes from an ounce and a half to eight ounces, depending on the size of fish from which they came. When cooking an order of cheeks, it is important that they all be of the same size so that they cook in all roughly the same amount of time. I asked the fish merchant to select eight of the same size for me.

It was always a task to separate the cheeks into consistently-sized orders and then on the line, if two or more orders were going to the same table, it would be up to the fish cook to select orders of more or less the same size so that everyone's plate looked the same. It is an epic fail to send an order of four 2-ounce pieces and another of two 4-ounce pieces to the same table. Invariably, the person with two pieces is going to complain (or write a highly negative review) that he or she got shorted. Yet again, I digress.

Lightly Dusted with Wondra

I like to lightly dust the halibut cheeks with salt, pepper, and Wondra, a granulated pregelatinized flour available in most grocery stores. Although it is marketed principally for thickening sauces (because it is pregelatinized, it will not clump), Wondra has found another market in professional kitchens. Chefs have adopted it en masse for the delightfully thin, crisp, and barely there crust that it gives. I put it on the halibut cheeks to keep them from sticking to the bottom of my stainless steel-lined skillet.

If you do not have Wondra in your pantry, put it on your shopping list today. You will also say, "Thank you General Mills!"

Seared on One Side, Cooking on the Other

Cook the cheeks in a skillet until they brown well on the bottom side. You'll see the flesh turn from pink and transparent to white and opaque around the edges as the bottom cooks. I flip the cheeks when I can see the white edge all the way around the cheek. Finish up the cooking another couple of minutes and then remove the cheeks and keep warm while you make the sauce. The sauce recipe is at the end of this post.

Caramelized Garlic and Red Pepper Flakes

Film the pan with a bit of olive oil, then add the garlic. I have added three cloves that are minced along with a pinch of red pepper flakes. For this dish, it is imperative to caramelize the garlic to the point that you see in the photo above. Although Julia Child would scold that you were going to "burn the garlic," it will be just fine. Trust me, I've made this dish thousands of times.

Ed's Sauce After Adding All Ingredients

Once the garlic becomes caramelized, stop the cooking by adding two ounces of dry white wine to the pan. Then add quickly two tablespoons of brined capers along with a bit of the brine, a cup and a half each of diced tomatoes and cooked quartered artichoke hearts. Finish by adding a handful of chiffonaded fresh basil.

Rewarming the Halibut Cheeks

Let the sauce cook for a couple of minutes to reduce the extra liquid, then place the halibut cheeks back on top to warm through. Remove the cheeks as the sauce becomes almost dry. Although my line cooks were always tempted to add a pat of butter to finish the sauce (and I am sure they tried when I wasn't looking), I do not see a need for butter in an Italian-inspired sauce that is nothing but a modified puttanesca sauce.

Plate however you see fit. With cheeks, I like to plate them on the sauce. With larger fillets of fish, I often would drape the sauce over the fish. 

Ed's Sauce

This quantity of sauce is perfect for garnishing two entrées or two plates of pasta.

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

3 cloves of garlic, finely minced

1 pinch pepperoncini (red pepper flakes)

2 ounces dry white wine

2 tablespoons pickled capers with a bit of brine

1-1/2 cups diced, peeled, and seeded tomatoes

1-1/2 cups cooked artichoke heart quarters (one 15-ounce can, drained)

1/2 cup fresh basil en chiffonade (leaves rolled and thinly sliced)

Heat the olive oil in a skillet and add the garlic and red pepper flakes.

When the garlic is caramelized and just at the point of overcooking, quickly add the white wine to stop the cooking, followed by the rest of the ingredients.

Cook over high flame until the sauce is as wet or as dry as you like. Season to taste, though additional salt is usually not necessary because of the capers.

Salmon Burgers

Once again, Ann was the impetus for bringing a dish to the table. The September Oregon Coho season was just open for 24 hours when the quota was met and as luck would have it, our store had a couple of the fish. I came home with a 2-pound chunk of late-season wild Oregon Coho salmon and I asked her how she'd like me to serve it. To be honest, I hadn't even thought of salmon burgers until she suggested it.

Her suggestion was great. Coho is not a very fatty salmon to begin with, not like chinook or king, and adding a bit of fat and flavor is a great thing to do to this kind of salmon. And we had just had some seared Coho earlier, from hatchery fish, so a change would be welcome. I would never put a fat piece of king in the food processor like this Coho. It would get seared or grilled to medium rare and the scrap would become salmon tartare, full stop.

I call the patties that you see in the photo below salmon burgers, made from raw salmon, to distinguish them from salmon cakes, made from cooked flaked salmon. These salmon patties are more akin to hamburgers than to fish or crab cakes. 

Salmon Burgers sans Buns

We used to make similar salmon burgers for our lunch menu at the restaurant, where we would usually serve them seared medium on a grilled brioche bun with cucumber slices, lettuce, red onion, and an herb- and caper-mayonnaise. At home, however, we omit the buns and the condiments.

Salmon Burger Mise en Place

The photo above shows all the ingredients for salmon burgers, starting in the lower left: Italian parsley, shallot, capers, Dijon-style mustard, an egg, Coho, and cayenne pepper. I don't typically add salt because both the capers and mustard are salty; in fact, that's why they are in the recipe: to add salt. To be certain, after I spin the mix up in the food processor, I taste it for seasoning and adjust as necessary.

The egg is not necessary. I add it only because I am working with lean Coho (right, you see no cream-colored stripes of fat in the red flesh) and I wanted to add a bit more fat and moisture to the burgers. If I were making this with fatty farm salmon rather than lean wild salmon, I would omit the egg.

Also, the herb or herbs that I use varies from batch to batch. Although this batch was made with Italian parsley, I more often use dill. If I had it, I would use chervil and in the very early spring before anything else had come up, I would use chives. Any or any mixture of the classic fines herbes will work just fine.

Please note that I only ever use flat-leafed Italian parsley. It is so much easier to work with and more flavorful than curly parsley, so it is all I ever grow. Now that I think about it, I don't think that my grocery store even carries curly parsley. If you ever read the word parsley on this blog, I'm talking about Italian parsley.

Note also that just as you wouldn't think about a binder in a hamburger, you shouldn't think about adding panko or other breadcrumbs to salmon burgers. The raw flesh has plenty of protein to bind the cake into a decent patty without any filler.

Ready to Process

To ready the ingredients for the food processor, pull or cut out the pin bones, if any, from the salmon. Skin the salmon and cut the filet into large cubes. Mince the parsley and the shallot. Add the ingredients to the food processor and pulse until you have a workable paste with quarter-inch chunks of salmon in it.

Four-Ounce Salmon Burgers Ready to Cook

Patty the burgers into whatever size you want. Because I am serving each person two cakes, I opted to make four-ounce cakes. At the restaurant, to have the patties fit our buns, we served one seven-ounce cake. I prefer my patties to be on the thicker side so that I can get a good sear on both sides while still having the center be warm but not cooked, about medium.

Salmon Burgers

Here's a decent starting point from which you can make your own modifications to suit your taste. Makes 8 4-ounce cakes.

2 pounds Coho salmon

1 shallot, minced

1/2 bunch parsley (or other herb such as dill), minced (1/2 cup in total)

2 tablespoons Dijon-style mustard

1/2 cup capers

1 egg

1/4-1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper, to taste 

salt as needed

Bone and skin the salmon. Cut into large cubes. Put in a food processor with the remaining ingredients. Pulse on and off until the salmon just forms a paste similar to hamburger. Season to taste. Patty. Sear in a hot pan until brown on both sides, but warm and uncooked in the center.

Steak Tartare

Steak tartare, that decadent appetizer, is a fixture of a great many restaurants. Why is that? As a retired chef and restaurant owner, the answer is obvious to me: economics. Beef is expensive and one of the most expensive items on the entire menu. Because it is so expensive, it is very hard—given what diners are willing to pay for a meal—very hard indeed to mark beef up to the extent that less expensive items can be marked up. So it is vital to sell every bit of that beef.

Steak Tartare, Egg Yolk, Cornichons

Think about it this way: all the trim and scrap off of the beef that I purchased cost the same $20 per pound as all the steak cuts. At that price, a restaurateur who wants to stay in business has got to find a way to cover some of the expense of the scrap meat. Steak tartare to the rescue. Ditto for tuna: when I would pay upwards of $20 a pound for #1 tuna, any little scrap was highly likely to end up as tartares. What a delicious way to recoup some of the expense!

Tartare isn't limited to beef. I've had delicious lamb kibbeh at Middle Eastern and Afghani restaurants and even served it at my own. On our tasting menu, we served tartares of elk, antelope, and yak. And during salmon season when we would get fresh king salmon flown in, the belly flaps and other trim would often end up minced and served as salmon tartare, a riff on sashimi. 

We Americans are not alone and we surely did not invent the concept: most cultures have a raw meat preparation that is similar to steak tartare. Think of crudo in South America, carpaccio in Italy, and yukhoe in Korea.

Tartare also is not limited to fully raw meat. Stepping out of the tartare rut, I would do mi-cuit (half-cooked) preparations in which I would briefly sear or grill the meat before chopping it. In France, if you sear a patty of tartare on both sides like a very rare hamburger, you call it steak aller-retour or tartare aller-retour ("steak round trip"). In addition, I used to cold smoke chopped tartare over ice at times. If you use a light hand, the smoke is a wonderful addition to tartare and really wonderfully unexpected to most diners.

I would also note that tartare is not limited to tenderloin. Of all the steak tartares that I have enjoyed at restaurants, my favorite beef version was made from skirt steak and my least favorite from tenderloin. My favorite lamb version was made from heart. Most people are squeamish about heart, but it is one of the cleanest, most flavorful cuts, albeit with a bit of chew. While most people lean toward the soft texture of tenderloin, I find it a bit mushy for my liking. I definitely prefer more texture to less.

As a trained food professional, I'd be remiss if I did not mention that eating any raw food is a risky proposition. E. coli is a very real thing as are other foodborne illnesses. Each person has to decide whether that risk is acceptable. For my part, I will only eat raw meat at a restaurant that I trust.

Capers, Minced Beef, Shallots, Mustard Prior to Mixing

Having run a restaurant, it is ingrained in me to use every single bit of every ingredient and so when I recently purchased a beef tenderloin, it was a no-brainer that we would soon be having steak tartare. When cutting the beef into steaks, I saved all the small bits of scrap from the tenderloin, plus the parts of either end that were too small to cut into steaks.

To make the tartare, I diced the pieces of tenderloin very fine with a knife. Yes, it takes a long time compared to running the meat through a grinder, but the two textures are incomparable. At the restaurant, we always cut the tartare with a knife and as long as we had the labor, we would cut it to order as the tickets came into the kitchen.

What you add to your tartare for flavorings is up to you, in the same way that what you add to your guacamole is up to you. For my part, I default to classic seasonings. I generally add capers, minced shallots, Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper as I did in this case. That said, tartare is a wonderful blank canvas that lends itself to experimentation. For example, a favorite from my restaurant days was a Korean-inflected tartare with minced kimchee, green onions, soy sauce, sesame seeds, sesame oil, and dobanjang.

Tartare is easy to make at home, especially if you are buying meat in bulk and breaking it down yourself. But beyond that, it is a really approachable and decadent restaurant-style appetizer to have in your home-cooking arsenal.

Happy Fourth!?

In this crazy year of 2020, July 4th was an opportunity for many to celebrate, but it seemed really off to me and I am sure to Ann as well. Our neighborhood had been planning to get together to eat, drink, and shoot off some fireworks for weeks, the 4th being something good and fun and normal that we could all look forward to, to help us get through the depressing news about this pandemic and the lack of leadership from our president.

Happy Fourth! Ann's Pallet Flag in the Back Yard

It was quite a stunning day, weatherwise, and we spent nearly the entire day outdoors as we are wont to do now in our dry season. In Oregon, we make the most of the summer, because it rains for the rest of the year. The morning we spent on the back patio, doing the daily crossword with coffee, and watching the hummingbird forays through the flower gardens.

Eggs with Salmon, Chives, Capers, and Sour Cream

Around mid-day, we migrated to the front patio and ate breakfast about one in the afternoon with a scramble designed to use the fat belly flaps off the steelhead trout that I broke down the day before. In addition to the trout, in the eggs are sour cream, capers, and chives from the garden. It was delicious, but I won't mix sour cream in with the eggs again. The sour cream disrupted the normal creamy texture of the eggs to yield a slightly grainier dish that wept water. Live and learn.

Red, White, and Blue Berry Smash

About three and feeling a bit morose, Ann declared it Happy Hour, "We need a red, white, and blue cocktail!" During this pandemic, our house cannot be the only one in which 5 o'clock comes at random times. I rummaged the kitchen and ended up with a cross between a gin and tonic and a Tom Collins: red raspberries, white liquor, and blueberries. It was tart, refreshing, and the recipe will follow in a subsequent post because Ann wants me to remember it for the future. If I don't write it down, it will be gone from my head in 48 hours.

Oh yeah, shout out to our neighbor Rennika who brought us the berries from her family's farm! Blueberries and all manner of caneberries are a staple agricultural product of our valley.

Bison Burger with English Cheddar, Pickles, and Bacon

In looking back over previous posts about July 4, a consistent theme seems to be burgers. We don't eat them that often, so they have become something of a treat for us and something of a 4th ritual. We picked up a package of ground bison at Costco earlier in the week, just for burgers. Bison has such a great meaty flavor that is sadly lacking from most beef these days. The meat is a little leaner than I like for a good burger, but so very tasty.

While I was out shopping, I forgot to get a bag of chips to accompany our burgers. How sad is it that I didn't just run up to the store two minutes away and grab a bag? How sad is it that I have to weigh the potential risk for bringing this damned virus home to Ann every time I think about leaving the house? How sad is it that there are no casual trips out, only necessary ones? This pandemic sucks.

We made the reluctant decision earlier in the week to opt out of the neighborhood Fourth gathering, for two reasons. First, the incidence of virus is growing here in Oregon, albeit not as bad as in other locales, and second, our dog Grace is absolutely terrified of fireworks. We wanted to be home to comfort her. Charlie doesn't like the fireworks so well, but he's so damned deaf now that he curled up and slept through them.

Even though it doesn't get dark here this time of year until after 10pm, the booms and pops started about 9:30. Reluctantly we went inside, to help muffle some of the sound and put Grace at more ease, scant good that it did do.

I really, really wanted to be out in the alley behind our houses, kicking back a few brews and watching fireworks, if not to totally seem normal, at least to get the hell out of the house and interact with human beings other than my wife. It's a small sacrifice to skip the fireworks, I know, but it certainly seems a much larger sacrifice in a day when every decision seems to be a sacrifice or at least a tradeoff against health risk.

Recycling

Let's face it. Cooking can be strenuous especially at the end of the day when you're tired and don't have the enthusiasm to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Even I, a retired professional chef, have days when I don't want to do something complicated or think a lot about dinner. For me, the most strenuous part is deciding what to eat. Executing it is pretty easy after that.

Something that really helps me is planning for leftovers from the major meals that I cook. When you've got leftovers, it really limits the scope of deciding what's for dinner, rephrasing the question as "How can I recycle these leftovers into a new meal?" For me, it's much easier to come up with ideas when I have constraints, such as using up leftovers, versus trying to come with a plan given a blank slate.

Cannellini-Piquillo Ersatz "Rouille"

Cannellini-Piquillo Ersatz "Rouille"

Here's an example from last week, shot over a four-day period. It starts with a lower-fat and lower-calorie ersatz rouille, a type of aïoli from Provence made with red peppers. Rouille is the classic garnish to bouillabaise. We're watching what we eat, now about three months into quarantine with rampant boredom and scant exercise. We don't want to give up flavor, but we do want to give up fat and calories where possible.

Enter this rouille. Rather than start from a base of egg yolk and olive oil, I substituted white beans. I put two pounds (1 kg) of cannellini and half a pound (250g) of piquillo peppers into the food processor along with 8 cloves of minced red hard neck garlic. When all was smoothed out, I drizzled in 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of extra virgin olive oil and then seasoned to taste. Not rouille, but not bad either, especially with that spicy red skin garlic!

While the sauce was destined to be eaten with a massive head of roasted cauliflower for dinner, I made 2-1/2 pounds, a processor bowl full, because I wanted to have the sauce on hand to use in other ways. After dinner, the remaining sauce went into the fridge to be incorporated into other dishes during the course of the week.

Arroz con Pollo Italiano

Likewise, when I make chicken or basically any other protein, I make enough for at least two meals. Having leftover meat in the refrigerator guarantees at least one follow-on quick taco meal. Last week, I was in the mood for something similar to chicken cacciatore, but I wanted to incorporate rice. It struck me that I could make arroz con pollo with Italian flavors to satisfy my craving.

Arroz con pollo was a frequent and favorite staff meal at the restaurant. We'd prep a hotel pan in the afternoon and leave it in the walk-in until about an hour before close, about 90 minutes before we would sit down to eat. Then it would go into the slow oven and would be ready, piping hot, once customers left the building.

Arroz con Pollo Ready for the Oven

Outside, I heated a cast-iron frying pan in my grill and browned six chicken thighs in olive oil until they were crisply brown on both sides, about 20 minutes. In decent weather, I do it outside to avoid setting off the f*cking smoke detector in the kitchen. It keeps the kitchen cooler as well.

Meanwhile, I prepped the vegetables: onion, carrot, celery, and lots of garlic. I then assembled spices (red pepper flakes, saffron, salt, and pepper) and a bouquet garni of oregano, sage, and lots of rosemary.  Out of the refrigerator came about a cup of olives and a half a cup of pickled capers. I drained a 28-ounce can of chopped tomatoes into a large measure and added chicken stock to the tomato juice up to the one quart line. Finally, I measured out 2 cups of long grain rice.

When the chicken was browned, I removed it to a plate and sautéed the vegetables in the cast iron pan on the grill, adding the spices and the bouquet towards the end. When the vegetables were translucent, I mixed them with the tomatoes, olives, capers, and rice and added the mix to the bottom of the roasting pan with the chicken on top. I poured the broth over, covered the roasting pan with foil, and put it in a slow oven (350F) for 90 minutes.

Out of the Oven, Ready to Eat

This recipe scales fairly nicely: just make sure that you use about two cups of broth to every one cup of rice.

Arroz con Pollo Italiano

Poached Eggs over Rice 

One of the dishes that Ann liked the best for brunch on our Sundays together back in the restaurant days was a poached egg over a loose risotto-like pile of Israeli couscous, inflected with piquillo peppers and topped with a pimentón (smoked paprika) aïoli.

Poached Eggs over Rice

I aimed to recreate the feel of that dish using some of the leftover rice and the cannellini-piquillo "rouille." In the span of ten minutes, I rewarmed the rice with a bit of chicken stock, mixed some of the "rouille" half and half with mayo and a little water to thin it, and poached some eggs. I added mayo and water to the white bean-red pepper sauce because I wanted the texture to approximate a true aïoli more closely.

Brunch just doesn't get any easier than that.

Tacos de Pollo

As I mentioned above, I like to have leftover proteins in the refrigerator to facilitate putting a taco dinner on the table in next to no time.

I first made a quick salsa fresca from tomatoes, onions, cilantro, chile peppers, lime juice, and salt. Then I took the leftover 50-50 rouille-aïoli from the day before and mashed it with a super ripe avocado and lime juice for some quick guacamole.

I picked the chicken off a couple of thighs leftover from the arroz con pollo and seared it quickly in a pan. After that, I gave a little more of the leftover rice a quick sauté to crisp it slightly.

Taco Fixings: Guacamole, Salsa Fresca, Rice, Pulled Chicken, Cotija

This is about a simple as dinner gets. The most strenuous thing was picking the meat off a couple of chicken thighs, mere child's play.

Tacos de Pollo

Recycling

In the course of a single week, I made a fake "rouille" from white beans and piquillo peppers and a big pan of arroz con pollo, both in quantities guaranteeing leftovers. From the remains of these two dishes, we had a very easy egg dish for brunch and a simple taco dish for dinner. Recycling leftovers is a great way to minimize the effort of putting food on the table and a great way to help answer the age-old question, "What's for dinner?"

Zucchini Puttanesca

While it is slow in the winter and I have more help than I have work for at the restaurant, I'm trying to take off our slowest night, Tuesday, to be with Ann. Honestly, I really haven't done much cooking of late and it was time to get back in the kitchen, if only for 15 minutes, and make some dinner for us.

Roasted Steelhead Trout with Zucchini Puttanesca

This was a refrigerator-foraged meal. Ann told me she had some small zucchini and I had bought a side of steelhead trout on Monday. That was a start at least before I went grubbing around the refrigerator looking for inspiration. I don't know how other people's refrigerators are organized, but as a chef, my refrigerator is full of deli containers of random things.

Ultimately I found some olives, capers, sun-dried tomatoes, and grated pecorino hidden away in those deli containers. There's always garlic and sambal oelek (chile paste) in there too. And on the counter were some less than perfect grape tomatoes. Within a minute, I had already figured that I would do a puttanesca riff on the zucchini to accompany the roasted steelhead.

Really simple procedure: pit the olives, mince the garlic, slice the sundried tomatoes into small batons, halve the grape tomatoes, and prep the zucchini by cutting in half lengthwise and then bias cutting each half. Fire a big sauté pan on high heat and film with olive oil. Add the zucchini and toss a little until just crisp tender, perhaps a minute and a half. Add the olives, sundried tomatoes, and capers. Toss for another minute. Add the garlic and a bit of sambal for spice and cook until you can smell the garlic. Turn off the flame and toss in the fresh tomatoes and a couple tablespoons of the grated pecorino. Feast!

Salmon Cakes

I'm starting to get back in the habit of taking Tuesday and Wednesday evenings off to spend with Ann if business is slow enough and slow enough early week it has been. After some back and forth about eating in or eating out, we decided on eating in.

In trying to find something healthy to eat for dinner, I remembered that I had a couple sides of small Steelhead Trout in the refrigerator and had just scored some amazing small cucumbers at the farmers market. Pretty quickly I arrived at salmon cakes with cucumber salad.

Salmon Cakes in the Pan

Salmon cakes really could not be any easier to make. The exact flavorings are different each time that I make them. I skinned the fish, cubed it, and tossed it in the food processor with some whole grain mustard, two minced shallots, a big bunch of chopped dill from the garden, and a big handful of capers. I processed it to the consistency you see in the pan above and then formed it into four-ounce cakes, which I cooked to crispy on the outside and medium rare in the middle. I see all kinds of recipes that include egg and breading to help hold the cakes together. This is about as necessary as egg and bread in hamburgers to help them hold together.

Salmon and Cucumbers, a Classic Combination

The cucumber salad is equally trivial to make. After slicing the cucumbers thinly, I added just a little Greek yogurt, a little sugar, a little rice vinegar, and a little salt. End of story. Delicious!

Crostini and Vinho Verde on the Patio

February 28!

Remember the 3+ feet of snow of just a few weeks ago? How about 66 degrees, shorts, and bare feet on the patio today?!

Sundried Tomato, Caper, and Goat Cheese Crostini

All winter we've been drinking (and loving) our red wine but when the weather gets nice, there is something special about that first bottle of patio wine on the patio in the spring. I am here to report that it was fantastic, the wine, the crostini, and most of all, spending time chatting with Ann.

I spent the (very chilly and windy) morning pruning the wisteria (which are in great shape thanks to all the hard work I did last winter) and after frozen fingers, I spent the late morning and all afternoon painting the master bathroom which we are remodeling.

I had all afternoon to think about the glorious weather outside that I was missing. At some point, I suggested to Ann that she put a bottle of Vinho Verde in the fridge: after seven hours of pruning and painting, I was going to need some adult therapy. And wonderful and faithful companion that she is, she did just that.

After I finished cleaning up from painting, I made these crostini from sundried tomatoes, capers, goat cheese, and balsamic vinegar. Anticipating the beautiful weather on Sunday afternoon, I brought home some micro-basil on Saturday night to garnish the crostini. Not only do the micros look beautiful, but they give a concentrated burst of flavor.

Fresh Local Micro-Basil: a Burst of Flavor

And out to the patio where we spent an hour or more before the sun got down too low and we cooled off enough to want to go back inside. About that first Vinho Verde of the year: I really missed that slightly spritzy, intensely sappy, low alcohol, green apple-flavored wine. Year in and year out, Bartholomew Broadbent ships awesome Vinho Verde!

Salmon Burgers

Ann had mentioned liking salmon burgers at some point last week and as I buy a side of salmon each week to snack on after work, I decided to turn this week's salmon into salmon burgers for her. I'm no stranger to salmon burgers: they were on the lunch menu at the restaurant for a couple of years in the early days until I figured out that nobody comes to my restaurant for sandwiches. It's a shame for it's a great sandwich.

Salmon Burger

Making salmon burgers is pretty trivial. I took the pin bones out of a side of salmon and skinned it, then cut it into large dice. Into the food processor it went and I pulsed it until it was the consistency of burger. To this I added a bunch of a quarter cup of capers, a half teaspoon of salt, a quarter cup of whole grain mustard, and a big handful each of chopped fresh dill and sliced green onion. I pulsed it again a couple of times to mix everything and then formed it into bun-size patties. A couple of minutes per side in a hot pan and we were eating. These burgers really are great.