fish stories

I heard two things on the radio this morning that stuck to the lint trap in my head.

First, a team of scientists has established credible data that weekly consumption of fish significantly reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer's Disease later in your life, so they counsel us to fire up the broiler and get busy with the filets.

Second, stocks of jack mackerel in the South Pacific have been depleted by approximately 60 percent in the last six years, ironically the same exact six years since the three nations that fish the area most heavily (Chile, Australia and New Zealand) established a coalition to protect the fishery. Depletion is due to, well, greed mainly, and due to the huge proportion of juvenile fish in the catch, caught before they can breed and repopulate the stock. In 2008, independent review showed that more than 60% of the mackerel caught were below the agreed-upon minimum size limit, and last year that percentage had increased to more than 90%. Increased! Awesome coalition, dudes. Rock on. Sicken yourself further here, if I have not ruined your day already.

OK, let me keep trying. Who is eating all that mackerel? Salmon. Farmed salmon. Most of the mackerel are ground up to produce fish meal for salmon farms, where the conversion ratio is approximately 4 pounds of mackerel to your dinner for 4 (or one pound of salmon.) 80 to 90% of the salmon consumed in the US is farmed, by the way, with disastrous results for natural populations.

I'm as attentive to resources like Good Catch and the Monterey Bay Aquarium list of "greener" fish choices as the next self-flagellating, confused, hungry, do-good wannabe. But the lists begin to lose some of their powers of persuasion for me when I hear a back story like this one. It's all relative, and the conditions of that relativity are unknown to most of us, who see "organic eco-farmed salmon" and think that sounds like it might be an OK choice. What is it that is supposed to matter, now that I think of it here in the store with the line forming behind me? Organic means no chemicals, so that's good because I think regular salmon is colored with synthetic dye and pumped up on pharmaceuticals, or was it farmed is better, because then natural stocks are not overfished, or was it that wild-caught that was the way to go, because there's something about farming that is bad? What did I read, again? (For reference, just file away that you can freely ignore the "organic" label in the fish market; there are no standards for organic certification for fish, it is not regulated at all and is entirely at the whim of the producer to slap the label on).

The thing of it is, these are tough times for the mackerel, and the native apple, and the honeybee, and for any human trying to source their food responsibly. What is good for our geriatric brains is hell on the planet; increasingly, it seems that what's good for the planet is for all of us to lie down very quietly and try not to work up an appetite or drive anywhere.

It's tempting to respond by throwing the hands upward. Too much to attend to! Gotta eat!

In times of dietary confusion, I always roll back to two things: something I can source near me, and vegetables. Thank goodness it's spring, and those twain are getting ready to meet again. Something from the dirt close by always soothes.

No recipe today. Just some sparks, to light the fire of the first foods of spring. What's ready where you are? (Forgive me but I don't really want to hear your answer on this one if you live west of, like, Pennsylvania, OK? You folks just answer in your heads.)

Here's your sparks:

These raw and sprightly asparagus, or these cooked and spicy ones, or this soup.

Make a radish salad, with slivered radishes and plenty of lemon and parsley and good coarse salt and pepper, or Indian-style, grated, with fresh grated ginger, lime juice and a spike of chile. What about a radish sandwich, using plenty of good butter and salt and dark bread? Or make radish hash browns! The rest of the world seems to be doing it.

Pickle a ramp.

Have good eggs? Make ricotta (there she goes again!) and a frittata thereafter, maybe using not only the mint called for, but the first chives and lovage and greens that are poking up.

Make soup from weeds (and that whey you have in the fridge now!).

Have a great weekend. Monday is cookie day! (No fish in the cookies.)

not stoned

One of the nice things about the internet is that in a matter of seconds, you can determine that you have never had an original idea in your life. This is a process that used to take months, if not years. It doesn't matter if you think you have some wildly original idea. Even if you thought it up alone, on a mountaintop, in a lead-lined underground cave, with earmuffs on, using an abacus, one minute’s tarantella on google once you come back down will establish that a minimum of 49 other people have posted step-by-step instructions, a short YouTube video and a host of tweets regarding this item in the time it took you to take off your backpack.

This is all going to work out to your advantage, dear reader.

I used some of my milk glut from our party last weekend to make a batch of ricotta, and I had these artichoke and olive calzones to tell you about today, wherein I used the ricotta. But I kind of wasn’t going to emphasize that I made the ricotta. It still feels a little like the actions of a fringe-dweller, like the mention of it might cause some eye-rolling. Even though I made a really tasty soup with the leftover whey, and I wanted you to try that, too. Still, I was going to give it a low profile, this wacky, out-there making of cheese.

Then I saw Food52’s feature on What To Do With Your Leftover Whey.

Then I saw the New York Times Dining section was featuring Melissa Clark’s easy-peasy-this-is-so-mainstream-how-have-you-not-done-it-yet?-recipe for home-made ricotta.

Then, for poops and giggles, I did a search on the interwebs for “make ricotta.” There may still be a few fringe-dwelling activities that I engage in, but cheese-making is no longer one of them.

So I am just going to wait here a moment while you get psyched up to make a batch of ricotta. A HUGE undertaking (it will take you 30 minutes)! You need lots of exotic ingredients (milk and lemon)! Fancy equipment (pot, spoon, strainer)! Rest up, carbo-load, push fluids, off you go. Use this excellent recipe, or check out the buttermilk vs. lemon juice debate here (with links to more recipes) or try this one—zounds!—that uses the microwave and makes the process even faster.

Was that not so much fun? Snip, snap—you made cheese! You’re a cheese-maker.

Now, about that pizza dough….well, there is a world of opinion out there beyond my own slightly suspect and subjective one that making your own is not a deviant or time-consuming activity. And we all know it is sold by the knob at every grocery store, too.It's entirely up to you, of course. But if you are thinking of making your own, now that you have that golden carafe of whey to play with the time is truly ripe. Just substitute it for the water, and remember that you are best off starting it the night before you want it. Then, all the next day, no matter what you are doing, you can be thinking "I am making pizza right now. Here I sit in this meeting, and yet, I am working on dinner at the same time."

As for the calzone, the ones I produced were a homely bunch, and they detonated when I baked them. Producing them ate up most of the time I had set aside, and I had some serious doubts about posting this at all. But I bailed by using the remaining filling and remaining dough to make a white pizza, which was a snap to throw together. Your call. I know which exercise I will repeat next time....

artichoke & green olive & ricotta pizza/calzone

2# of pizza dough, home-made or store-bought

1 # fresh ricotta (about 2 cups)

6 ozs fresh mozzarella, cubed (about a cup and a half)

1/2 to 2/3 cup finely grated parmesan cheese

2 T chopped fresh basil

2 T olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

a generous handful of pitted green olives, coarsely chopped

about 8 water-packed or thawed frozen artichoke hearts, drained and coarsely chopped

2-3 tsp finely chopped preserved lemon, or a pinch of fresh lemon zest, finely grated

fresh black pepper and sea salt to taste

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees to bake the pizzas. I bake mine on a baking sheet, not a pizza stone, and the results are fine, so don't sweat the lack of a stone. I have no stone, I have no peel, and yet I produce a pizza.

Combine the cheeses and the basil in a medium bowl. (Start with the lesser amount of parmesan, and reserve the remainder).

Heat the olive oil in a pan over medium heat, and toss in the minced garlic. Stir once or twice, then dump in the preserved lemon, stir, then the artichokes and olives. Sauté until nicely fragrant, about two minutes. Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Mix into the cheese. Taste the mixture and adjust the flavor to your liking with more parmesan, a twist of pepper, and possibly some salt if your olives are not terribly salty. I used a mondo, slightly oily and extremely salty olive from the antipasto bar at the grocery store, and between those and the remaining salty items in the mix, needed no more salt.

Roll out the dough for two pizzas. Divide the filling between the two crusts and, if you like, sprinkle any remaining parmesan on top. Bake 15 minutes or so, until the crust is nicely golden and the topping is dotted with golden spots as well. If you bake on a sheet, you can slip the baked pizza onto the oven rack directly for a minute, to completely crisp the bottom crust--but don't tell anyone that I do it, OK? It's one of those wacky workarounds that we all use privately but wouldn't want to get out.

pudding on the ritz

Big weekend. Huge! Sweet 16 party. Passover with one side of the family. Easter with the other. My friend Alana's book debut. Still not back in fighting shape from the Great Germ Siege.

It all calls for pudding. First, my fridge was groaning under the weight of a severe over-estimation regarding how much milk would be consumed at the party. Second, the looming week of lunchboxes bore down on my party-weary behind. Third--ah, salvation--a stolen moment of seated bliss with Alana's book reminded me how positively the lunchbox responds to a jar of pudding tucked into its hungry, fathomless depths.

The simplest of all types of pudding, a cornstarch-thickened milk pudding is the work of a few minutes to put together, and in partnership with a handful of mason jars will reap rewards for you all week, in the fulfillment of either your lunch-packing or midnight snacking responsibilities. I used whole milk here, but any milk--cow or otherwise--will do. This is a big blank canvas for you to fingerpaint upon.

In the case of the chocolate pudding, in fact I used chocolate milk, because that represented a good portion of the aforementioned milk glut, so I added no additional sugar and maybe a half a cup of chocolate chips. It's the proportion of liquid to cornstarch that you need to keep constant, and the rest of the parts are all moveable. I have made it with maple syrup in place of sugar, and used cocoa when I had no chocolate around, and it always turns out to be pudding, lovely thick satisfying milk-enriched pudding. The half cup to four cups proportion makes a pretty firm pudding, so if you'd like it softer, just use 1/3 of a cup of cornstarch instead.

Alana's chocolate pudding first, and below that the caramel version I made for the non-chocolate eaters in my house. Think of this, though: infusing the milk, as you heat it, with either fresh mint or fresh ginger; adding a tablespoon of instant espresso powder or grain coffee; layering a white pudding and a chocolate one in the same container. Why did I only think of that NOW?!

chocolate pudding
adapted from Alana Chernila's The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You can Stop Buying & Start Making

4 c milk
1/3 c sugar
1/2 cup cornstarch
6 ozs chopped bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, or 1 c chocolate chips

Combine 3 cups of the milk with the sugar in a heavy medium saucepan. Combine the remaining cup of milk with the cornstarch in the measuring cup and whisk until smooth. Heat the milk in the pot over medium-low heat until it is steaming. Watch carefully so that you do not burn the milk or let it boil (as in boil over and make a huge mess) and stir frequently. Whisk the cornstarch mixture into the hot mixture, raise the heat slightly and stir constantly until it begins to thicken, which will only take about 5 minutes. As it starts to thicken, stir in the chocolate and continue to cook until the mixture is nicely thick and waves from stirring stay visible on the surface. It will thicken considerably as it cools. Ladle into individual dishes (about 6 half-pint mason jars) and try to chill it before you eat it, if you can manage to wait. A skin will form on top (a delicacy around here) unless you press greased wax paper or plastic wrap against the surface.

caramel pudding

1/2 c sugar
1/4 c water
pinch of salt
1 vanilla bean or 2t vanilla extract
4 c milk
1/2 c cornstarch
pinch of salt

You will need 2 pots for this, but it will be entirely worth it.

Measure 3 c of milk into a saucepan and place over a low flame until too hot to leave your finger in there when you test it.

In the measuring cup, combine the cornstarch and the pinch of salt with the remaining cup of milk and whisk until smooth.

In another pot, a large, heavy saucepan, combine the sugar and water and bring to a boil. Allow to boil until a beautiful medium amber color (5 minutes, approximately) and IMMEDIATELY dump in the hot milk (sugar moves rapidly from 'lovely medium amber' to 'miserably blackened mess' unless you arrest its progress). The mixture will boil up fearsomely and you will think that all is lost, but soldier onward.


As you continue to heat and stir, the two substances will combine smoothly and you'll wonder why you ever doubted it would turn out well. Now whisk in the cornstarch mixture, and stir with a wooden spoon until the mixture is nicely thick and waves from stirring stay visible on the surface. It will thicken considerably as it cools. Ladle into individual dishes (about 6 half-pint mason jars) and try to chill it before you eat it, if you can manage to wait. A skin will form on top (a delicacy around here) unless you press greased wax paper or plastic wrap against the surface.

it's a curd to me, again

Now we are in Sweet 16 Party Prep Lockdown, so the Dominican beans I was planning to tell you about will have to wait until next week. We don't need to dwell on it or anything, but I forgot I wanted to tell you about them until after I mashed them all for bean dip, which is not very photogenic.

I am down to the last of the luscious lemons in my lemon care package. Here are a couple of blisteringly hot updates on the lemon curd issue, and that will have to be it for today. Gotta bake.

First, go ahead and make that lemon curd, but add a teaspoon of grated fresh ginger root to the pot, and then after straining it, a fat pinch of saffron threads that you crush as you sprinkle them in. If there is a more sensuous thing you can do in the kitchen in under 30 seconds than to crush a pinch of saffron threads, I want to hear about it--but maybe offline so we don't get in any trouble with the FCC.

Second, try a little raspberry curd if you feel all this lemon activity is not for you. The particulars are below. I am planning to deploy it in this super successful buttercream later on, if I don't eat it all first, but it would be comfortable dressing up a nice plain cake or scone or meringue or some ice cream, and like its lemony cousin, can be folded into some whipped cream if you are in the mood for some mousse.

raspberry lime curd

4 eggs
1 c sugar
10 oz bag frozen raspberries
1/4 c fresh lime juice
2t grated lime zest
1 stick of unsalted butter, cut in 1" chunks

Have ready a fine mesh strainer and a bowl it rests comfortably on.

Stir the eggs and sugar together in a medium size, heavy saucepan. Add the remaining ingredients to the pot and combine. Set over a medium flame and cook, stirring, until the mixture thickens, lowering the heat as necessary to avoid a hard boil and maintain a slow simmer. When the curd is nicely thickened (about five minutes at the simmer), dump the mixture into the strainer and use a spatula to force as much curd out from the seeds and other solids as you can. Cover and refrigerate until cool; when it cools, it will thicken quite a bit.

that was easy

My son had chicken pox a few weeks ago. He got off pretty easy, all things considered. When his sisters had it, years ago, they were paved with spots and truly miserable. I am glad he could knock it off his bucket list with less unhappiness. Like his sisters, my own tiptoe through those tulips was epic.

I went to a very academic and rigorous and you can go ahead and say snooty private school, where I learned a tremendous amount, especially about being a student, and where I made some lifelong friends whom I treasure, and where I came to loathe and despise the concept of 'living up to your potential.' The most crucial way to demonstrate that you were reaching this mysterious benchmark was getting in to college. So senior year was a crescendo of pressure: apply, keep grades up, stay on top of numerous resumé-building projects, etc. In my case the project was the yearbook, which had to be delivered to the printer right before winter break, which was also magically the point at which all applications were in, and all work leading to grades that would be reported to colleges was due. We all fell in to that break like off a cliff, and in my lucky case it involved a dream vacation on a sailboat in the Virgin Islands with my family, where I woke up on day 2 with a blinding headache and allover malaise. On day 3, I came out in spots and was packed off to a clinic that may or may not have been on St. John. There was a friendly Indian doctor with a pronounced accent. He looked me over.

"Has she been swimming?" he asked my parents.

"I have," I said, "but I think I have chicken pox."

"She could be having a reaction to something in the water," he said to my mother.

"But I think I have chicken pox," I said.

"It could be fish eggs," he mused.

"But I don't feel allergic, I feel sick," I said.

"She thinks she may have the chicken pox," my mother said to the doctor.

He laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "If you had chicken pox, you would feel sick!" He turned back to my parents. "She would be MUCH SICKER in that case. It is allergic." He directed the very large nurse in the room to administer a shot of Benadryl, and fell into conversation with my parents as she trundled across the room with what appeared to be a javelin full of the stuff.

A little cabin in the bow of a sailboat in hot weather loses some of its charm when you are feverish and rashy. When I got back to New York, Lucy Bailey and I (the only two people in our class who had not had chicken pox in grade school) compared notes on our itchy vacations, and what do you know but she had spent it in bed with the chicken pox.

My mother took me out to buy some make-up to cheer me up.

"What are we looking for today?" said the clerk at the counter of the fancy store.

"Do you have a cream that's good for dry skin?" I asked.

"This is wonderful for oily skin," he told my mother, smiling conspiratorially.

"But I have dry skin," I said, perhaps a little edgily.

"This is good for oily skin," he said, perhaps a little testily.

"But my skin is dry," I perhaps whined.

"But darling," he said, not tenderly, pointing to the pox on my face, "we're blossoming."

Reader, I killed him.

"Could be fish eggs," said in as close an approximation of an Indian accent as we can muster, became a catch-phrase in our family, and of course this brings us right around to tapioca, which is a lunchbox staple around here. Remember, we are all about loving the lunchbox this week. Did I distract you with my feverish ramblings?

Fruit tapioca is tasty and fast to make, and looks so much like tadpole eggs that I am sure you could find a good name for it to honor Roald Dahl and make this appealing to any skeptics in your house. I have no skeptics in my house. In my house I have to hide it in order to have enough for the lunchboxes the next day.

It’s a bit of a reach to call this a recipe. I measured things this time, just to make sure I would be giving you a functional formula, but usually it’s all done by glops and dollops and pretty much always comes out fine. The top pick around here is peach, for which I use any pink or orange juice (think: lemonade, apricot mango, orange & carrot), frozen peaches and maybe some honey if the juice is not sweet enough. Raspberry is another favorite. You can substitute instant or minute tapioca for the small pearl, in which case you eliminate the soaking step and make it even faster--just dump everything in the pot and cook. Don't be hindered by my peach rut--the possible combinations of fruits and juices are endless.

fruit tapioca

2/3 c small pearl tapioca

¾ c water

3 c fruit juice

2 c coarsely chopped fresh or frozen fruit

Depending on the sweetness of your juice, ¼ to ½ cup of apple juice concentrate, or a few T of sugar or honey or agave nectar

In a medium saucepan, put the tapioca to soak with the ¾ c of water for about half an hour.

Dump in the remaining ingredients, taste for sweetness and adjust as necessary. Bring to a low boil, stirring all the while to prevent the tapioca glumping to the bottom of the pot, and simmer for about 5 minutes, until a few of the tapioca balls test soft (they do not need to be clear, just tender). Pour into a lidded container and cool, then cover and refrigerate.

free lunch

At this point in lunchbox season, even when I am not coughing like a consumptive poet and consequently enjoying the sleep cycle of a mosquito, my inspired passion for the lunchbox has generally cooled somewhat from its September simmer. Sometimes I think I will be carted off to the nut farm, nattering about sandwiches and rocking back and forth with a thermos.

It’s been a long week, and it's possible that I am still a little delirious. But even before I took a forced week off from lunch preparation, I knew it was time for a little date-night with the concept.

What started me off on the rekindled romance path was these:

Stink Bug Eggs. I used to make them all the time, and then I stopped for no apparent reason, and when I made them before the Great Tumble Into Feeling Unwell, they were greeted with whoops of happiness.

If there is a lover of hard-boiled eggs in your life, and if this person either has an eye for beauty or is a 7-year-old boy, or both, this is a lunchbox trump card.

The recipe comes from one of my favorite cookbooks: Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, a posthumously-assembled collection of recipes for the foods that appear in his books for children. The book relies heavily on the principle that makes a person of a certain age more likely to eat a Stink Bug Egg than a hard-boiled egg, even though they are the same thing. Consequently it includes some pretty sophisticated seasonings and ingredients for a children’s cookbook. “Here, darling, is a disk of cinnamon-toasted brioche with caramelized coconut and lemon zest!” vs. “Anybody want a Crispy Wasp Sting?” Ditto for the Snozzcumbers, and the Mosquitoes’ Toes and Wampfish Roes Most Delicately Fried.

I know we are not supposed to trick little eaters and play games with food. I also know how a grumpy person perks up when you make letters in the pancakes or put ears on their sandwich. Eating is supposed to be a happy thing, after all.

Maybe some of you are saying, but lunch is a sandwich, a drink and a piece of fruit (or whatever the default setting is on your lunch plan). Let dinner be happy, and let lunch just be lunch. I need lunch to be fast. There's merit to this line of reasoning, and rest assured I am not advocating we all join the ranks of the crazed Bento moms who have aspic cutters and the blogs to prove it. But whether you are packing lunch, or making it at home for someone's plate, or even just dishing some up for yourself (it's OK to make yourself happy, too, I've been told), sometimes make it nice. Other than the stinkbug eggs, which do take longer than a hard-boiled egg (though none of that is active time), these ideas add no more than three minutes to the total preparation time. None of them. I made sure. And most of them owe their magic to infrequency; daily appearances would wear out their welcome.

Why bother? I was hoping you would ask that. Here's what I think. When food, and our experience of eating it, is nice, when it makes us think for a minute about being loved, or about what person and what soil grew this nourishing item, or about how fine it is to taste something that makes us pause to appreciate it in our mouths, then we are not just re-fueling. We are connecting. We are knitting back up the raveled sleeve of what has happened to our food. That's MULTI-TASKING! Fueling and thinking at the same time!

Stink bug eggs follow below; here are a few of those very fast, take no time, done in a wink ideas before we move on:

1. break out the cookie cutters, which perhaps have not seen the light of day in some time, and make them earn their keep:

2. have a channel knife? it's one of those gadgets that removes a strip of orange or lemon zest for all those cocktails you are mixing (maybe it is in with the cookie cutters, in the assisted-living drawer):

3. Refuse to get involve with any tool other than the knife you are already using? Get a little jiggy with the open face sandwich:

or make your regular sandwich, but cut it tiny:



4. Steal inspiration from those who impale their lunch on a stick, because everything tastes better on a stick, even fruit salad.


5. Leave the culinary hijinks to the whackjobs, and remember that the pen is mightier (and faster) than the spatula:

stick a little love note in the box

OK then!

stink bug eggs
adapted from Roald Dahl's Revolting Recipes

Eggs (as many as you'd like)
Large handful of onion skins

Hard-boil your desired number of eggs. I was told once that the best method is to put the eggs in cold water, bring the water to a boil and maintain a simmer for 7 minutes, and let them sit in the hot water, heat off, for another 7. I was also told that the best method is to boil the water, turn off the heat, put the eggs in, and let them stay there for 12 minutes. Maybe you were told something else. Do that, but follow this one essential, hard & fast rule: use eggs that are at least a week old, or the peeling will make you weep.

Pull the eggs out of the hot water, reserving it, and plunge the hot eggs into a bowl of ice water. Toss the onion skins into the hot water, and bring that back to a simmer.

When the eggs have cooled, whap them all over lightly against the counter, or with a spoon. You want the shell cracked but still intact. Return them to the pot with the onion skins, and turn off the heat. Let the eggs sit n the onion bath at least a couple hours, or overnight in the fridge, and then peel them. Admire the shells:

The eggs pictured above only took a short soak; photos do not do them much justice, but they are pretty awesome looking. You can use food coloring instead of onion skins, but then you would be using food coloring. Beets, maybe? Could be good. Let me know if you try it. I am going back to bed.

what happens while you are making other plans

Well, what do you know about that--I wasn’t inching off my sickbed after all. Or if I was, it was just to prepare to take a flying leap right in to the deepest center thereof. I had pneumonia! Who has time for that, I’d like to know? And then a fresh wave of illness moved through the rest of the house, too. At the low point, it seemed reasonable to wonder if perhaps we were part of a government experiment, or being secretly filmed for reality tv, but a sympathetic pal assured me that we were just stuck in a draft version of the script for “Contagion,” written by Sartre. However deep the mystery, it’s often the simplest explanation that unties the knot.

But the sun seems to be feebly shining here now, and I have cautiously rejoined the ranks of the upright and functional. Once again, the strong links of the chain of food and friendship held us firmly. Bless its power.

Seems fitting, since we have been kept so well by food and friendship in the last ten days, that the post I was trying to write as I sunk slowly under the desk was about putting love back in the lunchbox. Probably not surprising that the post appears to have been translated from Urdu, possibly by an iPhone app, nor that the photos are not terribly in focus. So now that I am somewhat operative again, I'll see what I can do to sort that all out, and get the Loving Lunchbox right out to you in short order.

In the meantime, get some sleep, drink plenty of water and for pete's sake wash your hands.