Recently in Fish Category

Fish is one of the best last minute dinner ideas. It is often fresh, extremely versatile, and cooks up in a flash. When the days drag on and by 4pm neither of us has given a single thought to dinner, I turn to fish.

These days, there isn't a lot of fresh, local fish. In May, we'll finally be able to get local salmon again, but until then, we're limited to some of the Canadian white fishes such as sole, cod, and rock fish. The following recipe will work well with any white fish. The whole thing takes about 40 minutes, and it's great with pasta, rice, or emmer.

Ingredients

• 1 pound sole, cod, or rock fish
• Flour for dusting
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup orange juice
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 6 tablespoons butter
• A bit of olive oil

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200.

Heat some olive oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. On a plate, sprinkle some flour and season with salt and pepper. Dredge the fish in the flour mixture and fry it in the skillet for about 2 minutes each side or until it is done.

Transfer the fish to an oven safe dish, and keep it warm in the oven while you make the sauce.

In the same skillet, add the 6 tablespoons butter. The butter will melt and then foam. Give it a few stirs during this process. When it is starting to turn brown, add the orange juice. When the mixture foams again, add the lemon juice. Stir for 30 seconds and remove from heat.

Plate the fish and top with the sauce. The sauce is especially good on pasta as well.

So what do you do when you're 10 minutes away from leaving work and you have no idea what to make for dinner? You go to the web and do a quick search. Tonight I came up with a simple tasty recipe for any broiled white fish. Add a little rice or Emmer and you've got yourself a complete meal.

Ingredients

• Olive oil
• 2 teaspoons minced, peeled fresh ginger
• 2 minced garlic cloves
• 1 minced red bell pepper
• 1 bunch chopped green onions
• 1 teaspoon curry powder
• 2 teaspoons red curry paste
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 4 teaspoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 pound white fish (cod, tilapia, sole)
• Rice or Emmer

Directions

First, the prep work. Mince the ginger, garlic, and red pepper. I did this by combining all of these ingredients in a food processor. Get the curry powder, red curry paste, and cumin ready and shake the coconut milk can.

Heat some oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the minced pepper, ginger, and garlic mixture. Stir for a good 5 minutes and then add the onions.

After another minute, add the curry powder, curry paste, and cumin. Stir for one minute and then add the soy sauce, brown sugar, and coconut milk.

Heat until simmering, but don't let it come to a boil. Turn off the heat and cover to keep warm.

Preheat the broiler. On a greased cookie sheet, lay the fish and drizzle with oil and sprinkle with salt.

Broil for 7 minutes or until the fish is flaky.

Serve over rice or emmer and top with sauce.

We really enjoyed this dish. The fish was tender and an excellent conveyance for the spicy, somewhat sweet sauce. Next time I might back off on the red curry paste just a bit as I think I'd like to savor the flavor a bit more.

One of the fabulous things about living in Seattle is the shear amount of fresh seafood we can get. The fishing boats dock less than 5 miles from our house and at the farmer's market, we can often get fish that was taken off the boat just that morning.

Salmon is always a wonderful option, but sometimes we feel like a change of pace. The other day, we picked up some fresh red snapper. John pulled out the Moosewood Restaurant New Classics cookbook and we found an interesting recipe: Fish with Cornmeal Chipotle Crust. We're a sucker for chipotle, so we gave it a try.

Ingredients * = local. & = organic

• 1 pound firm white fish *
• 1 tablespoon canned chipotles in adobo sauce 
• 1 1/2 tablespoons vegetable oil &
• 1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon or lime juice &
• 1 large garlic clove, minced *&
• 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cornmeal &

So we didn't do too badly on local/organic for this recipe. Soon we'll have our own thyme as well.

We preheated the oven to 375. Then we put a little oil in a glass dish and put the dish in the oven to warm. (This is key, and I'll explain why later). We pureed the chipotles in the food processor and then combined them with the oil, lime juice, thyme, and salt. We used a smallish lime and didn't even measure the juice, we just squeezed it as well as we could. Next we poured the sauce in a shallow bowl.

We poured the cornmeal on a plate. Then we rinsed the fish and patted it dry. The next part was messy. John dipped the fish in the chipotle mix, making sure to coat it well. Then he dredged it in the cornmeal.

This is the part where you really need two people. I pulled the hot oiled pan out of the oven and he laid the coated fish in the hot pan.

Remember when I said I'd explain this? Well, the first time we made this, we just put the fish in the cold, oiled pan. Well, when we tried to serve it, the top half of the fish was nice and crispy, but the bottom of the fish was soggy and most of the coating stayed in the pan. When we heated the pan first, the bottom crisped nicely as well.

We baked the fish for 25 minutes. That's it!

(AKA Pecan Crusted Salmon)

This recipe has made it into the category of "one of our standby recipes". The only problem is that we rarely make it. I'm not sure why, except for the fact that shortly after we discovered it, we bought a grill and started cooking almost all of our meals on that. Mmmmm, BBQ. But when it's cold and rainy outside, you don't want to spend any more time outside than you absolutely have to.

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard (Moutarde de Dijon)
• 3 tablespoons butter, melted
• 5 teaspoons honey (we use Agave nectar for a lower glycemic index)
• 1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
• 3 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley
• 6 fillets of salmon (4 oz each)
• Salt and Pepper
• Lemon wedges (optional)

So examining our success at local shopping... it seems that we were quite unsuccessful today. The Dijon mustard is from France. The only organic and local ingredient is the butter. But, you could make this recipe with more local and organic ingredients, especially in the spring and summer when salmon is fresh.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In one bowl, mix the mustard, melted butter, and honey. In a second bowl, mix the bread crumbs, pecans, and the parsley.

(Here are the chopped pecans and our Alaskan ULU)

Place the salmon fillets in a greased baking dish. Season them with salt and pepper. Don't these fillets look good? I did give a quick thought to scraping the recipe and just cooking the salmon plain.

But, a calmer head prevailed as J started brushing the salmon with the mustard/honey/butter mixture.

Cover the top of each fillet with the bread crumb mixture.

Bake for 10 minutes or until salmon is done. A good guideline is for every inch of thickness, bake the salmon for 10 minutes.

We served this with a side of roasted hazelnut squash. We bought the squash from the University District Farmer's Market. We quartered it, scraped out the seeds, and roasted it for about an hour at 400 degrees.

Our plan was to take the squash out of the oven and cut it out of it's peel. Once I picked up a piece of the squash however, that plan flew out the window. I basically had to scrape the squash out as best I could. We brushed it with melted butter.

By then the salmon was ready. Here's our out of focus dinner! Look Mom! I ate squash. Willingly!