Le Menu

Some of my favorite blog posts often describe what was on the menu for dinner, especially if dinner was homemade.  I miss the Julie/Julia Project blog, where a 30-something woman in New York blogged about preparing each one of Julia Child’s recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  Her writing and project was compelling enough to land her a book deal at the end of the project and the book is forthcoming.

While I do not intend to turn this blog into a food blog, food is one of my favorite subjects.  I enjoy cooking good meals and own several cookbooks,which I only resort to if I’ve run out of ideas.  I subscribe to a few magazines (Gourmet, Sunset, and Prevention) which provide interesting recipe ideas each month.  Often the recipes are surprisingly quick and delicious.  The Los Angeles Times has a weekly food section and I subscribe to the Seattle Post Intelligencer online, which also has a food section.

Last week’s LA Times food section featured mackerel, which before yesterday was unfamiliar to me as a dinner item.  I’d seen it in a marine biology course I taught last summer.  Whole Foods has an excellent seafood department so I went there first.  The manager told me that they don’t stock it because it’s a kind of fishy fish and your average white person, who apparently Whole Foods caters to, doesn’t buy it.  He recommended that I try an Asian store and gave me a few addresses.

Yesterday Dave and I ventured into an Asian supermarket on Devonshire and Reseda.  I had always pictured Asian markets as kind of hole-in-the wall shops in the San Fernando Valley, mostly because the non-white population seemed to be Hispanic, but our trip to the Galleria, which is sort of an Asian sub-mall with a large grocery store, proved that my observations about the demographics around here weren’t entirely correct.  We found the seafood department easily enough and found all kinds of frozen and iced specimens not found at Whole Foods.  For instance, catfish that easily weighed 3 pounds, large squid, whole tilapia, and mackerel.  In an Asian market you have the choice of cleaning the fish yourself or the nice people behind the counter will do it for you.  I’m not squeamish about cleaning fish but I don’t use the entrails or head or tail for anything so when the cleaning was offered I accepted.  Not only was my fish expertly cleaned, it was the cheapest 1.5 pounds of fish I’ve purchased anywhere at just over $3.00.  I never get out of Whole Foods for less than $10 for ordinary fish for one meal.  When we were checking out, I noticed the produce section and wondered if they stocked anything more interesting than what we can buy at Von’s or Whole Foods.  Next trip we’ll investigate that section.

Here’s what I did with the mackerel as advised by the LA Times last Wednesday.  I put parchment down in a baking pan, sliced an onion, then prepared a charmoula.  The LA Times recipe is slightly tamer (the quantities of spices are halved and cayenne pepper is left out) than the recipe I’ve linked here.  The fish gets slathered with this green sauce inside and out then covered with foil and baked in a 400F oven for 30 minutes if the fish is whole. If you use filets, bake for 20 minutes.  The corn on the cob had already been in the oven for about 20 minutes.  After the fish baked for 20 minutes, the foil comes off so the skin can brown, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes.  In the meantime, I peeled more cooked beets for the beet salad I described the other day.  When I first made this salad, I used more onions than necessary and we both went to bed with onions on the belly.  At least for me, a few Tums were required to temper the onions in the middle of the night.  The addition of another pound or so of beets mellowed it nicely.  Next time I will use at least 2 bunches of beets to 1/2 of an onion, even a sweet onion like a Vidalia or Walla Walla.  When dinner was served, it was rather colorful and very flavorful with the green sauced fish, red beet salad on a bed of lettuce, and yellow corn on the cob.

This blog will by no means be anything like another Julie/Julia Project but food is hobby with me and now that I have a lot of time on my hands, I may be posting about it more frequently.