{"id":469,"date":"2014-12-02T01:19:44","date_gmt":"2014-12-02T09:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/?p=469"},"modified":"2014-12-02T01:19:50","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T09:19:50","slug":"november-2014-good-eats-fish-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/02\/november-2014-good-eats-fish-month\/","title":{"rendered":"November 2014: Good Eats Fish Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Wait, why is November fish month? It’s clearly turkey month! Well, remember when I said earlier this month that November would be random Good Eats episode month<\/a>? And how I rolled the dried pasta episode, which is really recipe light? Well, I re-rolled and got Hook, Line, and Dinner<\/a>, which was the fish episode. So I did a few fish dishes.<\/p>\n

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Saturday, November 15, 2014 – The Good Eats book<\/a> calls this “Fish Meuniere” (pp 56-57). The TV show just calls it “pan frying”. The basic idea is season your fish with salt and pepper, coat it with a little bit of flour, and then pan fry it. And then, make a lemon caper butter sauce, because lemon and capers go really well on fish for some reason.<\/p>\n

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Alton Brown recommends using a trout for this recipe. But he also recommends just asking your local fish monger for their recommendation. The fish monger at the Bellevue Uwajimaya<\/a> recommended true cod. This turned out to be a bad idea. The cod fell apart as soon as it was finished cooking, and instead of getting that nice filet you see in Good Eats, I got the mess you see in the photo above. It was still a delicious mess though, since the fish was still delicious, and the lemon and capers made everything delicious-er.<\/p>\n

I guess the Bellevue Uwajimaya fish monger doesn’t know the difference between pan fry and deep fry. (The quality of the fish was still top notch though.)<\/p>\n

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Thursday, November 27, 2014 – This wasn’t from the Good Eats episode, but I decided to include it anyway. For our Thanksgiving party, we were bored of turkey, so we just roasted a fish instead. Alton Brown recommends bass for whole roasting. Uwajimaya was out of bass, so I got a salmon instead, mainly because I had assumed we needed 5 lbs of fish to feed all 10 of us, and salmon were the only fish that got to the 5 lb range. In retrospect, we had leftover fish, so I guess I should have gone with something smaller and more flavorful. (As they say, hindsight is 20\/20, but foresight is 50\/50.)<\/p>\n

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The interesting part is the aromatics I stuffed into the fish’s belly. When I cook on the stove top, onions and garlic are inevitable. We were doing Asian-inspired food, so I also tossed in some slices of ginger. I got the idea of using citrus from the Good Eats episode, so I also sliced up some lemon and put it in there. And to finish off, some sprigs of rosemary, because rosemary is the best herb.<\/p>\n

The actual cooking method was just roasting the fish at 450 F for 35 min. (Which got a 5 lb salmon to a nice well done. Maybe we can scale back on the cooking time for a bit.) In retrospec, I should have taken photos of nice flaky pieces of fish on a plate. Oh well. As they say, foresight is 50\/50.<\/p>\n

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Saturday, November 29, 2014 – The last thing on the Good Eats episode was a grilled fish steak. It’s late November, and it’s cold outside, and I don’t have a proper grill, so I grilled it on my cast iron grill pan instead. And the Uwajimaya fish mongers recommended a swordfish steak, which you can’t really go wrong with. (Although the rookie first suggested the true cod again (which was previously frozen, and they have no idea when and how it was defrosted, so I passed on it), but then asked a more experienced fish monger who recommended the swordfish.)<\/p>\n

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I rubbed the 14.5oz swordfish steak with cumin, coriander, fennel, kosher salt, and black pepper, painted it with olive oil, and grilled about 2 minutes each side. As you can see, it’s nice and seared on the outside and rare on the inside. Of course, some of my friends would freak out if I served them a rare fish steak. In that hypothetical, I’d pop it into the oven for 5-10 minutes. (Yeah, I’ll need to figure that one out a bit more.)<\/p>\n

The swordfish steak was delicious. And learning (practicing) 3 ways to prepare fish was a good exercise in practice cooking. Also, as it turns out, I don’t like fennel. Too licorice-y.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wait, why is November fish month? It’s clearly turkey month! Well, remember when I said earlier this month that November would be random Good Eats episode month? And how I rolled the dried pasta episode, which is really recipe light? Well, I re-rolled and got Hook, Line, and Dinner, which was the fish episode. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[77,47],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","tag-good-eats","tag-seafood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}