The Local Food Report: seven fishes

We met Frank Tenaglia through a letter. It was addressed to my husband and his brother, and it was in response to an article that had been written about their seafood market, and the Italian tradition of eating seven different kinds of fish on Christmas Eve.

"Dear Hay Brothers," it began. "More than seventy five years ago, my mother used to make this meal and I loved it. She would have fried smelts, fried anchovies, baccala, stuffed squid, calamari, oysters, scallops, or crab." Frank gave his address and a phone number, and said that he hoped he could get the makings for a meal for two this year.

Last week, my husband and I drove to West Hyannisport to meet him. We sat down with Frank and his wife Carolyn, and he told us his memories of Christmas Eve dinner in an Italian household. He remembers his mother as a wonderful cook, and said that for the big meal—Feast of the Seven Fishes—she battered almost everything in flour and egg and deep fried it in olive oil. His favorite were smelts—small, oily, migratory fish—that she cooked whole, gutted but with the scales and skin on and the skeleton still in. He also loved anchovies and baccala (dried, salted codfish), and his mother's specialty, stuffed squid.

His memories of the meal reach way back—back to the 1930s, when he was six, seven, eight years old. He remembers helping his mother in the kitchen—not with the fish, but with mincemeat shaped like a horseshoe, and long snakes of fried dough, cosas frittes—literally, fried things.

But Frank never learned to cook himself. When he was younger, his mother did the cooking, and when he married his wife Carolyn took over the cooking. She was Irish, so they didn't celebrate Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But recently, Carolyn's gotten less mobile, and Frank's taken over in the kitchen. And this year, he's hoping to make his very first Feast of the Seven Fishes.

I don't think he's planning anything complicated—just seven fishes, battered and fried—but if you're interested in the tradition, there are lots of menus from Italian-American chefs online. I found a good-looking one in Saveur (check out the story here and the menu here) and another from Mario Batali. I'm not sure yet what we're having for Christmas Eve dinner, but we almost always have some seafood. And if we make it to seven fish dishes, here are my top picks for this year:

1. Stuffed Oysters

2. Lobster Fra Diavolo

3. Stuffed Clams

4. Calamari with Stewed Tomatoes

5. Salt Cod Stew

6. Stuffed Squid

7. Seared Sea Scallops

What would you make? I'd love to hear.

The Local Food Report: live cod

Imagine, just for a second, that you're a cod fisherman. You longline, which means you set a line with a series of baited hooks and send it down with an anchor, and then later, come back to pull it up.

Usually, the fish come in through a roller, fall to the deck, and then you process them by slitting their throats, cutting out their guts, rinsing them, and packing them on ice. You get about $2 a pound.

But if you take a little more time—if you unhook the fish and put them in a tank and keep them alive—you can get $3 a pound. Sound smart? It is.

This is the system fishermen Eric Hesse and Greg Walinski of Sesuit Harbor in Dennis have set up with a Boston company called Wong Trading. Wong Trading distributes to Asian restaurants—mostly chefs in Boston's Chinatown—and these chefs like their fish still swimming. Hesse says it's a cultural thing—they think the fish have a subtler taste when they're served just-gutted, and they're willing to pay for it.

Hesse and Walinski fish on a quota system, which counts the pounds of fish they catch, not the pounds of fish they sell. So if they can sell the whole fish—gutted, on average, a fish usually weighs about 17 percent less—they're making that much more money on their quota. What's more, the chefs like the smaller, single-serving-size fish, which are exactly the ones the regular fillet market doesn't want.

It can be tricky—unhooking fish at night, for instance, is a challenge, as is keeping an eye on hundreds of pounds of live cod—but all in all, it's a pretty cool system. Here's to the ingenuity of our fishermen!

The Local Food Report: Meet monkfish

Have you ever seen a monkfish? They are, to quote my husband "pretty ugly looking things" that look more like Gelatinous Starship Enterprises than any fish you've ever seen. Here—take a look:

Just to be clear, that man up there is not my husband. He's someone who went fishing with Kayman Charters in Gloucester, and they were nice enough to share his photo with me because I did not have one of my own. You see what Alex means, though, about the Gelatinous Starship Enterprise, right? That monkfish must be at least two thirds head.

Which is a shame, really, because the only meat is in the tail. There's the tail meat and the liver, which is sort of attached to the tail, but we never see the liver around here because it's such a delicacy in Asia. They cure it and serve it as nigiri or sashimi in places like Japan, and it's in such high demand over there that the boats here cut it away from the tail meat and ship it off to market right away.

At any rate, for each twenty pounder, you only get about five to seven pounds of meat, and even that is a lot of work. First you have to deal with all the slime and gook that comes with the head, and then, once you get past that, you have to separate the skin from the meat, and then the meat from a sausage-casing like layer that surrounds it. It's hard work.

But if you like monkfish—and I do—it's worth it. The meat has a texture similar to shrimp or lobster meat that, when cooked properly, snaps rather nicely when you eat it. (It's also known as Poor Man's Lobster for this reason.) Not only that, but it has a subtle, not-too-fishy flavor, sort of like a cross between cod and striped bass. This lends it well to chefs and high end restaurants, but most people don't really cook it that often at home.

Alex says that's mainly because for a long time, monkfish has had a reputation around here as trash fish. Locally, the boats that get it are mostly bringing it in as bycatch—scallop dredgers and groundfish draggers pick it up as they move along the ocean floor—although some boats are also starting to target it. Which leads to the other reason it's not that popular—sustainability issues. While most scientists agree that monkfish population levels are fine, dragging is not considered a sustainable harvesting method because of the bycatch and the damage it does to the ocean floor. That said, according to NOAA, monkfish habitat is only minimally vulnerable to these fishing gears.

It's kind of hard to know what to think. But my guess would be that monkfish, like most things, is fine in moderation. And a fish this ugly, well, it needs some love.

If you're into it, here are some recipes to try. If you took me up on my suggestion to make ratatouille this summer, I'd go for this Cooking Light recipe for Monkfish with Ratatoille. I've also been eying this Monkfish and Clam Bourride, from a 2002 issue of Gourmet, and The Minimalist's take on Monkfish with Mashed Potatoes and Thyme looks simple and elegant.

Happy cooking!

The Local Food Report: E & T Farms

Ed Osmun is shy—that much we have in common. The first day I showed up with my microphone in tow I could see it in the way he bowed his head. But just as much as Ed is shy, I am determined, and today, finally, we got his story out. It starts with tilapia—ready for market, and fat.

These tilapia are the main event on Ed's farm. They arrive tiny—half a gram—from New Mexico. A breeder there selects for uniformity and growth, which makes Ed's life easier when it comes to culling and the eventual harvest. The fish spend their roughly nine months of life in nine large, half-dumpster size tanks—growing up in shades from orange to black into weights a pound and a quarter and on. As they live and eat they of course create waste, but Ed has a system in place—a growing method called aquaponics—that allows him to use this waste instead of throwing it out.

It works like this: in the water, there are big drums filled with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Next door—adjacent to the fish tanks in the farm's roughly 8,000 square foot indoor growing area—is a greenhouse space. Nine tubes, one from each of the fish tanks, feed nine hydroponic systems, with the water full of nitrates constantly filtering out from the fish tanks and into plastic tubes beneath the rows of salad greens.


Eventually, what solid waste the greens can't take up is filtered out along with old water, and new water is filtered in. It's a fairly ingenious system, although Ed says he can't take any credit. People think the idea may go as far back as the ancient Incas, the Chinese, and even the Aztecs. If you think about it, it's actually a very natural system—the whole world runs on aquaponics in one way or another. But the modern system was the brainchild of the New Alchemy Institute—the place that inspired Arthur Teubner to include growing space in his living space. The researchers at New Alchemy published a series of articles on irrigating garden vegetables with fish effluent in the 1970s, and the idea took off.

Ed says he's been interested in controlled environment growing for at least as long. His wife tells him he was talking about it when they were dating; they've been married now 37 years.


Of course, the upshot of all this is food. Ed sells tilapia to local chefs (he's hoping to start selling retail to fish markets soon, too) and his greens go to local stores, restaurants, and farmers' markets. They're sold under the banner of E & T Farms, which Ed runs with his wife, Betty. They also produce honey and beeswax candles, and in the summer, they expand their growing outside and offer goodies like tomatoes and cucumbers. But even now, all year round, they have salad mix—plump plastic bags filled with baby lettuces, Swiss chard, arugula, and even a few nasturtiums.

This Saturday, at the Marstons Mills Farmers' Market, if you have a second, introduce yourself. Ed may be shy, but he's always willing to talk aquaponics.

The Local Food Report: how to cut a haddock

Oh, friends. I might be good at some things—picking the dark chocolate pieces from a pint of Ben & Jerry's mint chocolate chunk comes to mind, as does distracting myself online with archives of the The Blue Hour when I'm on a very tight deadline—but learning to fillet a haddock is not on that list. I tried, really I did, to listen carefully and learn the other day when Alex tried to teach me with his favorite blue handled knife, but it would appear I'm not cut out for whole fish.

It's not that I was freaked out. It would take a lot more than a whole haddock staring up at me from a cutting board to give me cold feet. It was more of a handling and anatomy-understanding inability sort of thing. We decided to do this as a soon-to-be-married send off radio piece, and also, it seemed high time, if we are going through with this whole marriage thing, that I learn how to cut a fish.

When we set up, Alex arranged the haddock so that it's top side was toward me, head to the left, tail to the right. He told me how to cut around the gill plate, to stick the knife in and feel around for the bones, and then to cut a half semi-circle sort of arch. He helped me stick the knife in on the head side, angle it flat, and cut down the ribs, along the backbone, to the tail. He told me to pull up gently on the fillet and run my knife over the backbone, next, and then to angle the knife down and free the meat on the other side. All this made sense.

What did not make sense was the way the knife moved in my hand, the way it sawed instead of slid, and most importantly, how on earth a person is supposed to keep a gentle yet firm hold strong enough to keep down a wet, slippery fish. I mangled the head loin when the knife slipped, and then on the belly side, I ran into a line of bones sticking up from the cutting board, perpendicular to the backbone (also known as the nape), and called it quits. I did ask to try again on the other side, but Alex was not willing to sacrifice quite that much line caught, $10.99-a-pound fish. That's my haddock down there, looking like a tattered, disastrous wreck.


Here's his, sitting all neat and pretty, ready for it's Food + Wine cover shot.


At any rate, the most interesting thing I learned from the whole debacle is that it is very, very important, if you're going to try and learn to cut fish, to first study the structure of the bones. Alex told me at the end, after I'd messed the fillet up, that the key to freeing the fillet is to understand the anatomy of the fish. If you know where the bones are, you know where not to cut, and then you can cut along the extreme borders of the meat without ruining all that nice interior flesh. After much online searching, I was very pleased to find this excellent drawing of a haddock skeleton. Although it's still a little difficult to see where the nape bones are (covered up by the pectoral fin? overlapping with the ribs?) it certainly clears the rest up quite a bit.

I was planning, before we did the lesson, on telling you step-by-step how to cut your own whole haddock, but given how well that went, I think it might be best if you take your cues over here. You'll notice that when the guy in the video does the fillet, he never tries to cut around the nape bones. He cuts down the backbone on the belly side from the head to the tail, but not all the way to the bottom side, just a few inches in. Then, starting at the head side, instead of trying to cut around the nape bones that are sticking up, he just tugs the fillet toward the tail a little bit, until the meat comes free from the perpendicular bones. Then he pushes the knife all the way through to the bottom of the belly, and cuts along the rib bones to the tail. I have a feeling that Alex would tell me this is not top-notch technique, but for a beginner, it seems like a good trick to try.

Luckily, despite my complete and utter lack of technique, the marriage is still on. Alex can be quite generous sometimes, and it appears that he is willing to commit to a lifetime of cutting fish. I'll see you when we get back, in exactly one month and a day.

The Local Food Report: Cape Ann Fresh Catch

So. Remember all that talk about CSAs in the spring? You know—the Community Supported Agriculture model where you fork over a bunch of cash in March, pay for the farmer's start up cost, and get a weekly pick-up of fresh fruits and veggies all season long?

Well, there's a new kid in town. Introducing... the CSF. Community Supported Fishery.

This is what Steve Parkes of Gloucester calls The Hand Off. In which, a formerly sane man or woman agrees to show up on a specified day at a specified time once a week to meet a refrigerated truck and take home a plastic bag full of whole fish. Tails swing at faces, coolers and ice are packed into trunks, and at home, puzzlement ensues.

The thing about applying the CSA model to fish is that produce is no whole animal. People are accustomed to handling boxes of spinach and carrots and pears. These days, heck, they even know what to do with celeriac! Most people are not, however, entirely clear on the matter of how to gut and fillet whole fish. (My lovely, 600-pound-tuna-spattered fiancé being the exception.)

Teaching people how to deal with their pick-up has been the biggest challenge for Cape Ann Fresh Catch, the CSF I visited in Ipswich a few weeks back. It was started by the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association and the Northwest Marine Alliance in an attempt to boost fishermen's income, and also to get fresh, just-off-the-boat, sustainably caught fish direct to consumers. They opened the truck doors in June, and so far, over 800 families have signed up.

Each member gets a weekly bag of whatever the 10 full-time local fishermen catch. A share costs $380 for 12 weeks, and there are stops in places every day of the week—Harvard Square, Acton, Ipswich, Gloucester, Marblehead, Cambridge, and a few others. Parkes—who calls himself the Boat to Fork Coordinator—is hoping they'll be able to do at least three sessions and go almost year round. It's tricky in February and March, he says, because weather makes it tough for the boats to get out, but otherwise, he and the fishermen are hoping to make a full-time gig of the thing. There are a few volunteers that help him out at each stop, too, checking names off of clipboards and sussing out what each family prefers of the day's choices.


There aren't always options, of course. For a while when things first started up, the catch of the day was all cod, all the time for quite a few weeks. But the other day when I talked with Parkes, every member could choose between flounder with whiting or cod with whiting, and they seemed pretty pleased overall.

The thing about a CSF is, the fishermen do the bulk of the choosing for you. They decide which species to go after—which are less fished out, which are in season, which are at their peak this time of year. Some weeks, there might be all kinds of options. Others, off Cape Ann at least, cod might be the only one. It means that as a member you might not always get something different, but you will always get what is freshest and best. Most days, Parkes says, the fish he delivers was caught that morning, and a few times this summer, it was so just-out-of-the-sea it hadn't even gone into rigor mortis yet.

The exciting thing is, this week, the guys from Gloucester—Parkes and the fishermen and the organizers over at the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association—are all coming down to Chatham to talk with folks here about bringing the model south. The idea has been slowly moving down the coast—it started, after all, with a bunch of shrimp fishermen in Port Clyde, Maine—and finally, it's getting to us. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.

P.S. A friend of mine actually did a radio piece on the CSF in Port Clyde, which is well worth listening to, especially if you're interested in the history and politics behind the idea. If you click on the link up there and scroll down, you can hear her segment on her blog.

The Local Food Report: reel a striper in

Have you ever caught a striped bass?

I thought I had—in my version of my first date with Alex, at least, that's how things went. We went out on his parents' boat, drove around the harbor, stared awkwardly, fumblingly into each other's eyes, and came home with my very first fish. A striper, and a keeper at that. I even wrote about it over here.

The trouble is, according to Alex—who if we're being honest really knows much, much more about these sorts of things—is that the bass was a bluefish. I wish I could tell you that when he told me that after reading my column I came up with something witty about storytelling and artistic license, but I didn't. Instead, I cursed my lost bass and vowed to go out again and give it another try soon. Of course it's August and the chances of me heading out on a boat with a rod before the quota dwindles away towards September are terribly, terribly small, but a girl can dream.

In the meantime, you could always head out for me. Couldn't you?

It wouldn't be too tricky. There's a big throng of stripers hanging out in the waters off Race Point, and you could go out from Pamet Harbor or even Provincetown. You'd need to find a boat, of course, and some extra gas and maybe bring a lunch cooler or two, but the sheer number of fish bunched up in that spot would make it worth your while. You'd want to be respectful of the commercial guys down at the docks, even if they seem to have sort of a short temper these days, because they've been dealing with an awful lot of extra traffic thanks to these fish.


And finally, you'd want to have a plan for what to do with the fish once it's caught. That's where, if you'll allow it, I'd like to come in. I might not be able to go out there and reel a striper in, but I can certainly give you a knock-your-socks-off recipe for bass crudo.

Technically, it's Alex's recipe, but I don't think he'll mind if I share. (In any case, the cat already leapt out of the bag in the whole false-bass debacle, so it's a bit late to start keeping secrets now.) It's my absolute favorite recipe for striper there is, and it's also the easiest. All you need is a nice cut of fish—preferably the the thicker head cut without its skin—a few squeezes of lime juice, some cilantro from the garden, and a bottle of hot sauce. Some nice, big crystals of sea salt help too, and peppercorns to grind fresh. Other than that, it will just be you and the bass, sitting down outside with a nice glass of Sancerre.

It's an excellent way to spend an evening, I think. So go ahead, beat me to it—just be sure to tell me all your tall tales about how you caught the fish.

STRIPED BASS CRUDO

This is a recipe Alex sometimes pulls out at the restaurant, but it's also one we eat at home a lot. It makes enough for four as an appetizer, but if you have a lot of fish lovers in your kitchen, as we pretty much always do, I'd make at least twice as much. The most important part is that the fish be fresh, which, if you're catching your own, shouldn't be an issue in the slightest.

1/2 pound striped bass fillet, skinned (preferably the thicker head cut)
several sprigs cilantro
juice of 1/2 lime
pinch of coarse sea salt
freshly cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sriracha

Cutting against the grain of the fish, slice the fillet into strips as thin as possible. Arrange the strips so that they overlap just slightly to form several lines across a large, chilled plate. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, and press the strips firmly with the bottom of a cup to flatten the fish. (At this point, you can put the fish in the fridge for several hours and pull it out just before you’re ready to serve.) Remove the wrap and top each piece of bass with a single cilantro leaf. Squeeze the lime juice over the fish and sprinkle it with sea salt and cracked pepper. Drizzle olive oil over top and dot the rim of the plate with Sriracha, to be used as a dipping sauce. Serve at once, maybe with a glass of Sancerre or Fumé Blanc.

A nice spot

Well. We're going to try something new around here today. I was invited, a week or two or maybe three ago, to a party. Only it wasn't a party with girls in paisley sundresses and men with freshly shaven beards and real live potato salad and glass bottle beers that sweat in your hands. It was an online party—a potluck for bloggers, organized by my friend Tara.

Here's where I'd like to host my end of things: at the Wellfleet harbor, down on the dock, staring out at the sailboats. Don't you think that'd be a nice spot?

I do.

Anyway, I first met Tara a few months ago, at a food writing symposium in West Virginia. We stayed in a schmaltzy hotel tucked into the Allegheny Mountains and sat around in Dorothy Draper chairs talking about voice and photography and persona and drinking way too much Kentucky bourbon until way past my bedtime. It felt like the kind of friendship you make at summer camp— all fast and furious and then suddenly gone. I knew, though, the day I got a handwritten note on Tara Mataraza Desmond stationary just to say hello, that we were going to make it.

And though I'm not sure an online potluck quite counts as seeing someone again, for now it is just about as close as we're going to get. So Tara gathered up a whole group of bloggers, some from the symposium and some from the other corners of her life, and sent us each a recipe from her new book. The official date is set for Wednesday, but since what we do around here today will still be around tomorrow, I decided it was okay to jump the gun a bit.

Also, to ask someone to wait to talk about a recipe like herbed cream cheese on rye toast with cucumber pickles and smoked bluefish is a little much. Especially on a day when the harbor looks as breezy as it does above, and when the air inland is so heavy it just might melt you if you try to do anything chef-like, like, say, turn on the oven or heat up a pot of soup. Days like today are just meant for sandwiches like this.

The sandwich is from Tara's book, Almost Meatless. It's a stack of toasted rye, a spread of cream cheese that's been whipped up with fresh chives and dill, a layer of quickly-pickled cucumbers, and then just a sprinkling of smoked bluefish. Her book is all about how to eat meat without eating too much of it, and this recipe is a very good representative as far as I can tell. All the recipes are toned down carnivorous dishes, with chapter headlines like a Bit of Chicken and a Taste of Turkey and a Little Fish and Seafood. It's the sort of cooking I tend to do anyways, not really because I don't like meat, but because I get so involved with things like kohlrabi and dinosaur kale and the fact that four strawberry plants will send out enough runners to make a patch that I sort of forget about the chicken and lamb in the freezer.

Anyways, regardless of how you feel about meat on a regular basis, I reccomend you give this sandwich a whirl. (Unless, of course, you're a vegetarian, in which case I actually think I'd still give it a whirl, only without the smoked fish. It will still be worth your while.)

There's nothing too tricky about putting it together, although it's a good idea to take the cream cheese out of the fridge first thing. Otherwise you might forget, and between waiting for the pickles to marinate and the cream cheese to soften, you might have a rather terrible low blood sugar moment and threaten to step on your dogs' toes. And it's an even better idea to start the cucumbers pickling in the morning, over a bowl of granola.

Beyond that, there's nothing to it. So bon voyage, and I'll see you at the harbor.

SMOKED AND HERBED CREAM CHEESE ON RYE

adapted from Almost Meatless, by Tara Mataraza Desmond and Joy Manning from 10 Speed Press

I changed Tara's recipe around a little bit to fit what I had on hand. Her recipe calls for smoked whitefish, but I used smoked blue. I absolutely adore bluefish paté, and the fresh smoked blue with the whipped cream cheese, chives, and dill is an absolutely perfect match. Also, Pan d' Avignon in Hyannis makes a killer rye bread. They sell it all over the place—at the Hyannis farmers' market and the Wellfleet Marketplace and I think Hatch's, just to name a few.

1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 small cucumber, cut into paper thin slices
1/4 cup loosely packed fresh dill fronds, chopped
2 tablespoons fresh chives, chopped
4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
8 pieces rye bread, toasted
4 ounces smoked bluefish, crumbled
1 tomato, sliced
8 large lettuce leaves or a handful of mixed greens

Take the cream cheese out of the fridge, and set it aside on the counter. Swirl together the sugar, salt, and vinegar in a small mixing bowl, and then dump the cucumbers in. Mix well and put the bowl in the fridge for at least half an hour while the pickles marinate.

Get out an electric beater and the hopefully-soft cream cheese, and spoon half the tub into a bigger mixing bowl. Throw in the dill and the chives and beat everything together until the mixture takes on the consistency of the whipped veggie cream cheese they have at very good bagel places. Toast the rye bread, pull out the cucumbers, and then assemble four sandwiches as follows. Spread half the pieces of toast with a good thick layer of cream cheese, crumble an ounce of the bluefish on top of each, and for every piece of toast with cream cheese stack on a layer of cucumbers and a tomato slice and a broad leaf of lettuce. Now press the four plain piece sof toast on top, slice in half, and enjoy, if you're anything like me, with one of your mother's homemade pickles on a quilt down by the water.

P.S. If you're interested in finding out who else will be potlucking tomorrow, you can head on over to Tara's blog in the morning. She'll be making introductions all day.

The Local Food Report: life before cod

There are some foods we can do without around here. I can't be sure, but I think there was life on the Cape before bananas and avocados and mango mojitos, though that last one might be up for debate. There was not, however, life before cod.

At least, no human life. Every population that's lived on this strip of sand has owed their survival, in some manner at least, to codfish. There was codfish before agriculture, before Stop n' Shop, and certainly before the Europeans arrived. In fact, if you've read Cod or Salt or any of those other fascinating edible histories of New England, you know that cod is why the Old Worlders came over here in the first place. They were looking for fish to dry and turn into salt cod and ship home, and they found it in the New World in droves. It was only later that they decided to stay.

These days, the big codfish that used to be so common are getting harder and harder to find. So are the cod fishermen, as their livelihood slowly gets eaten away.

Thankfully, a group of ground-fishermen in Chatham decided they were ready to do something about it. After all, avocados are good and all, but they can't really compare to a panko-crusted fillet. So about four years ago, they came up with a plan. They asked fisheries regulators if they could manage their catch as a community, the way harvesting cooperatives in the Pacific Northwest did, putting together their catch history and agreeing to take a fixed amount of fish from the sea every year. 

This way, they could avoid fishing under the days-at-sea regulations, which allow fishermen to go out only a fixed number of days, and take so many pounds per day. As one fisherman said, if you put your net in for twenty minutes too long and catch 1,000 pounds of extra fish, you have to throw them back. Since they're already dead, this doesn't do much for the whole plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea objective.

The regulators went for it, and in May of 2004, the Georges Bank Cod Hook Sector was formed.

Participation was voluntary, and the sector took applications and put together a board of directors and a manager and based on how many fishermen applied and their catch history, a quota was assigned. The quota was a percentage of the Total Allowable Catch—how many pounds of groundfish (cod, haddock, and flounder) can come out of the sea every year—and was monitored carefully. Today, this sector has twenty-five fishermen on board.

The Georges Bank Fixed Gear Sector came next, in May of 2006, and today it has nine fishermen involved. 

As other groups of fishermen have watched these Chatham sectors manage their own catch—cutting down on how many days they have to fish, working as a community to run the business of the sea, not wasting a single fish—they've decided they want to make the switch, too. Seventeen groups from Connecticut to Maine put in proposals this year, and depending on what the New England Fishery Management Council decides next week, there could be new sectors in Martha's Vineyard, Boston, New Bedford, and the South Shore by 2010. And that's just around here. Imagine if the whole system switched over—no more dumped fish, business and finances aligned with conservation. Maybe, just maybe, cod would have a chance.

This is thick stuff, I know. If you want to keep reading, I recommend heading over here, or over here, or grabbing this pdf. It's hard to say what the right way is to keep the fish in the sea, but this seems like an awfully good start.

Oh! and the New England Fishery Manangement Council votes on the new proposals next week. If you have anything to say before it happens, you can get in touch with them over here, or you can let your governor know over here.

There's time

Is is wrong to eat the same dish every night for a week straight?

If it is, well, we're doomed. We've been eating the same root vegetable and cilantro slaw with Thai fish cakes for dinner for six days now. (Okay, okay. Sometimes we have it for lunch too.) Six days!

In our defense, this meal is good. And the every day part isn't entirely unwarranted. When you boil three pounds of frozen flounder to make fish stock, you can't just throw all that white meat away. It may have lost a little flavor, but that's why fish cakes were invented. With red curry paste, cilantro, sugar, and a pinch of salt, you can make anything come to life. As for the slaw, well; it isn't quite farmers' market season yet. Those root vegetables are still kicking around, and slicing them up very thinly, sprinkling them with cilantro, and drizzling them with a light, lemon-mayo dressing makes them seem much, much more acceptable this time of year. In fact, between the curry-spiced fish cakes and the cilantro-spiked slaw, I've almost been able to imagine myself down to the fish taco street stand we visited on a trip to Sayulita. I'm not quite there, but then again, we're only halfway through the fish. There's time.


If you look very closely at the picture above, you will see the edge of a little white bowl with a peanut dipping sauce peeking out. This mixture of vinegar, sugar, and crushed nuts is essential. It makes the fish cakes just the slightest bit sweet, and it adds crunch. And, well, if you're going to eat something every day for a week, you ought to go all out.

THAI FISH CAKES

This recipe is a take-off on the traditional Thai fish cakes, Thod Mun Pla. A friend gave us a recipe for those, but since we lacked both string beans and kaffir lime leaves (the two key ingredients) we decided to go with cilantro instead. This turned out to be a very happy decision, as it led us to a recipe we like better yet.

1 pound boiled white fish
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped thin
1 tablespoon red curry paste
1 egg
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
oil/fat for frying

Knead fish, cilantro, curry paste, egg, sugar, and salt by hand in a mixing bowl. Fill a deep, wide pan about an inch full with cooking oil or fat drippings. When the oil is hot, pat the fish mixture into cakes and drop as many will fit into the pan. Cook about 2 minutes each side, or until golden brown. Serve warm over some sort of crunchy slaw, with peanut dipping sauce.

PEANUT DIPPING SAUCE

1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanuts, crushed

In a saucepan, heat up vinegar and sugar. Bring to a boil, and remove from heat. Add peanuts; mix well and serve.

The Local Food Report: bluefin tuna, part 2

Have you ever seen anything like this?

It's an aerial picture of a school of giant bluefin tuna, swimming around the Gulf of Maine. The Large Pelagics Research Center let me borrow it, since I talked with a research director there, Molly Lutcavage, for the radio today.

It's really a pretty amazing idea, that the tuna are so big, and stand out from the ocean so clearly, that someone flying around in a plane could just snap! take a picture and there they are. Like little tadpole-Cheerios, swimming around in the big blue, milky sea.

Lutcavage, along with the New England Aquarium and her group of researchers, studied tuna this way for three years, using spotter pilots from the fishing industry. The spotter pilots' job was to fly around looking for big schools of tuna, and then call the boat captains so they could rev up their engines, grab their nets or harpoons, and head out.


It used to be that only harpoon boats and purse seiners used pilots, but when they started flying for boats with general category licenses, for example rod and reel, whoever got to the fish first could catch most of the quota. In other words, it was first come first serve, and some boats lost out. As you might imagine, this didn't go over very well with a lot of fishermen, and the spotter pilots became so controversial in the late 90s that Lutcavage had to stop using them. Instead, she started tracking giant bluefin with tags.

When she did, she noticed the same thing the fishermen have been noticing: there are a lot fewer big fish around these days, and a lot more juveniles in Cape Cod Bay. The giants are out there, she says, it's just that they're bypassing the whole Gulf of Maine, heading up to Canada or hanging out places like Georges Banks instead.

To try and figure out why, Lutcavage is looking into all kinds of things. Their reproductive cycles, where they spawn, how they interact with their prey. The Center even has a program called Tag a Tiny, aimed at studying the juveniles themselves. The tags track the little tunas' geographic locations, and what the depth and temperature of the water they're swimming in is like. Every little bit of information helps.

If you're interested in knowing more, it's well worth checking out all of the links (in purple) above. Because even though we have a long way to go when it comes to understanding and managing tuna, Lutcavage and her team are learning more by the day.

I, for one, am hoping we understand enough soon enough that tuna sashimi will never be a distant dream. That's one treat I'd rather not do without.

P.S. All photos here are courtesy of the Large Pelagics Research Center in Durham, New Hampshire. Thank you so, so much!

Fish tacos

By the time we set out the fixings, our guests had been there for hours. It was a potluck, of sorts—a celebration. The gifts piled up in the form of venison, wagyu steak, fresh dug steamers, and pollock.

Once a full inventory was taken, we set the menu: fish, game, and beef tacos, with a primer of Orleans clams.

I threw together a tortilla dough, and began thinning the dense flour balls with a rolling pin. A friend joined in using an already empty wine bottle, and the room began to sweat. The gas ran high, another friend manned the pan, and we churned out a full stack of soft, pliable wraps.

Meanwhile, another friend took to the toppings. He chopped cabbage and lettuce, simmered beans and spice, and finally sliced a lone tomato before looking around for more. A basket of ground cherries caught my eye, and we dropped them in to soak, half-ripened green balls falling from their dusty husks.

By the time we finally settled into our chairs, the gentle comfort of good food and company sat heavy in the air. There was a toast; perhaps two, and we talked into the night—plates scraped clean, dogs licking their chops, women bustling through the kitchen with dishrags and soap. We gave thanks for family and friends, and for the lingering fruits of the season, and settled in for a restful fall night.

FALL FISH TACOS

Serves 12

Make ahead a double batch of flour tortillas. Keep warm (wrapped in cloth) in the oven. Cut 6 pounds pollock into 12 steaks. Mix 1 tablespoon each of: cumin, chilli pepper, cayenne, black pepper, and salt. Rub spices on fish, drizzle with olive oil, and set aside. Arrange on a long platter 1 cup cabbage, cut into very thin strips, and 1/2 cup ground cherries. Make a hot aioli from 1/2 cup mayonnaise and 1 tablespoon hot sauce (such as Sriracha). In a hot pan, sear pollock for several minutes on each side. Bring out to table along with tortillas, and let guests create their own tacos.

Leftover fish paté

The cooking gods seem to have graced me with a string of lucky kitchen accidents recently. Beyond the poached-quince-turned-fruit leather-incident earlier this week, I've had already another one worthy of sharing.

It began as an attempt at fish sausage. I’d picked up a brochure on the delicacy, somewhere, and pulled it out in the face of a mountain of leftover codfish. There was something alluring about the idea of a seafood sausage; something thrilling in the imagined transformation of raw flesh of the sea into smoky, spicy links.

It didn’t work out this way, however; the fish was supposed to be raw, for starters, and my leftover mackerel had already been cooked, the salmon smoked for weeks. Atop that, I was supposed to have a sausage horn, and casing, and a dash of Pernod, none which graced the reaches of my cupboards.

But I still had the fish, and, unwilling to accept defeat, I forged doggedly ahead towards sausage. I pureed codfish and smoked salmon and herbs, crushed a handful of hot peppers and cilantro, and poured in cream and a lone, goopy egg white with a good dash of paprika. I ran the food processor pulse after pulse after pulse, until finally vegetables met flesh and a sort of paté-esque paste emerged.

The longer I tasted and hemmed and hawed, the clearer it became that in fact my fish sausage was paté. And so I switched directions: rolled out a batch of crackers, set the oven on to bake, and spread the first crisp wafer with my creation. It was delicious: spicy and firm, with plenty of veggies and a smoky fish flavor to boot. And while it may not have been what I was trying for, it certainly hit the spot.

LEFTOVER FISH PATE

Makes an appetizer dip for 12

Mince: 1 leek, 1 small, tart apple, 1 tomato, and 3 small hot peppers. Sautee leek in 2 tablespoons butter until soft, then add apple, tomato, and hot pepper. In a food processor, puree 1 lb. leftover cooked fish [I used a combination of 3/4 lb. pan-fried mackerel and 1/4 lb. smoked salmon, but any variety of different fish are likely to work]. Add 1 egg white, 2 tablespoons fresh minced cilantro, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and 1/2 cup heavy cream and puree until smooth. Season with paprika, salt, and pepper to taste. Serve chilled with crackers.

Bluefin steak

That, I am informed as I stand peering over my boyfriend Alex's shoulder as he cooks, is a nice piece of fish. He holds the steak to his nose, breathes in its scent, and grins. He grips it like a chunk of gold, positioning the red flesh beneath the stove light on a white serving platter for me to survey. I admire the lean simplicity of the meat, its deep scarlet color and the fine cross lines running through it, a maze of muscle and sinew.

He has good reason to appreciate this fish. At a time when tuna populations are at record lows, its massive body was quite a catch. Locally harpooned and dressed at 610 pounds, it was swimming, weighing in at well over 700, just hours before.

There should be more fish like this one; bluefin used to be so common that Atlantic fishermen discarded it as by-catch, or sold it at 30 cents per pound for cat food. The arrival of purse seine fishing, with its deep, all-encircling nets and an international high price sashimi market in the late 1950s and 1960s changed all that. Suddenly the bluefin were disappearing at record rates, sold at auction in Japanese fish houses and leaving nothing but babies in Atlantic waters.

The juveniles today are weighing in at as little as 150 pounds, meaning they have gathered neither the time nor the brawn yet to breed before they are caught. Worse, because the young fish must be sold under the table, they are not being recorded, making the Atlantic look more plentiful than it is. The few big fish that are still around and recorded make it look like catch has gone down, when in reality, it's just getting smaller.

Despite penalties in the thousands of dollars, poaching continues. It moves under the radar, from local fishermen to Cape restaurateurs, each excusing the deed as already done. For the fisherman, the market is a given; for the chef, the fish are already dead.

Consumer demand doesn't help. Hungry visitors and guests want sashimi and toro and bluefin specials, and they want them cheap. As stock dwindles, the only way to keep prices where they are is to keep supplying fish, regardless of size or its cost in the end.

The fishmonger who lives with me has a hard time with this. When you tell someone looking for dinner that their fish was harpooned, they look at you in despair, as though you have sullied the flesh by revealing it's dead. We only make the connection between death and dinner, it seems, by being reminded that fish get caught. It's beside the point whether it was illegally or humanely.

But don't put your fork down just yet. Hope lies for me in the belief that most of us, however innately, know a good piece of fish when we see one. You don't get big steaks from small fish; no toro lines their bellies; the cuttings are smaller. When you see that perfect steak, when you know that this is a good piece of fish, buy it. Otherwise, pass the pasta.

PAN SEARED BLUEFIN

Serves 2

Cut a one pound bluefin steak into two 4- by 1- by 1-inch rectangles. Season with salt and pepper and sear for 20 seconds per side in a hot, oiled skillet. Slice rectangles into thin squares and eat hot with a ponzu dipping sauce made from equal parts rice vinegar, soy sauce, and lime juice.