BLACK PEPPER SHRIMP // anna

Happy Monday!  I tried to get this recipe to you on Friday, when it was snowing/raining/hailing and we desperately needed some heat, but the day slipped away from me.  Anyways, this recipe is still perfect for today because it's got some heat and lots of spice and it will give you a kick in the pants which, if you're like me, you need on Mondays.

I came across this recipe a few weeks ago when my mom gave me Plenty. Both Elspeth and my mom have been raving about Jerusalem, the sister cookbook to Plenty, so I knew I was in for a treat.  I sat down to flip through and bookmark the recipes I wanted to try immediately.  Apparently I need to try  all of them.

Plenty is filled with page after page of beautiful photography and mouth-watering recipes, all vegetarian.  I finally settled on black pepper tofu as a jumping off point, and I'm glad I did.  It was simple and delicious, especially served over wilted greens and rice, and it has a warmth to it that is perfect for spring evenings.

While the original recipe calls for crispy fried tofu, my tofu-frying skills are not up to par and I opted to use shrimp instead.  I'm sure it would be fabulous with tofu as well, or really any protein.  Feel free to add more or less spice, depending on your preference.  I toned the original recipe down a bit, as my taste buds can't handle the heat of eight chiles.

BLACK PEPPER SHRIMP

The Maine shrimp season is over now, but many places still sell it frozen.  This dish is delicious with rice and wilted greens - I used kale and spinach, but whatever you have on hand will work.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound raw shrimp, shelled
5 to 6 tablespoons butter
3 fresh red chiles, thinly sliced
6 large garlic cloves, diced or crushed
2 medium shallots, diced
3 tablespoons diced fresh ginger
9 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon soy sauce or tamari
2 tablespoons sugar
3 to 4 tablespoons crushed black pepper (I used a spice grinder)
1 bunch green onions, cut into 1 to 2 inch segments

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan.  Add shrimp and cook until pink on both sides.  When shrimp are cooked, remove them from the frying pan and set them aside.

Add butter to frying pan and melt it.  Add chiles, garlic, shallots, and ginger.  Cook on medium-low heat for 10 to 15 minutes, until ingredients are soft.  Stir in soy sauce, sugar, and black pepper.  Add green onions and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, covered, allowing them to soften a bit.

Add the cooked shrimp to the butter and soy mixture, mixing well so all pieces are covered in sauce.

Happy eating!

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.

Sturdy and fragile

Last May, one very early morning, I went out weir fishing. I was exhausted from work the night before, and not really looking forward to getting up and getting on a boat with all the wet and the cold. But when I got there—when I met Shannon and Ernie and Shareen and motored out and saw the weir—everything changed. I was awake suddenly, wide awake, and the morning was ethereal, magical.

I've never seen anything simultaneously so sturdy and fragile as the weir. It was made of posts—hickory posts, driven deep down into the sea bed—with a series of nets that let the fish in. They could swim out, but they can't figure out how, and so they get trapped—hundreds and hundreds of squid, mackerel, butterfish.

When I got home, I got Alex and Ernie in touch. The Eldgredges sell mostly through a CSF—a community supported fisheries program that's run just like a CSA—but they had enough to sell to Alex, too. Last year, the big run was butterfish, and he got a whole tote full for the markets. His restaurant and the one where I work fried them up and ran them as specials—fish and chips served head on, skeleton in. There were a few leftover for staff meal one night—sweet, rich flesh with tails that crunched like potato chips.

This year, it's mackerel that keeps swimming in. Alex brought some home last night—those glossy bodies up there—silvery, midnight blue, amazingly fresh. We ate them whole, escabeche style, pan fried. I slivered carrots and onions while Alex cleaned the fish—heads off, tails on, guts tossed and body cavity washed out. While he seared I made an olive tapenade—plenty of garlic, green olives, salt.

I'd never really eaten much mackerel, but I was sold pretty quick. Some people think they're oily, but when they're fresh like this, they're fleshy and sweet and rich. The marinade added tang, the tapenade gave them brine, and we both cleaned our plates. There was something about them that was just right—the crisp maybe, or the give. Whatever it was, it fit the night, the mood, the season—so if you have a chance, dig in.

MACKEREL ESCABECHE WITH CARROTS, SHALLOTS, & OLIVE TAPENADE

Escabeche is a Mediterranean thing. The general idea is to take an oily fish, poach or fry it, and serve it with an acidic vegetable marinade. It's also popular in Jamaica, although it tends to be much spicier down there. We adapted this recipe from one we found over here, and found it absolutely delicious.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more for frying

2 large shallots, thinly sliced

2 medium carrots, peeled, trimmed, and cut into 2-inch long slivers

4 sprigs fresh thyme or 2 teaspoons dried

2 bay leaves

3 large garlic cloves, minced, divided

1/3 cup red wine vinegar

salt and freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup minced green olives

four 8 ounce mackerel, guts and heads removed

Heat up the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the shallots, carrots, thyme, bay leaves, and a third of the garlic and cook until the vegetables are softened, about 8 minutes. Remove from heat and transfer to a shallow serving dish. Stir in the vinegar, season with salt and pepper, and set aside.

Mix the remaining garlic with the green olives to make the tapenade, then set aside.

Fill the skillet with about 1/4-inch of olive oil. Heat the oil over high heat until shimmering. While you wait, season the mackerel with salt and pepper. When the pan's hot, add them to the skillet and cook until the skin is brown and crisp, about 4 minutes. Turn the fish and cook another 3-4 minutes on the other side, or until the flesh is cooked through and the skin is crisp.

Serve each fish with a large spoonful of the vegetables and their marinade and a sprinkling of olive tapenade on top. Eat from the tail to the head, taking the flesh on the top half first, then gently pulling the skeleton out before eating the rest. About one fish per person makes a good serving.

P.S. If you're looking for local mackerel, Alex thinks he'll be getting it in to his Eastham and Truro markets until about mid-June!

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: full strength sea

Did you know that not all Wellfleet oysters are created equal?

This oyster, the wild banana oyster, is the one that shuckers preferred years ago. They were selling oysters by the jar, and this long, thin banana oyster had a whole lot of meat inside. It's from Chipman's Cove and it grows in the mud, just far enough down that it has to stretch to get up and out of it for air, and so it's constantly growing skinny, up. It used to be this biomass banana people picked.

But then, the game changed. Wellfleet made a name for itself—people in the midwest wrote letters cross country about those sweet jars of Wellfleets they found on their supermarket shelves—and the raw bar market sprang up. Tourists and locals wanted their meat served on the half shell, and the deep cupped West Side and the manicured grant oysters with their round, shapely figures jumped in.

The West Sides grow on sugar sand bottoms, places where there's deep water and rough sediment and every time the tide turns any sharp, thin edges get chipped off. A grant owner creates this same look by pulling their oysters out, knocking off the beaks and coaxing them into wide, deep shells.

The funny thing is, they all taste the same. The flavor of an oyster is determined by the water, and in Wellfleet, we are full strength sea salt. Most people, myself included, would take our raw thirty-three parts per million over a southern oyster—those flat-tasting warm water creatures from Virginia and Florida—any day, whatever the shape.

If you get those deep-cupped West Sides or a nice, wide grant shell, though, you almost have to try Oysters Rockefeller. The greens and the herbs and the sherry and the cheese—they just fit. The wide, deep cup holds the juice and the meat and the flavor all at once, and if you're any good at shucking, they take hardly a quarter hour to make. They're elegant and dressy and just sophisticated enough, and the way they feel on your tongue is like pure luxury slipping down.

We ate six last night—six West Sides Rockefeller with two glasses of white wine and my grandmother's tiny silver oyster forks. While we sat the radio signal went silent and the dark crept up the windows, and we decided instead of turning on the lights to simply tuck in, leave the dishes, and go to bed. I can't say if it was the oysters or the quiet or the wine, but it all felt very extravagant.

Wherever you live, and whatever sorts of oysters you have (please don't tell me, please don't, that you have none at all), I highly recommend you pick up a bag this afternoon. Look for the ones with the deep cups, the tall sides, the wide, holding shells, and make sure you have a shucking knife. Crack them open over a bowl, and save the juice, then sauté up your best spring greens with some sherry and herbs. Turn on the broiler and just as the air begins to chill, arrange the meats in their shells with a frock of green and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan or pecorino on top. Pull them out just as the cheese begins to sizzle and brown, and eat them as the sun goes down.

OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER

This recipe is somewhat adapted from one a very talented former Mac's Shack chef passed along, but mostly, it is made up. The chef's recipe had an incredibly daunting number of steps and soaks and sautés—the sort of undertakings that would be okay for a whole night of service at a nice restaurant, but absolutely ridiculous for a half dozen oysters at home—so I took a rough inventory his ingredients and technique and reinvented it on my own. The result was delicious, simple, and so long as your oyster shucking technique does not involve a garden glove, a layer of dish towels, and a lot of fear, also very fast.

6 oysters
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 ounces spinach, chopped into small pieces
2 ounces Swiss chard, chopped into small pieces
salt to taste
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped dill
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
2 tablespoons sherry
1/2 tablespoon butter
2 ounces grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese

Shuck the oysters, reserving the liquid and meats in a small bowl. Scrub the bottom shells clean and set them aside; throw the tops in the compost.

Heat up the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the shallot and sauté for about 30 seconds, or until it just starts to brown. Throw in the spinach and Swiss chard, and sauté, stirring vigorously, for about a minute. Add the herbs and continue sautéing for another minute or two, or until the greens are completely wilted.

Pour the sherry around the edges of the pan to deglaze; it should sizzle and almost instantly disappear. Pour in the oyster liquid, taking care not to let any oysters slip in. Stir in the butter and continue cooking for another minute, or until the oyster liquid is reduced by half, all the alcohol in the sherry has cooked off, and the butter is absorbed. Turn off the heat and set the greens aside.

Preheat your oven broiler and arrange the six bottom oyster shells on a baking sheet. Place an oyster meat in each one. Divide the sautéed greens evenly between the six shells, gently layering a spoonful on top of each of the oysters. Top the greens with the grated cheese, and broil the oysters for 2 minutes, or until the cheese turns golden brown. Devour at once.

The Local Food Report: since 1888

Friends, I have been waiting for this day for weeks. I have been tiptoeing around like my sister and I used to when we were making an especially extraordinary construction paper Christmas present for our parents, beaming and whispering and wishing the day to give it away would just hurry up and get here. And now lo and behold, here it is, and I don't even know where to start. I guess the best place is with the dahlias. They are lovely, aren't they?

They were handpicked from a garden in Westport for the one hundred and twenty-first annual Allen's Neck Clambake, held the third Thursday of every August since 1888. If you look closely, you can see that they are set up on a picnic table in a grove, and that there are an awful lot of picnic tables stretching out on all sides, and in every direction, all decorated with white clothes and home grown flowers and paper napkins and plates. That's because the Allen's Neck Meeting House—the same Quaker congregation that's been putting this clambake on since the very first summer—sells out five hundred tickets each year. One hundred and fifty volunteers set everything thing up, and just about the whole town comes to eat.

The bakemasters are in charge, and the work starts at 7 am when they build the fire.


They build it on a big, concrete slab in the middle of the grove, sort of like you would a log cabin, with interlocking layers, and then they fill each layer with stones. That way, when they rake out the logs a few hours later, the rocks will tumble down onto either side of the concrete, evenly, and the hot wood and ashes can be swept away. Men put on fire coats and heavy boots and someone brings out a hose, and what you see up there disappears into a cloud of smoke and emerges as a perfect bed of hot cooking stones. This all happens at 11:30, in a hushed, reverent silence—The Rake Out, as they call it—and it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.


Once the stones are set and everyone's boots have been hosed down so their toes don't sizzle up, a pick-up truck full of rock weed arrives and the men start throwing it over the rocks. The rock weed crackles and hisses as its bubbles pop in the heat, and the steam gets so thick you can hardly see your own feet. Next, they load up the food—boxes and boxes of clams and potatoes and onions and tripe stacked up in perfect squares. When the whole meal is on board, they cover it with a wet tarp, and then another wet tarp, and then another, and then finally a few more dry ones on top. They weight down some of the sides, but they make sure to leave some holes, too, because otherwise, the pressure from the steam will blow the whole thing up. It's the most unnecessary and wonderful clambake procedure I've ever seen.


Kathy Neustadt, an expert on clambakes, agrees. She's the one who invited me to come experience the event at Allen's Neck. I think she knew how excited I would be because this was the very first clambake she ever went to, back in 1984, and she got so excited about it that she researched clambakes for 8 years. This led, in turn, to a book—Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition. Kathy says that over the course of writing it, she came to believe that how a community puts on a clambake is like a window into its soul.

At first, I thought this was sort of a grandiose way to think about a clambake, but then I found out that the one at Allen's Neck doesn't have lobster. This put me into a swivet, having grown up in Maine and all, and I realized Kathy was right. How you put on a clambake says more than you think about who you are, and where you're from.

At any rate, 'tis the season. Kathy will be at the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford this weekend, talking about the history and traditions of New England clambakes, and I'm sure she'd love to see you if you have time to stop by. There will also be all sorts of other interesting talks and tours and good food and on the whole just a lot of fun, so I wouldn't skip it if you live nearby. For more information, you can head on over here. Oh! And you can read more about Kathy's book in this direction.

Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

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.

A fair trade

Have you ever met Stephen Skelton? Or, more importantly I suppose, do you like a good homemade duck prosciutto, fresh pasta with steaming ragu, and a perfectly arranged bowl of littlenecks, with a cheese plate for desert?

I thought so. Me too. The other night we held another one of those Community Suppers, with Mary DeBartolo, who heads up the Slow Food chapter around here, and Stephen cooked. It was held at the Wine List in Hyannis, and it was absolutely wonderful. We had forty guests, lots of wine, and especially tasty littlenecks. Sarah Robin from the Flying Fish/Hillcrest Pizza and Chelsea Vivian from Edible Cape Cod and I served, running around in all-black, carrying plates and washing dishes and sneaking into the kitchen for goblets of wine and stolen prosciutto.

If you're wondering why I'm telling you about all this after the fact, well, there are two reasons. The first is to apologize for not letting you know sooner—I plan to be much more proactive about that for future dinners. (I promise. I've even added a little sidebar do-hickey and everything. Just look at me and my html wizardry!) The second is that I have Stephen's recipes for littlenecks, and duck prosciutto, so that you can recreate them at home. I hope you'll think this is a fair trade.


Actually what Stephen has offered are not really recipes, but more like sets of guidelines. He says that's how he likes to cook, and I have to say, I think it's a good way. It's much better to work with a set of well-intentioned directions that leave room for a bit of creativity than stay on the straight and narrow all the time, hopping from recipe to recipe. So here they are—mainly in his words—with a few tweaks here and there.

(Oh! and if you're inspired to try and find him and taste his cooking for yourself, for the next few weeks, he'll be doing demos and dinners at the Wine List. Once May swings around, he's hoping to open up a new venture, a restaurant called "The Glass Onion" in Falmouth. I can't wait to see how it turns out!)

STEPS TOWARD A GOOD POT OF LITTLENECKS

in Stephen Skelton's words:

I encourage people to not follow exact recipes but instead use more or less of what they do or don't like.

There wasn't exactly a recipe for the littlenecks, but more a preference of amounts of olive oil, chopped garlic, rinsed littlenecks, white wine, peeled carrots cut into thin strips, and washed leeks cut into thin strips.

Just heat a pan with a little oil, add the garlic to cook out the raw harshness, add the littlenecks, wine, carrots and leeks. Cover the pan over medium heat and wait for the clams to open. When they are open...enjoy with homemade bread.

DUCK PROSCIUTTO

in Stephen Skelton's words:

The duck requires a little more care and time; it takes a week to cure.

Trim excess fat from the duck breast, season with a fine grind of black or white pepper. In a container just large enough to hold the breasts in one layer without touching each other, cover the bottom of the container with salt. Lay the duck, skin side down on the salt (do not let the sides of the breast touch each other or the sides of the container). Cover the duck completely with more salt. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours.

Rinse the duck in a bowl of cold water. Discard all of the salt. Dry the duck well with a clean towel. Wrap in cheesecloth, tie with string and hang it (from the handle of a pan or something similar) for one week. It should feel firm but not hard. Slice the duck thin and serve with cranberry juice cooked down into a syrup or another sweet style sauce to offset the salt of the cured duck.

Note: Because the salt has pulled the moisture out of the duck, it does not have to be cooked. This is one of the oldest methods of food preserving.

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!

Take a good swig

Phew. What a week. Don't you think?

It's hard to pinpoint why, but I'm finding the whole spring thing a bit exhausting this year, just between you and me. It's like I haven't quite adjusted to those extra hours yet. They offer so much more time to get up and do! It's all a bit taxing, really.

It's exciting, though, too. Spinach and peas are up in the greenhouse, and a little row of radishes just popped up the other day. Most afternoons, we even have to open the door, to let it cool down in there. The temperature's gotten as high as 90 (!), when the sun's out, around noon. I'm thinking of going on a tropical vacation this weekend, right there in the front yard. I'll mix up a pitcher of fizzy grape juice, call a friend or two, and haul out my favorite blue and white polka-dot bikini. Beat that, June!

Springtime also means the simplicity of summer cooking is on the way, and frankly, at the end of a week like this, I can't help but hope it comes soon. Remember the days when breakfast was as simple as a pint of strawberries? When dinner could be a beefsteak tomato, a few slices of homemade mozzarella, basil, and a pinch of sea salt? Honestly, I can't wait for those days to return.

In the meantime, I have something almost as easy for you. When you get home from work this afternoon, crack open a beer (preferably something hoppy, or maybe Belgian-esque, like a Hefeweizen, or an amber ale) take a good swig, and pour the rest into a large soup pot. Grab another beer, and do it again. Add some butter, maybe a sprig of thyme, a squeeze of lemon juice, and an onion, too, for good measure. Now bring it all to a boil, throw in two dozen littlenecks, and in about three minutes, when the shells are open, pat yourself on the back and declare dinner done.

See how easy that was?


Now grab the pot, and haul the whole mess outside to the porch. Crack open a bottle of white wine, take off your shoes, and eat the whole darn thing, flinging the shells into the woods.

LITTLENECKS STEAMED IN BEER

2 hoppy beers
1 onion
2 sprigs thyme
2 tablespoons butter
a squeeze of lemon juice
24 littleneck clams

Pour beer into a large soup pot. Add onion, thyme, and butter, and bring to a boil. Throw in clams, soaked and cleaned. Steam 3 minutes, or until shells have just opened. Squirt a bit of lemon juice over top and haul the whole put outside. I like the broth just as much as the clams.

P.S. Did you see the news?!

The Local Food Report: sweet meats in red sauce

I have a confession to make. You probably think, after all my talk this morning about the edible wonders of slipper shells, that I have actually eaten one of the gastropods. Well, I haven't. Now you know.

I tried, I really did try for you, but I simply couldn't. I did manage to convince myself that they look very similar to littlenecks, which was comforting, but I did not manage to actually throw one down the hatch.

I think it's a texture thing. I replayed Dave Masch's words again and again in my head—I have tasted his home-baked bread, after all—and he is not one to lie when it comes to what tastes good. I ought to trust him; he calls slipper shell meats sweet, chewy, and delicious. Sweet and delicious I could muster, but chewy, I wasn't so sure. Squid has never really been my thing.

Or it could have been learning about all their sex changing that got me. They live in stacks, see, with the bottom snails clinging to things like rocks, shells, and dock pilings. The larger, older animals (snails, technically) on the bottom of the pile are always females, while the smaller, younger ones are top are males. If the females die, the largest male will change gender, and move to the bottom of the stack. They've even made up a word for this. It's called being a sequential hermaphrodite.


Weird, huh?

I'm sure you've seen them—they wash up on the beaches around here all the time—particularly after winter storms. If you walk down towards the water, where the shell line or the swath of rocks is, you can find a bunch. In fact, I had no trouble collecting. Once you get your search image in mind, that's the easy part. It was the eating where I chickened out.

But luckily, Dave Masch was brave enough to try them, not just once, but many times. He's also brave enough to share a recipe he came up with for the things, which I think deserves a big pat on the back. He calls it: "Sweet Meats in Red Sauce," and he says it's quite a masterpiece.

So here it is. I hope you're brave enough to try, and if you are, I hope you'll let us all know how it goes.

SWEET MEATS IN RED SAUCE

by Dave Masch

3 cups tomato sauce, preferably homemade
1 cup slipper shell meats, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 tablespoons Italian parsley, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
red pepper flakes to taste
1 pound linguine, cooked

Heat up tomato sauce in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add all ingredients but the linguine. Simmer for three minutes and serve over the linguine. [Dave says he likes it quite peppery hot, but how many red pepper flakes you add is definitely a personal choice. Sometimes, he adds Tabasco, too.] "That's all there is to it! Go for it, you won't be sorry," he says.

He has a few other notes. For starters, in order to extract the slipper meats from their shells, you can steam them briefly, for about 2 or 3 minutes in water, white wine, or beer. "You should be able to winkle them out in a trice!"

He also offers a recipe for a nice light tomato sauce, in case you don't have any tucked away. It is comprised simply of one 28-ounce can of whole tomatoes in puree, 2 small sliced onions, salt and pepper to taste, and a teaspoon of dried basil, "or oregano, terragon, or any other herb you fancy." You simply simmer these ingredients together for 20 minutes, stirring frequently, and if you want a smooth sauce, in the end, you puree it. And maybe, if you feel like it, you can add in 4 tablespoons of butter at the end, just for good measure (although if you do that you might not want to tell people it's "light").

Hostess for a day

Have you ever wished you could be a professional, full-time, home-dinner-party-hostess, just for a month or two? That each morning involved waking up, taking stock of your refrigerator and pantry, and planning a menu, a guest list, and decor?

There would be chores involved, certainly. Silver gets tarnished, flowers need refreshing, and dusting when you live in a home with a woodstove seems like the never-ending song of tasks. And of course if being a hostess was the only thing to think about, ever, I suppose you might eventually get bored. But I think it would take me a very, very long time. Because home dinner parties are really my absolute favorite thing.

For starters, there's the fact that you get to spend the morning pouring over cookbooks. You get to pull out a butternut squash, or a container of frozen rhubarb, or a pork shoulder and wonder, what on earth will I do with this? That, in my opinion, is the best part, because no matter what you have, there is always an excellent menu to be made. It simply takes a bit of imagination, and lots of time with those books. Which are some of my favorite inanimate objects to spend a day with. They're more fun than some people and can be awfully talkative, I find.


Then there's the cooking, and the whirlwind of friends and hugs and babies and drinks, and the sitting down to a meal you are offering up to feed the people you love. I really like that part, the food. But the part where I'm afraid I start to sound a bit crazy is right now, when I announce that I like dinner parties so much that I don't even really mind cleaning up. In fact, truth be told, I kind of like the routine. There are always a few women in the kitchen, and between the washing and the drying and the gossiping and the sense of tidiness that ensues, there's something awfully satisfying about that time, too.

I have no idea whether or not this weekend will offer that chance. But if it does, I know exactly what I'll make. Here's an early March menu, in case you find yourself in the lucky seat of host or hostess for a day. You might have to make a trip to the library, of course, but that's the whole fun.

— cocktail hour —

The Old Fashioned, to show off bourbon's charms
from The Essential Cocktail by Dale DeGroff and featured in Gourmet, March 2009

Cracker stacks with Brad's Bread and Butter Pickles and Great Hill Blue Cheese

— dinner —

Butternut Squash in Cream and Cinnamon
from The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, by Judith Jones

Cod baked in foil with leeks and carrots
from Cook's Illustrated, March & April 2009

— dessert —

Tinky's Cozy Apple-Maple Pudding
from Yankee, March/April 2009

In a clammy sort of way

I've been having sort of a clam moment recently. Clam pie, clam chowder, stuffed clams: I'm starting to feel sort of like Bubba Gump, but in a clammy way.

It started with this article I've been working on, for Cape Cod Life magazine. It's about iconic foods of the Cape and islands, and the more I've thought about it, the more I've ended up with clams. 

Plus, the fishmonger closed up shop recently, so we've been eating the leftover littlenecks and quahogs and cherrystones. I know some people might not agree, but I find clams sort of dreamy, in a swirly, salty kind of way. They're just so ruffly around the edges, and all pastel and pretty and pink.

I also found a great clam cookbook: The Cape Cod Fish & Seafood Cookbook: From Basic to Gourmet. The author, Gillian Drake, seems like a down-to-earth sort of lady. Her recipes are short, simple, and to the point. There's no fuss, and no fancy ingredients to necessitate a trip to the store. With good seafood, veggies, and herbs, you can cook just about anything in the book.

She has baked stuffed clams, clams casino, clam fritters—clams with red sauce, clam casserole, clam quiche. She even has spaghetti con vongole: clam spaghetti with white clam sauce, just in case you really need a fix. I tried out sort of a modified clam pie recipe today, and that really did the trick.

I'm not going to pretend it was easy. It did involve a fire in the oven (although I like to think of this as sort of a pre-requisite for any truly winning recipe) and a lot of hands on time, but it was very, very good. It was also nice and hearty, in a very January way.

So here's my take—it's not quite Gillian's—but it certainly involved hers along the way. I stole a few ideas from a beef pot pie I saw in the Williams Sonoma catalog, too, like the cheese in the crust and baking it bottomless in a shallow Le Creuset dish.

(In retrospect, this was not the best idea. When there's no bottom crust for the top crust to latch on to, the beautifully bunched edges simply slide down the side of the pan. I'm not sure how Williams Sonoma got theirs to work, but according to my smoke detector, that's one of those "Do not try this at home" pictures. That said, the crust that did not slide did turn out beautifully, so if you're up for an adventure, it might be worth a try. I'll count on you to decide accordingly.) 

But beyond the fire and a few lost pieces of crust, the pie came out very handsomely. Not to mention, delicious. 

CLAM PIE

adapted from the Cape Cod Fish & Seafood Cookbook: From Basic to Gourmet, by Gillian Drake

Serves 4 to 6

24 cherrystone clams

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 cup salt pork, diced

1 cup onion, diced

1/4 cup celery, finely chopped

1 smallish turnip, diced

1 tablespoon dried thyme, or leaves of 1 sprig if fresh

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons flour

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 ounce brandy

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

pastry for a 2 crust, 9-inch pie

2 to 3 ounces goat or blue cheese

Shuck or steam open the clams and chop coarsely, saving 1/2 cup of liquor. Heat up over medium heat an approximately 9-inch round, heavy bottomed pot, 3 to 4 inches deep (similar in size to a deep dish pie plate). Add salt pork to the pot and sauté for about a minutes, until the pork begins to render some fat. Then add the onions and celery, and once they're soft (about 5 minutes), the turnips, clams, and thyme too. After sautéing everything together for about 5 minutes, transfer the mixture to a bowl.

Put the pan back on the stove and put in the butter to melt. When it's hot, add the flour slowly, stirring with a whisk until it's absorbed. Add the clam liquor slowly, stirring until every addition is absorbed. Add the cream and brandy in the same manner. Now season the mixture with salt and pepper to taste, simmer for a minute or two, and add the clam mixture back in. Mix well, remove from heat, and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Roll out the pie crust into two very thin layers. On top of one, crumble the cheese in a circle in the center. Put the other layer over top, and roll out a bit more gently. Drape the crust over the pot the clam mixture is in, letting it cave to reach the clams. If you don't want to bake the pie in that pot, transfer the clams to a pie plate and drape crust to cover that. Crimp the edges—very carefully anchoring them on the side and angling them towards the inside of the pot/plate—otherwise they will detach, slide off, and burn. Brush the crust with milk and bake about 30 minutes, or until the filling is thick and the crust is golden. Serve hot.

Riches & things

It's a good thing Christmas only comes once a year. It's also a good thing there are leftovers, so that even though it only comes once a year, we can enjoy it for at least a few days afterward.

The things we consumed yesterday! Coffee cake and sticky buns, fried eggs and toast, coffee and wine, and—finally, a black trumpet and lobster risotto.

The risotto was the star. It stole the day, hands down, with flying colors, this new dish. We'd never tried it before; it was a recipe I'd found in Cooking Light, a gift idea they'd had. (I know, the last one was terrible, but they've had so many good ones in the past, that I figured I'd give this one a try. Besides, it's particularly hard to go wrong with thyme, white wine, chicken broth, and rice.)

The gift idea was to give a fancy jar of dried mushrooms and rice, measured into the correct proportions and tied with a satchel of herbs and a copy of the recipe. I had neither the fancy jar nor the herbs, but I did have a very expensive, intoxicating bag of dried black trumpets. We'd picked them up at a farmers' market in Camden, from the Oyster Creek vendors and their farm in Damariscotta. We'd buried our noses in the bag, inhaled, and handed over a big wad of cash. It felt kind of like we were buying the other kind of mushrooms, only these were expensive for their smoky, exotic taste.

Packed into a dressed up Mason jar, they looked almost royal, delicate charcoal horns stacked atop a shimmering heap of rice. I gave them to my father, and though I hadn't planned on giving them as a Christmas dinner, when we started feeling around late in the day for a meal, he immediately brought them up. Between the trumpets and the lobster we'd had planned, we had our holiday feast.

The fishmonger and my father lit a fire in the pit outside, while I chopped onions and garlic. We soaked the mushrooms in chicken broth, letting them expand and release, and heated up a large soup pan. My father poured in the oil and a bit of butter, and in went the onions, the garlic, the rice. (It was the wrong kind of rice, we discovered later, brown basmati, but it filled in nicely for arborio in a pinch.)

My father added wine, reduced it down, and then the mushrooms, thyme, and herbs. He left me in charge of adding the chicken broth, cup by cup, reducing it down, and stirring slowly until all was absorbed. Meanwhile, outside, he and the fishmonger doused the fire with a heap of culls. Lobster tails and claws reddened and charred, while the meat inside slowly cooked.

It took a while—it's a time-to-spare, holiday sort of dish to be sure—but what we ended up with was absolutely delicious. The rice and mushrooms thickened, warm and sticky and steaming, and a few of us, after oohing and ahhing and indulging, went so far as to lick our bowls. The next time you find yourself with a reason to celebrate and a lazy afternoon, I think you should give it a try.

BLACK TRUMPET AND LOBSTER RISOTTO

adapted from Cooking Light, November 2008

Serves 6

ingredients:

5 ounces dried black trumpet mushrooms

9 cups chicken broth

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons oil

1 cup chopped onion

4 garlic cloves, minced

2 cups uncooked brown basmati rice

1 cup dry white wine

1 teaspoon thyme, dried

1 bay leaf

2 cups cooked lobster meat, chopped

salt & pepper to taste

Soak mushrooms for 30 minutes or until tender in 2 cups of the chicken broth. Pour the rest of the chicken broth into a large bowl, and set aside. Heat butter and oil in a large, heavy bottomed soup pot over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and saute for 8 to 10 minutes or until tender, stirring frequently. Add rice; cook 1 minute, stirring constantly. Add wine, and cook until absorbed, stirring constantly. Stir in mushrooms, thyme, and bay leaf.

Add broth, 1 cup at a time, stirring frequently until each portion is absorbed. (This process takes a bit longer with brown basmati, but so long as you keep an eye on it, you don't have to be stiriring all the time.) When all the chicken broth has been added and absorbed, season with salt and pepper, add lobster meat, and serve immediately.