So wasabi salmon Florentine goes like this.

Get a nice piece of salmon cheap at Kroger's because it's almost to its sell-by date. Take the little lump of wasabi wrapped in plastic out of the freezer where it's been since I had takeout sushi about a week ago. Hack off a lump about half the size of the last joint of my little finger. Mix this with about twice as much brown sugar and about half a tablespoon soy sauce. Smear this on the nonskin side of the salmon about an hour before cooking. Put fish back in fridge so neither cats nor bacteria will steal it.

When ready to cook, put a bit of olive oil and a bit of butter in a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Put the fish in skinside down. While it's starting to cook tear up enough spinach to fill up the pan. When you figure the skin is browned to taste, flip the fish over. Throw in the heap of spinach and a couple dashes West Virginia Zest Sauce (which you probably won't have, so use cider vinegar a/o white wine and some spices you figure will go with). Put a lid on the pan. It won't take long for the fish and spinach to cook but you have time to mix a bit more wasabi with about a teaspoon of soy sauce.

Check the fish in a couple minutes. If it's done turn off the heat, remove the fish to your plate, stir the spinach well in the pan juice, and put it on the plate. Pour the wasabi mix over the fish. Eat. If it's not done, put the lid back on and check again in another couple minutes.

OR, more better, I'd just cook his salmon separately and the two of us that do eat spinach would enjoy the whole effect. that sounds much better. (I'd go ahead and add wasabi to his portion, just not the spinach).

We've had an extraordinary amount of sales on canned salmon (the good kind with all the parts, once one mashes it up, you don't notice) lately, and my salmon cakes have been a common dinner. The thing I can't figure, is that the expensive cans are pure meat, but if you take out the skin and bones, it removes the calcium etc. that salmon is a good provider of. and the Whole Salmon cans are CHEAP ($0.99 a couple of weeks ago, $1.09 today) Go figure. Email dragonet@kc.rr.com for a salmon cake recipe, the last time i did this it worked really well.

I happen to actually like the skin and bones in canned salmon. Home cooked salmon though the bones are not edible, at least not with my cooking....

Some of the local supermarkets labels the country of origin of the fish at the fish counter--there's fresh salmon filets [or is that fillets?... the spelling goes....] from farmed salmon from Chile, fresh salmon steaks from farmed salmon from Canada, previously frozen raised salmon from Canada, unfreezing whole (gutted however) farmed tilapia from China or Indonesia, previously frozen tilapia where wherever (don't remember), shrimp from places including India and Vietnam, fresh wild haddock from Canada, mussels and various types of clams from the USA... the lobsters in the tank aren't labelled, but they're most likely USA caught.

Christina, it's possible if I've turned all the citrus in the house into marmalade, which I did -- literally, more than two gallons of it. This batch is made from Seville oranges, Ponderosa lemons (which turn out to be brilliant for marmalade), and some little things called Golden Nuggets which look like small Seville oranges, but are sweet, seedless, and probably a variety of tangerine. It's a really good batch.

I've got it sitting on my dining table right now, bottled off into thirteen jelly jars, plus one frappucino bottle (needs refrigeration, will be eaten first, I only used it because I ran short of small jars), plus five salvaged half-size mason jars that originally held either Classico pasta sauce or Green Mountain salsa. Those are good brands anyway, but I seriously approve of manufacturers who package their products in reusable canning jars.

But...but...salmon bones are ICKY!

Peel four kiwis that are ripe to the point of sour and mash them with about a tablespoon of prepared crushed garlic. Add about 1/3 cup of Zinfandel. Stir. Pour sauce into pan. Skin chicken breasts, lay them in sauce, then with a spoon pull sauce from the bottom of the pan until breasts are covered. Cook for 90 minutes at 450. Makes nicely browned and still very tender chicken with a spicy-kiwi kick.

Grey soul sounds like a day without writing.

Mash up 2-3 cloves of garlic and saute them slowly in some good olive oil. Take a pound or so of chicken--bone in is authentic, boneless is all the Philistines in my house will eat--and brown it in the oil (remove the garlic cloves if they look like they're getting too brown, otherwise keep them in the pan).

Chop up whatever vegetables you have on hand--last night it was one and a half tomatos, two carrots, a green pepper, two mushrooms (wish I'd had more), half a massive yellow onion, and two stalks of celery--fairly fine. Put them to the side.

When the chicken is golden (not necessarily cooked through) remove to a plate. In the oil/juice left in the pan, slowly saute the vegetables for about seven minutes, until they're tender but not soggy. Since I had some fresh thyme and rosemary I added a good portion of each, the rosemary snipped with a scissors (probably two tablespoons) and the thyme leaves pulled off the stems (probably a tablespoon). When the veggies are tender, add a can of diced tomatoes and 1/2 cup red wine, add salt and pepper to taste, and return the chicken to the pan for 25 minutes.

Served over egg noodles and with a green salad. Danny ate all of his and asked for more; Julie ate all the chicken and picked the mushrooms out to eat those. Bec ate all the chicken and the sauce but refused to eat the veggies.

(PS. canned salmon is cooked as what amounts to pressure cooking, the bones are soft, not at all like cooking fresh salmon -- I have a kitchen set of needle nose pliers for fish bones.)

That's what makes them icky!

Growing up, we'd have this concoction of my dad's involving canned salmon with bones, creamy sauce, and rice. Tasty by our household standards (anglo-american + irish-american + 10 mouths = vats of bland boiled food), but the little vertebrae squicked me.

The can ended up with two ridges of skin and bone cooked onto the inside. After checking the rim for sharp bits, I gave it too the dog. (Who gets salmon skin and scraps after I broil fillets.) Watching her try to hold the can still enough to lick from was fun.

Merav, I like that. Do you add any spices?

Dave, I had to look up barramundi. How do those things taste? Also, how big are your crayfish? If you're cutting them into medallions, they've got to be bigger than irrigation-canal crawdads.

Valerie, grey sole is also sold as lemon sole, no doubt because it sounds yummier and more cheerful that way.

Fishmongering has its tricks, just like any other trade. Chilean sea bass aren't bass. "Mahi-mahi" sounds better than "hunk o' shark." Fake sea scallops get cut out of skate wings with a biscuit cutter. And I've only ever once seen a monkfish in its entirety, rather than cut up and sold as filets, because they look like they were designed by Hieronymus Bosch.

Mad, my hat's off to you for coming up with a recipe that'll satisfy your picky eaters. You're so much more patient than I am. In your position, I'd long ago have said "suit yourselves," and consigned them to a diet of TV dinners and cold cereal.

Come to think of it, I HAVE to get some granular maltitol from somewhere, and beg/bribe/commission you to make me some marmie. I'm sitting here with my mouth watering.

Marinate a pound and a half of meaty filets (shark, swordfish, salmon, tuna all work) in olive oil, lime or lemon juice, cumin, salt, and pepper.

While the fish is marinating, put together a tropical fruit salsa: one mango, diced, one can of chopped pineapple in juice, drained, and a small red bell pepper, diced, seasoned with a splash each of lime juice and white vinegar, a sprinkling of sugar, and some crushed red pepper to taste.

Grill the fish and top it with the tropical fruit salsa.

Teresa, no white wine in the house? No retsina? No saki? (What do you drink when you order in Greek or Japanese?) Every time I start to think we're the exact same person you say something alien like that!

A couple dementedly easy fish recipes. The first one wouldn't have worked so well in your deprived circumstances:

1. What the old Jamaican fishmonger told me to do with a halibut steak

You'll need: halibut steak(s), big chunk of ginger, glass of white wine, 6 or 8 limes, pepper.

-- throw a big chunk of ginger into the food processor and gronch it. No need to peel the ginger, although washing it is socially appropriate. It makes a great noise as it gronches.

-- put the gronched ginger into a skillet. Slop some white wine in it (enough to moisten the ginger without drowning it).

-- put the skillet on the stove at medium. If the ginger starts to burn, it is too high. If nothing happens, it is too low.

-- throw the halibut onto the bed of ginger. Lightly pepper it. Drizzle it with lime juice.

-- as the halibut cooks, keep drizzling it with lime juice every time things start to look a bit dry. Flip the fish over every five minutes or when you get bored.

-- the fish is ready when it gets really flaky around the edges. Just in case, check the thickest part with a knife.

Discard the ginger. Serve the fish (making sure to give the cat a small taste) with tasteful wedges of lime and a well-chilled sauvignon blanc. Goes really well with wild rice.

2. Oh hell what do I do with this chunk of fish?

Similar motif to recipe #1.

You'll need: some sort of edible fish (chicken works well too), olive oil, big jar of salsa, V8 juice, pepper.

-- Slop enough olive oil in a skillet to cover the bottom. Put it on medium to high.

-- Throw in the fish, and sprinkle on some pepper. Cook it for a minute or three on each side.

-- when everything seems to be under control, dump the whole jar of salsa on top of the fish. I like medium spicy chunky salsa for this. (Always have a big jar of salsa in the house as an emergency sauce.)

-- the salsa will start to sizzle and generally act unhappy. Stir it around, turning the fish occasionally if the mood moves you.

-- when the salsa is getting too thick, pour in some V8 to thin it.

-- when the fish seems cooked, stop cooking.

The salsa will have reduced to a nice thick sauce. (No point wasting a sample of this one on the cat. Cats don't like the slightly slicy sauce.) Very tasty and unidentifiable as salsa to anyone who doesn't know this trick. Serve with a light red wine, to go with the sauce. Pinot noir works.

It works best with tuna. Make sure you get sushi quality, with as few white streaks in the streak as possible (because you have to cut those out and that's tedious). The lime juice does that for you. Just cut the fish into thin strips. I throw in papaya and passionfruit as well. I serve it in salad bowls. Never tell people it is raw fish until they've tasted how amazing it it.

I'd like to think that the tuna discounts, at least, have something to do with the mercury standards. Slate has a good roundup of info on that issue here, with lots of links to other places. One table from the FDA shows canned salmon as having no detected mercury (nifty table here), but salmon gets grouped into the seafood mercury warnings nonetheless. So perhaps that's it -- the warnings have led to reduced consumption, and from there to cut prices on tinned fish?

Hmmm. Now I want to go find fish to cook for dinner.

Well, that makes sense. That way they could've ended up in the sauce and none of us wouldn've been the wiser. The food preparation gene seems to be absent in my family. We can keep body and soul together, but fancy cooking (i.e. cooking involving more than salt) is something we mostly do with the telephone: "hello, I'd like the black peppered sea scallops. 35 minutes? great, see you then!"

All these wonderful fish-cooking stories are making me hungry, better go find the phone...

http://www.alaskaseafood.org/flavor/recipes/canned.htm

Discard the ginger. Serve the fish (making sure to give the cat a small taste) with tasteful wedges of lime and a well-chilled sauvignon blanc. Goes really well with wild rice.

Discard the ginger? **whimper.** Send it to me!

Teresa:

There are times I simply through more frozen tortellini at them and wander off to feed myself. Not a one of them will eat fish, but they're all (even Danny) getting more reasonable about the foods they will eat. So some nights I deign to feed them.

I'll keep the fishy ginger for you on the spare desk at the office where we are keeping sample science experiments for an umcoming kids book. Right next to the chicken bone soaking in vinegar. The bone is already nice and rubbery and bendy.

Xopher: Have you been tested for sensitivity to maltitol? I have a spanking-new intestinal ulcer from its near cousin sorbitol. Be careful how much you injest and how often.

I think that the proportions of lime juice I use in that recipe aren't sufficient to cevichize fish, even cut thinly - but of course one could increase the lime juice quite handily. In that case, it would help to add more sweet fruits, or more sugar, to the salsa.

Yum.

Marinate any white fish in salsa for 30 minutes.
Grill.
Serve with fresh salsa.

Not a one of them will eat fish

One of my friends said his wife has started feeding their kids spicy fish dishes and telling them it's chicken. They can't tell the difference because it's spicy and they're young and gullible.

Crayfish, in this case, means "Southern Rock Lobster" or "Painted Southern Ocean Cray", both of which resemble clawless lobsters. The legal minimum size is seven inches from the point of the back carapace to the end of the tail; most are larger.

The first place I read about Tilapia was in discussions of long-duration space-mission life support. It is fairly efficient in converting plant waste to meat and is thus a good match if you are already growing food. For similiar reasons, it is now popular as a farmed fish.

I find Tilapia to be a relatively mild white-fleshed fish. One recipe I have had is here, it came from this list of recipes.

I'm not especially fond of chicken, either, but if one is not going to do the skinned-chicken-breast, cover with bacon, cover with mushrooms, 350 in the toaster oven thing -- it must be good bacon, none of this shameful disgrace bacon that is half water by mass and shrinks like drunkard's courage on the battle morning -- one might make up a big loaf's worth -- probably a double loaf's worth if you ask a cookbook -- of whole wheat bread dough, and then sling the aforesaid skinned chicken (or turkey, but you'll need one instead of two or more dough) breasts into it along with fresh tarragon and the juice of half a lemon each into it.

Bake for a couple of hours after the dough rises; be sure you've sealed the whole thing snuggly. (Pound flat; place chicken. Fold both halves of dough that haven't got chicken on them over all the chicken. Crimp firmly.)

This has the advantage of not running any risk of drying out and the disadvantage the the bottom half the bread winds up terrible soggy.

I'm getting deja vu typing this, so it may have been blogged here before, but:

My wife and I spoke at a NASA/ Industry / Academic conference at Epcot Center where Robert Frisbee drew our attention to a paper on the utility of goats at a Moon Base. I've also heard that octopi and squid are particularly fast and efficient at generating human-desired edible protein in extraterrestrial settings. Calimari, the other white meat! Charles Stross urges us NOT to eat Lobsters in space.

So I'm winging it. (then again, I made them Friday, two cans for extra guests.)

This recipe:
Start with a 14.75 ounce can whole salmon. Open, drain thoroughly (this makes my cats really happy) and put the salmon in a suitable bowl. Mash the fish until all is pulverized, my no-tech potato masher is my weapon of choice for the whole mixing process.

Mix with one egg and about 1/2 cup breadcrumbs (may be more or less, you're looking for the same texture you'd have for meatballs or hamburgers), plus any seasoning you like -- last time i sauteed some onion and garlic until soft, also pepper and a bit of our home made chili powder - into the mashed salmon.

Scoop in approx. 1/4 cup amounts and form gently into patties.

Saute in a small amount of your choice of oil (just enough to keep them from sticking to pan) until golden brown and delicious.

Can be served with any number of sauces per the taste you wish.

We had smashed red potatoes and mixed vegetables with it Friday. And we had leftovers, i had salmon cakes for dinner tonight.

"Fish disabled people can cook:

Marinate any white fish in salsa for 30 minutes.
Grill.
Serve with fresh salsa."

Why disabled people in particular? Or are we talking "Simple recipie for the cooking-impaired?"
(I should try it in either case. ;>)

Oh, that's a great idea. Pick the two most tentacle-intensive forms of life on the planet, and make a point of eating them right there in the aliens' faces. "Yeah, we could have brought along something furry-- but we find it more efficient to eat things that look like this."

When the tripods are striding across the landscape as the soldiers within harden their ammonia-circulation-peristalsis-nexi with images of human explorers chowing down on things indistinguishable from little Squorklings, I hope you'll be happy.

What we call a cray here is a saltwater crustacean like a lobster, without claws but with a longer, thicker tail that contains most of the meat. Some say that they can tell the difference in the flavours. I can't.

Sadly, my husband is old enough to know better, and will only eat canned tuna if he's really really hungry. Or the only alternative (as one night on our honeymoon) is lobster. He's a lovely fellow, and I try not to hold his dietary peculiarities against him. But if I try to mask fish with spicy stuff, the kids will look at Dad and realize that dinner is Ucky, even if I say it's chicken... Sigh.

Greg--

No, it's okay. Don't send the used ginger. But if I were making the dish, I'd probably serve it with the fish. I do love ginger rather a lot.

Wonderful! I showed your posting to my wife, son, and a Physicist houseguest with the declaration: "THIS is why I blog!" Because your reply was delightful. I don't mind playing the Straight Man. Abbott got paid more than Costello, you know.

On another matter, she might be too shy to point it out, but there's a nice poem on Strange Horizons by a member of the Making Light community:

Equinox by Yoon Ha Lee.

Madeline Robins: My husband enjoys, nay, demands, what we call "caveman cuisine" - beef or chicken, bread, potatoes, and pasta. The only vegetable he likes is corn, which is, as I keep telling him, a grain; the saying he's appropriated to explain this is "vegetables are what food eats."

He'll only eat fish in stick form...won't eat rice because it's "weird." Grills a very good steak, though.

I've told him that if we have a child, he (the husband, not the child) will be chained in the basement at dinnertime and thrown a raw steak or two if he's good and promises not to let the child see him eat.

I'm definitely going to try the ginger thing, Greg; thanks for posting it.

I've just watched the PBS Nature episode on venomous creatures, which included a blue-ringed octopus paralyzing a crab and a cone shell stinging and eating a live (and appalled) fish, so right now the idea of eating tentacled things creeps me out. (But they certainly have it coming.)

You can get your own Plush Cthulhu at Toy Vault

Maybe a few plush Cthulii could go along on the spaceships to show the aliens we do respect our tentacled fellow-entities???

Kiwi page
The kiwi is New Zealand's national icon and part of our image world-wide. New Zealanders have been "Kiwis" since the days of the First World War ... Today our identity as Kiwis is based around our national bird.

It's a curious bird, the kiwi: It cannot fly, has loose, hair-like feathers and long whiskers. Largely nocturnal, it burrows in the ground, is the only bird known to have nostrils at the end of its bill and literally sniffs out food. It also has one of the largest egg-to-body weight ratios of any bird - the egg averages 15per cent of the female's body weight ( compared to two per cent for the ostrich).

The kiwi is related to the ostrich of Africa, the emu of Australia and the now-extinct moa of New Zealand ... The brown kiwi is still widespread in the central and northern North Island, but the little spotted kiwi survives only on off-shore islands.

as you hint, all three types of kiwi are indeed edible. If one were to stuff some of the birds with the fruit, then stuff one of the mammals with the birds, you'd end up with a kiwiwiwi (rather along the lines of the turducken).

I'm going to have to try it again, but throw it all on a bed of brown rice for some body. Thank you so much for sharing the recipe!!!

They also, apropos of very little, have a Tesla Coil and a van de Graaff generator, in the sense that it is a generator built by Robert van de Graaff.

As in "the Cthulhua eat Cuitlacoche, also known as Huitlacoche?"

There. Smut smuggled past the pr0n-detectors...

All these recipes worked up an appetite, but I'm too sleepy to cook. Think I'll raid the 'fridge for some Jewish Sushi.

I'm a little late to reply to the Monkfish reference with this old joke. The Cardinal was rushing to Rome for the conclave, and noticed a Fish & Chips place run by a monastery. He ordered, and said to the robed fellow behind the counter: "You must be the Chip Monk."

"Oh, no," said the hooded one, "I'm the Fish Friar."

(Meanwhile, my imagination's coming up with a crazy story about a recipie that makes the lame walk and the blind see-IF you prepare it JUST right...hey, this could be fun to play with...)

Fossil Records Show Biodiversity Comes And Goes

"BERKELEY, CA -- A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning surprise. Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation. The analysis, performed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, has withstood thorough testing so that confidence in the results is above 99-percent...."

Go to store.
Get a SMALL haddock fillet.
Heat oil in frying pan
Put haddock fillet in pan
Turn over a few times and until done appropriately (overcooking is not a good thing), something about when fish almost stops having translucency.

Usually fried haddock is breaded, and often deepfried, but those take more effort.

==================

Meanwhile, how NOT to dine on shellfish, as demonstrated by perhaps the World's Stupidest Seagull...

If you are a Cape Cod seagull....

1. land in the shallow water off waterfront land with a shore.

2. Vigorously pump with your feet stirring up the bottom.

3. If you are talented in the way certain seagulls are talented, you will be able to detect clams relatively close to the soil surface under the water. Tilt down and come up with the clam.

4. If you are the seagull, you now have a clam in beak.

5a If you are a seagull with a clue, unlike World's Stupidest Seagull, takeoff from the water and fly up do a stall-type maneuver in the air over a -rocks- and drop the clam on the rocks, to smash the clam open, and then dine on fresh clam.

5b. If you are the World's Stupidest Seagull, you will perform the fly up into vertical stall maneuver over the sandy shore, and the clam with land on the land intact.

6. Pick up the clam and try 5b again.

7. Repeat step 6.

8. Having failed to get the clam open (this was a hardshelled clam...) by dropping it onto sand, fly with clam onto a wooden dock and try dropping the clam onto the wood from standing on the dock with the clam in your beak. This doesn't work, either, despite repeated drops and rolls...

9. Leave the clam on the dock.

10. Go back into the shallow water, and collect another hardshell clam.

11. Return to the wooden dock with the second clam.

12. Try to open clam #2 the same way tried to open clam #1--doesn't work with a second hardshell clam, either.

13. Finally put down clam #2, and try dropping clam #1 from beak onto dock again. It still doesn't work.

14. Fly off somewhere else with clam #1, leaving clam #2 on the dock....

Do this where there are humans watching out a window marvelling at how utterly -stupid- you are. I have still digital pictures of some of this idiocy, It's unfortunately that I didnt' have the camcorder with me. Most seagulls are a lot brighter than that particular idiot!

I have seen seagulls dismember and dine on rock crabs, horseshoe crabs, clams, mussels, scallops... and fly up and drop clams onto rocks or other hard surfaces from sufficent height with sufficient hardness of impact area, to crack open recalitrant shells. That particular seagull, however, appeared uniquely clueless.

=====

On a different topic, "Chilean sea bass" is I think generally known as "Patagonian toothfish." That's what the enormous juvenile female squid was chasing when the fishermen annoyed at having their catch being collected by the squid, decided to catch the predator that was eating their livelihood.

I do the same thing with the fresh farm-raised trout available at the local Farmer's Market. Fry skin side first to get it nice & crispy, flip over to finish the cooking, let it rest on a plate, then make a simple brown butter sauce with some kind of herbs. The hardest part of the process is removing all the pin-bones from the fillet; otherwise, takes a grand total of ten minutes, top to bottom.

The stars are right every 62 million years.

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li

"The stars are right every 62 million years."

Like Lucille Ball, I'm a Virgo with Mercury and Venus in Virgo. So I don't believe in Astrology.

But, on the other hand, I am intrigued by Popstrology.

Regarding all of the wonderful ideas for herbal sauces: I'm looking forward to easy, affordable access to fresh herbs upon my return to the Great White North this summer. I'm currently living in a large coastal city in western Japan, with easy access to seafood. Oddly, a lot of it seems to come from Norway, New Zealand, and/or Alaska. The fugu, however, is local. The proliferation of imported fish might also be that my brain filters out all of the local fish that are labelled purely in Japanese.

Fresh herbs are hard to come by. I've never seen fresh dill or cilantro here. The way fresh basil is priced, you'd think it was coca leaf. I was amazed yesterday to find that my local grocery store had changed their packaged spice line to one that included dill seed—the first time I've seen it—and have resorted to buying Indian spices and basmati rice from an online store based in Tokyo.

Lest this starts to sound too much like a rant, the sushi is excellent, as is the extensive selection of umeboshi. And edamame as a regulary-stocked item in the grocery store's freezer section is a dream come true. Now if only I could find someone to teach me how to properly sharpen my yanagi ba.

You're right, and I should have acknowledged your citation first. Lovecraft, for all his importance in Horror, was serious about Astronomy. He wrote an Astronomy column for a newspaper. He always insisted, after 1930, that HE had predicted Pluto. The point of your quotation is the logistics of tentacled aliens coming to Earth as a matter of orbital dynamics. What Lovecraft did that really matters to the history of our genre was unite cosmology and horror, with other star systems part of the supernatural, and with the ultimate horror being a universe that is neither good nor evil, but blindly following the laws of nature, indifferent to humanity.

Hold on, my son needs me -- and he's born in The Year of Paula Abdul.

I simplified somewhat:

You'll need: halibut steak(s), chunk of ginger, 6 or 8 limes, pepper, bunch of fresh cilantro (corriander).

-- throw the ginger into the food processor and gronch it. (I used about half the standard chunk they sell in the stores -- far less than I used to use.) I peeled the ginger, thinking I might serve it is it looked presentable. It made an ok noise as it gronched, but not quite as satifying as the larger amount of unpeeled ginger.

-- put the gronched ginger into a skillet. Put the juice of two limes in with it. (I used to use wine for this step, but didn't have enough white wine on hand. It tasted better without the wine!)

-- put the skillet on the stove at medium. If the ginger starts to brown very quickly, it is too high. If nothing happens, it is too low.

-- cut the halibut into servng-sized pieces and throw them onto the bed of ginger. Lightly pepper them. Drizzle them with lime juice.

-- as the halibut cooks, keep drizzling with lime juice every time things start to look a bit dry. Flip the pieces over every five minutes or when you get bored.

-- the fish is ready when it gets really flaky around the edges. Just in case, check the thickest part with a knife.

-- chop up the cilantro and spread it out on the serving plate. Put the pieces of fish onto the bed of cilantro. Arrange the cooked ginger among the pieces of fish. (Thanks, Madeleine!) Decorate with lime wedges. Serve the fish (making sure to give the cat a small taste) with wild rice, roast green beans and a well-chilled sauvignon blanc. (I had to use Chardonnay last night. It was ok but sauvignon would have worked better.)

Roast Green Beans

You need: olive oil, a pound or two of green beans; a head or two of garlic, a couple of largish onions, sea salt, balsamic vinegar.

-- spread a layer of olive oil on a baking tray. Heat your oven to 375 or a bit more.

-- Wash the green beans and cut off their tops and tails. Spread them out evenly on the tray.

-- Cut the two onions into reasonably thin rings (1/2 cm or 1/4 inch or so) and spread them out top of the beans.

-- peel all of the garlic and cut it into small chunks. Sprinkle the chunks over the beans and onions.

-- sprinkle a little sea salt over the veggies.

-- bake, stirring every five minutes or so.

-- it is ready when some of the beans have started to turn brown. The dish doesn't taste right if it isn't baked long enough; It is better to burn a few of the beans that to undercook the dish.

-- take the roast beans out of the oven just before serving. Just before you take it to the table, drizzle the hot beans with balsamic and toss.

For tomorrow Elise is coming to partake of fish soup, and as the Soup Guy goeth unto the organic co-op to gather the leeks and the parsley, the green onions, yea, and the tilapia and the shellfish in their season, he shall show wisdom in taking unto himself also some soybeans, which do dwell in the freezer.

And when he did say this, the Soup Guy thought to send the message, and go unto the cupboard, that he might know whether the bonito flakes were sufficient to the dashi to come.

Selah, y'all.

No-salt buttery popcorn topping:

Indredients:
1/2 stick melted butter
Enough garlic powder to cover the bottom of a bread machine's measuring cup.
Same amount of onion powder.
Half as much cumin
Half THAT amount of chili powder (more if you like spicy)

Stir spices into melted butter. Pour over large batch of popcorn. Toss to coat.

Low-fat alternate use: Put spice mixture, without the butter, into a covered container with salt-free tortilla chips. Shake to coat.

Alas, with only me & my low-protein diet frail aged caree to consume it, it seemed a poor purchase at $50/kg. Later I thought perhaps I could have donated it to a local feed-the-needy place, but would they have accepted it with a chunk carved out? So I just took a photo of the blackboard description in the window.

Alas, with only me & my low-protein diet frail aged caree to consume it, it seemed a poor purchase at $50/kg (you had to get the whole object, they didn't slice). Later I thought perhaps I could have donated it to a local feed-the-needy place, but would they have accepted it with a chunk carved out? So I just took a photo of the blackboard description in the window.

Ostemuturducken

I'm not sure about the people who'd try stuffing the Kiwi bird with the Kiwi fruit, then admit that they'd eat New Zealanders stuffed with it. Sounds possibly unethical.

OTOH, "gronch" is an excellent expression, Greg.

And Melissa, very many good cooks don't measure "properly" or follow recipes, they use experience & taste-testing.

One of those uses of 'eat' is metaphorical. Or at least idiomatic. In any case, does not involve chop-chop devouring...and is likely to be highly pleasurable to the New Zealander in question, whether they've been eating birds and fruit or not.

OTOH, my experimental chili sells out at my work's bake/chili sale every year. Sometimes the experiment works.

Meanwhile, on the food front....

The labeling of frozen fish with a particular country, doesn't mean diddlesquat about where the fish was caught it the fish were caught "wild." The Norweigan ships go all over the world, and other fleets do, too. There are bags of "Alaska Pollack" in the local supermarkets marked with China as the country of origin--are there pollack off the coast of China, or are those pollack caught in proximity to Alaska? I suspect the latter.

The Market Baskets list the country of origin of finned and shell fish-- the tilipia comes from any of China, Indonesia, I think I saw some labelled Ecuador; shrimp from India, Oman even I think, Vietnam... the in-shell clams are mostly from Massachusetts clambeds I thing--"USA" has a lot of territory, and the lobsters are from probably Maine, maybe with some from Massachusetts or even New Hampshire (New Hampshire doesn't have much coast), mussels from the USA or Canadia, fresh haddock generally from Canada, cod usually from the USA or Canada, fresh salmon mostly from far America (can['t remember which country), frozen defrosted farmed salmon from Canada, etc.

I lost a picture of three fishing boats in Hyannis lined up, in the hard drive crash. That picture can't be replicated--one of the boats, The Lonely Hunter, went down with all hands some months after I'd taken the picture.

My aunt told me the winter before last that a fishing boat that was from New Bedford, had come into Hyannis Harbor in distress--it was covered with ice "it looked like a snowball," she said. It very nearly didn't make it to safety. That winter was so cold and nasty that it was freezing harbors too solidly for boats to go in and out of.

As for food, my lack of skill with the Japanese language makes it so that I wouldn't know where to begin asking questions about where stuff comes from so I try not to look into it very deeply. But it's hard to ignore stuff like whale parts at the high-end grocery, or the sudden abundance of chicken meals at the school cafeteria around the time of the asian flu culls last year.

And then there was the ad I saw in the paper the other day for a travelling petting zoo with a baby tiger. But that's a digression better suited to a non-food thread.