Green Tea Pamplemousse

Ennju certainly sounds en francais. Pas francais. A simple Japanese place where it's always fresh. From seaweed salad to green tea mousse, adding an extra plate of something is easy and fun!

fish, delicious fish (and vegetables)

Salad season is finally upon me. FRESH FLAVORFUL CILANTRO, sprightly and green instead of supermarket wilty and pale. buttery mesclun instead of tasteless tracing paper. the most exquisite tomatoes i have ever had and sweet sweet fresh steamed corn. this salad is black beans, corn, tomato, avocado, cilantro, lime, salt and pepper and some olive oil. its so delicious.

I've been reading a variety of books on agricultural & food policy, food politics, gardening & farming misadventures and watching Michael Pollan profusely on youtube. I was a little lazy last week and didn't trek down to the farmers market because by the time I'd woken up, it was high noon and I didn't want to push and shove through a crowded market. I resorted to shopping at my local grocery store. (Michael Pollan says its ok, so I guess it must be) I tried to ignore the wilting looking vegetables and the nagging feeling in my gut as I bought something that was clearly NOT bio dynamic yogurt, cringed as i cracked open eggs from a blue Styrofoam box. as the week was drawing to a close, I was getting better about shopping at the grocery store around the corner. Then I decided that maybe I should replace the jar of peanut butter that my boyfriend left and I promptly finished.


Now I realise that this could just as well have happened at Whole Foods or whichever overpriced trendy grocers, but it was enough to snap me out of gristedes contentment. Skippys peanut butter NATURAL was made with 4 ingredients: Peanuts, Sugar, Salt, Palm Oil. Skippys peanut butter regular was made with a host of ingredients that I couldn't pronounce and hydrogenated soy products. why shouldn't food be natural in the first place?! i started to convulse at the thought of the tortellini pockets, unnecessarily made with hydrogenated something that I had consumed during the week, courtesy of convenience via gristedes. That was the last straw and waited and waited for Saturday morning so I could spring up bright and early and buy nothing but fresh produce. potentially pesticide, herbicide and fungicidally laden produce, but fresh nevertheless – one less layer of hidden processes that I didn't know about.

I've started buying lots of fish lately because they cook so easily and are good for you in general. once I'd gotten over my fishy mishap of 2003 where i never wanted to cook ocean produce in my apartment ever again, I've been consuming fish like a starved pelican. I also read that fish swim all over the place and fill up on good stuff, gathering from the ocean a myriad of nutrients which humans consume. Human hunters and gatherers also had better immune systems and generally were in better health than sedentary farmers (does this mean, in modern times, that I should be shopping at grocery stores far and wide???) because of a wider variety of nutrients that they consumed by running around and foraging. In this way, by eating fish, you're reaping the benefits of their oceanic hunting and gathering. Scarily, this is not too far from the truth of my boyfriend's multiple pleads to first feed me with tasty food he would not ordinarily consume (extravagant cheese, ice cream, cake, muffins, general tasty stuff) and thennnn have me hop in the oven tom and jerry style and roast and consume me, as weird sort of human Turducken (Jan-chees-en?), claiming it would increase the tastiness by two fold and be a very efficient way of consuming both double flavor and double nutrients. The fact that there is some truth in that makes me very wary.

Now I buy fish from the farmers market - something I'd only recently attempted because the fish isn't individually labelled so I didn't want seem like an idiot and annoy the 15 people behind me asking what every type of fish was. Fish has been a recent thing for me, unlike steak where I can pick out my cut blindfolded. Therefore, to minimize embarrassment, I went to Whole Foods and spent an unusually long time studying labelled fish and fish fillets, not unlike studying for a test. after a while, fish monger said to me "just get it, whatever it is, you know you want it" yes I wanted it, but not at Whole Foods. I chirped cheerfully that I couldn't make up my mind and that I'd be back later, scurrying quickly to the long island fish stand in Union Square, deftly ordering some grey sole, seabass and black fish. I then bought my weight in vegetables that I'll have to eat in a week.

The couple behind me in line for fish were the cutest, discussing fish rations and proportions for the week.
"squid?"
"no, I don't care for that, but if you buy it, I'll make it."
"Lets get that really tasty fish we had last summer and grill it!"
"I'm going to go to Staples and get some index cards and pens, you know what to do right?"
"how many days do you want to eat fish this week?"
mmm tasty fish. Usually, food tastes much better when someone else cooks it for you. Being a sort of recent convert to vegetables (i ate my first salad in its entirety 6 or 7 years ago), and definitely a recent fish maker, I find that if I cook it myself, I enjoy it infinitely more. Maybe it's because of my past mega scallop failure which makes successful seafood a double triumph. I'm also very picky about what type of cooking my vegetables have been subjected to. and the grassy flavor of my salad greens. In many ways, this weekly trek to the farmers market has turned me into a food nazi. why eat fake food when you can eat real food?

in an ambitious attempt inspired by fresh fish (it shouldn't even be so hard to make it AMBITIOUS), I'm cutting out hydrogenated nonsense and high fructose corn syrup for a week. this sounds doable. but it also makes you commit to cooking and making EVERYTHING. and not even! lets double check that bag of chocolate chips in the chocolate cherry bread. oh wait, don't buy any of that pasta sauce. CHECK the CEREAL and the GRANOLA. do NOT eat burgers with ketchup. eating real food is a pain in the ass! just look: I make my own jam, pasta sauce and salad dressing. I make my own bread so I know what I'm eating for breakfast. I buy bio dynamic all organically produced granola, I only buy certain types of chocolate milk. its so easy to revert to the supermarket, but YOU CAN'T TRUST THE SUPERMARKET. or at least its time consuming to trust the supermarket. some people think I'm nuts to spend so much time thinking about food, but you eat food everyday how can you not?

cool weather = more bread

my quick fix spring meal has been this asparagus pasta which is nothing but pasta, a little creme fraiche for a fake sauce and then lottttts of Parmesan. 2 bunches from the farmer market on Saturday is plenty asparagus for the week.

BUT, onto bread and more bread. the weather has been surprisingly forgiving for late may. usually by this time I have given up on all food except salad or a quick pasta, limiting all stove use to 15 minutes and prohibiting any food that needs an oven. I probably should be eating more salad, but until I have no appetite left for food because of extreme heat, I probably won't have an appetite for salad.

Just the other day I was having a burger with a friend and was asked if I wanted a salad, fries or onion rings. taking into account my quick fix asparagus pasta earlier, I winced HARD and said salad as my friend laughed in absolute disgust. my burger arrived with more vegetables than meat and plate combined, unruly leaves overspilling the edges like some green monster from the wild, never ending and continuous, threatening the small stack of lettuce, onion, pickle and tomato on the side. i had neglected to consider a burger's core constituents! which, between two buns and a piece of meat (yikes) was a salad in itself! I looked longingly at the onion rings across the table. The ruffles of mesclun were mocking me.

It was way, way too early to be eating that many raw vegetables. It'll be a few more loaves of bread and grilled asparagus yet before I go on guacamole overdrive, and embark on the serious mission to eat a differernt salad everyday.

snacks

Balthazar Bakery charges $8 for a goat cheese tart. Taking into account the laborious task of caramalizing onions, it's still absolutely outrageous and completely unacceptable. i decided to make my own, with an easy peasy puff pastry crust. the original recipe is here. kinda like a mini pizza but much much better - and reversed. it uses the onions as a base with whole tomatoes on top.

in search of the American Savory Snack

My biggest grumble about being in America is that lack of savory snacks. sometimes i just want something quick and easy - 3 fishballs on a skewer. or a curry puff. or some tako pachi octopus balls with kewpie and bonito flakes. when i don't really care for Another Boring Sandwich, or a Very Messy Falafel, or a bag of junk like potato chips god forbid, City Bakery's mac and cheese (the downfall of many a waning afternoon when i'd been so, SO good during the day gorging on raw vegetables and a nasty but tasty looking carrot and orange juice).

I was munching on grapes this afternoon, contemplating the quarts of yogurt that get consumed in my apartment every week. it usually gets mixed with honey, granola and fresh berries in the morning. but today, the compulsion for a savory snack took over. Also, I knew I'd be in trouble if i didn't make dinner with some sort of healthy sauce/decoy chutney accompaniment for a saucehungry sauceconsumer pottering around my apartment with eyes for sauce and sauce alone.

completely unaware of what i was actually making (tzatziki), i absentmindedly chopped up some cucumbers, and garlic, and dished out yogurt and squeezed lemon into it. okay, so it's not really an American Savory Snack (still elusive), the other delicous dip i make is a mean guacamole (still not American), but this dip scratches a couple of snack taste buds for sure.

the bread making warparth

I've started making my own bread. I've made about 4 loaves in the past 3 weeks. This is my latest specimen: chocolate cherry bread
nutritional power up: it's whole wheat

my previous loaves were eaten up too quickly to be photographed, but they were a marsala, raisin walnut and olive breads.

given that the chocolate cherry bread at the farmers market is a whopping $8, i went a little overboard with this baby, with an overly generous amount of chocolate chips and sour cherries. it was like i baked a large, lazy and crusty muffin that i felt just a little odd about eating it for breakfast. i'm not sure if i've mastered the fine art of making bread such that i could go on a breadmaking throwdown, but hey they are pretty tasty and they toast well and have structural integrity, so i'm not too worried.

what i am worried about is my new snuggly yet lethal night time snack: chocolate cherry bread and iced coffee with ice cream.

the easiest most delicious meal ever

i finally caved yesterday from making every single meal at home (sometimes having pancakes for dinner) and bought a pizza from a block away. it was so decadent, wolfing it down, while watching the simpsons on prime time television, while it was still bright outside. oh working life. i never want to work again. the pizza was enough to kick me back into action today, making this month's speciality - broiled salmon with assorted spring vegetables and occasionally potatoes with a lemon creme fraiche sauce. i've had this twice in a week now, once with asparagus, and today's with fiddleheads.

this is surprisingly easy to make. half an hour! (TAKE THAT RACHEL RAY. i know your meals take more than half an hour to make anyway) and you can prepare the fish while the asparagus/fiddleheads are roasting happily in the oven for 15 minutes. i love the eaaaasssse - proving that it doesn't have to take an entire large slab of ribeye to win over someone's heart (stomach?):
after slathering a bunch of asparagus with olive oil, sprinkling with salt and pepper, roast at 400 degrees (farenheit) for 15 minutes.

while roasting, take salmon fillets, about 6oz each, rub with salt, sprinkle with pepper. maybe massage with lemon thyme and then squeeze lemon over it. set aside.

for the winning "sauce", take a couple of tablespoons of creme fraiche, mix with a few squeezes of lemon juice, a few grates of lemon zest and a little lemon thyme.

take asparagus out from the oven, set it to BROIL, and pop the fish in for 7 1/2 minutes.

VOILA. c'est delicioux: serve fish with asparagus and drizzle creme fraiche over.