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?