Fishity Fish Fish Fish.

I like fish. I bought a large jar of pickled herring from Costco last time we were there, and it makes me sad that the MD Costco doesn't carry whole smoked whitefish like the one in NY. Courtesy of watching my dad many Saturday/Sunday mornings taking apart whole whitefish throughout the course of my life, I make my own smoked whitefish salad which, if I may be so bold to say, is significantly superior to store-bought varieties.

(How to make whitefish salad: buy appropriate poundage of smoked whitefish. Remove meat, throw in tupperware. Add mayonnaise - Hellman's, you fools! Nothing but Hellman's! Mix. Put on real fresh bagel - toasting optional - with cucumber slices. Revel in the smoky, fishy, chewy, creamy, crunchy, cucumbery goodness.)

For ocasional fresh fish treats, Danny and I go with Trader Joe's frozen offerings. We've sampled their tuna (sear it after a quick marinade in soy, garlic, and ginger, include the ginger and garlic in the pan; it is excellent on salads or anything else), wild salmon, and sole.

With the salmon, I sliced kumquats (a seasonal treat currently available at TJ's! Woohoo!), garlic, salt, and pepper over the 2 fillets, each with a sprig of rosemary, and stuck them in a very hot broiler until they were just done. We ate them with sliced tomatoes topped with a few rogue kumquat slices, balsamic vinegar, and a bit of olive oil and some coconut rice and beans.

(The coconut rice and beans is very easy. For 1 meal for 2 people, take 1 cup of rice, 1 can of coconut milk in a measuring cup, and filling the difference with water, make sure you get 2 cups of liquid. Put rice and liquid in a pot, and add 1/2-1 can of drained and lightly rinsed black beans. Top with a little salt, maybe some allspice, and cover. Heat and boil until the level of liquid is below the top of the rice, turn heat on low, cover, and let it steam. Don't let it burn. Eat when soft.)

Actually, the nice thing about kumquats is their flesh is extremely tart so there's no need for lemon juice to counteract fishiness, but the peel is very very sweet. So when you cook them, there's virtually no bitterness. Also, a lot of the sour goes away with cooking. And you still get crazy amounts of citrus flavor because you leave the peel on and you're supposed to eat the whole thing. It was such a Carribbean-meets-Mediterranean flavor combination, it made the grey February go away because it tasted like sunshine. The tomatoes, the coconut, the fish, and the citrus... mm-mm.

You know, kumquats are an amazing ingredient because you get a huge amount of tangy, sweet, and flavor all in one easily handled fruit. All you need to do is wash, slice, and make sure you get [most of] the pits out. No peeling, no hard carapace, no equipment needed to access the yumminess, and no shells. Besides, the fewer ingredients required to make something that tastes awesome, the better.

Anyway, back to the fish. The sole. Danny was craving something fried, so we decided to fry the sole. The fail-safe breading procedure is flour-egg-bread crumbs. We used panko, and the beauty of that style of breading is whatever you're frying, be it eggplant or fish, doesn't absorb excessive oil. I mean, obviously you're frying something and when you eat it you're going to say, "oohhhhh yeah, fried whatever-it-is," but it doesn't get gratuitously grease-logged and nasty. So it was Danny's turn, and he fried the fish to perfection. Olive oil was fine here. We had the leftover rice from our salmon feast, and Danny made this garlic tomato chipotle sauce. Sautee ~2-3 cloves of garlic a little bit, dump in a large can of peeled whole tomatoes, reduce by ~1/2 (the tomatoes will fall apart by then), and kill the flame. Put 1 chipotle en adobo in the food processor, dump the tomatoes in, and food process. Obviously, if you like the smoky heat, use more chipotles. I put fish, a small heap of rice and beans, and a pile of thawed frozen spinach on my plate with a huge glob of sauce in the middle. I kind of dragged everything through the sauce, and it took the whole meal south of the border.

Very satisfying. Very delicious. And I got my omega 3's. So, fish. From Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean to the American southwest/Mexico by way of the Carribbean. :)