fish dish try-out

At yesterday's farmer's market in Pasadena I picked up a small piece of barramundi to do a little test for a dish that will go on the menu at the next “night in” supper on January 16. So far, here is how it goes:

Preheat your oven to 375°. I made a small amount of fish stock from the flap of the barramundi and the shells from 3 huge shrimp I also picked up (for another dish). Combine the fish and shells (or whatever fish parts you have; you could make a simple, spicey vegetable stock if you prefer) in a saucepan with a halved tangerine, some celery, an onion, thyme, parsley, a red jalapeno, a knob of ginger, some fennel seed, a little white wine, and water. Cook for 45 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve and set aside. Cube and parboil some yukon potatoes; set aside. Slice on the bias: green garlic, red spring onion. I had kohlrabi and made some little matchsticks. Slice some peeled ginger into thin strips. Set these slicey items aside. For garnish, cut a few thin rounds of watermelon radish and julienne. Julienne some pickled ginger. Combine in a small bowl with some pickled ginger juice and a touch of salt. Reserve. Start a saute pan on the heat, get it ripping hot, season your fish, sear the skin side, flip it, and finish it in the oven. While you are cooking the fish, get some of the stock boiling in a saute pan. Add the green garlic, sliced ginger, and kohlrabi and cook a minute or so. Add the cooked potatoes and green onion. Season. Add a knob of butter and a generous handful of pea shoots. Taste it. Adjust it. Plate it, including broth. Plate the fish skin-side up. Place some of the radish/ginger mix on the fish and scatter some around the dish. Eat. Think about how to tweak this whole shebang in large and small ways (use black cod?, find shell peas, use peas in dish, make stock from pods?, drop the kohlrabi?, more chile heat in the broth?, sweeten broth with tangerine juice?, etc.), and about the big shrimps that are going to poach in the remaining stock and get mixed up with some blood oranges, greens, and some sort of harisa vinaigrette for a late afternoon snack.

post-new years eve bender, failed

happy new year it is the 4^th of January already the year is half over and off to a vaguely frustrating start for instance last night we got home from a movie and every attempt to take to drink was foiled for one reason or another, the Salanques Mas Doix priorat from Whole Foods yes I go there for certain ingredients the wine guy in Glendale is good his name is Steve and the wine area has little cards with his face on it pinned up with various bottles and the cards say “What Steve’s drinking” it’s a recommendation to try the bottle also an indication that Steve is drinking a lot of good shit and all in a days work and also it’s a little devil on my left shoulder whispering career change well there was only a smidgeon left in the bottle and delicious as it was it merely teased the mouth into great expectations and then taunted, I’m finished, you got anything better, apparently not, a hullabaloo zinfandel I had it once before and it was ok in a pinch but this time surprisingly undrinkable I spit it out and this morning $16 worth of swill went into a saucepan with a dried chile and some herbs to cook down and make itself useful later in the evening around supper time or for tomorrows poached egg and there was nothing else in the house save for some port from trader joes which also turned out to be pretty wretched plus the glass was musty maybe that ruined a perfectly good port though I am not sure the port warrants that much slack it’s just lousy port, ok I give up, it was all a lesson, a sign, a cue, to simplify in the new year and in the spirit of clean living forgo the booze altogether, drink more water well that’s just a sensible idea regardless, take a sleeping pill and go to bed early so much for clean living or it was purely a flagrant reminder of the importance of keeping a solid single malt lying around it makes meditations in an emergency all a little more fluid even if doesn’t put the fires out, on my way to work I am making a to do list in my head and it has on it buy single malt Michelle Bachman is rambling on about god as she bows out of the presidential race it’s about time unfortunately I believe her when she says you haven’t heard the last from me I add to list get new radio one without election coverage now how about that drink

how did these fish get on this plate, or, dinner is for discussing the slippery pre-global post-socialist relations between anchovies and art in Croatia and all over

Those are not anchovies but sredelas and I am back in Los Angeles as fresh as a sardine from Zagreb where Julia and I went for the sake of art, to show some Bush-era videos we made, perhaps still laboring under the thought that art can change the world, like workers once could and maybe did somewhere, though the most I will venture for the time being is that it can sometimes help you think which could be a step in the right direction and that it is also the thing that turns little anchovies, not those sredelas (above), into a delicious fried snack (below), “lightly battered,” crispy outside and creamy in, dripped with lemon juice, the best bite we had in Zagreb, trumping every overcooked and overcreamed and oversalted mock-Italian pasta plate and every platter of a signature Croat dish of cooked chard and potatoes which could be simply delicious but was always and sadly cooked to pulp, these little fish poppers and the squid ink pasta were bottomlessly good at the Tip-Top restaurant, with Christmas décor hung in fishnet on the ceiling, and with friends from Beirut, Zagreb, Alexandria, Kosovo, Bucharest, and all over. 

Rasha, Julia, David in Zagreb at the seminar "Sweet 60s," organized by the curatorial team WHW Zagreb

some soup experience

 

the wind has knocked the wind out of our town, taken itself out of everyone’s sails and crossed the wires, everything’s either down or jammed up, freeways, trees, power lines, traffic lights, the internet we had thought was somehow above all this act of nature nonsense how am I supposed to know which way that fucker the wind is going to blow if I can’t get on-line to check the weather channel how am I supposed to conduct my electrical affairs or take care of digital chores what will I do in my newly spare time if I can’t even post this post maybe it’s time to acquire some new skills how to find a candle when the lights are blown out how to find my way when I am lost without you or mapquest how to heat the soup up in the dark that’s how humans used to do it anyway isn’t it fortunately I have some old skills that come in handy in circumstances like these for instance I can make this soup with my eyes closed: onion, carrot, celery, potatoes, thyme, garlic, chiles, roasted tomatoes, chicken stock, christmas lima beans, cavalo nero, porky meatballs I did it that way years ago when I was living in the dark and had no electricity and no cavalo nero either it wasn’t a thing yet back then good thing I made a big batch a few days before the winds came up and the lights went out all it needed was a simple reheat but not long from now I will make this recipe from scratch when things have gone dark again and there’s another fierce wind stirring the pot
it will all be part of my experience economy but there are still going to be dishes to wash by hand in the dark that service can’t always be
someone else’s experience close your eyes and get used to it 

let them eat metal

The name of this blog, “hurrah! the butter,” is modified from the English translation of the title and text of the above work by German artist John Heartfield, “Hurrah, die butter ist alle!”—“Hurrah, the butter is all gone.” Heartfield was an exemplary practitioner of “agit-prop” art and is best known for his socialist and anti-nazi photomontages from the 1930s. This particular work, originally published in AIZ, the Workers Illustrated Journal, in December, 1935, depicts a family at the dinner table stuffing themselves with bicycle parts and various pieces of metal. The cry “Hurrah, die butter . . . “ is Heartfield’s ironic response to a statement by Hermann Goering, cited in the lower portion of the image: “Goering in his Hamburg speech: ‘Iron ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have at most made people fat.’”

This bloggy use of a fragment from an anti-nazi artwork might seem to suggest some kind of parallel between then and now, but a reference makes neither an equation nor an explicit link; it really only maybe makes for resonance across disparate eras. Pretty heavy, huh? If I were cutting the crap I would just say the photomontage is razor-sharp and hilarious, particularly the baby eating a hatchet.