March 12, 2012 Lunch – Pho Meatbll Soup Dinner – Teriyaki Mackerel

March 12, 2012 Lunch – Pho Meatbll Soup  Dinner – Teriyaki Mackerel 

For lunch I made Pho with the fresh meatballs and the pho flavoring and a head of baby bok choy and some onion and a shallot with fresh pho noodles from Ta Lin ($1.15) and a sliced scallion. I garnished the soup with the usual fresh mung bean sprouts and fresh cilantro, hoisen sauce and shirachi chili sauce and squeezed lemon into the soup. It was just okay.  I need to work on the recipe a bit more.

Dinner was a different story.  Suzette grilled the marinated mackerel filets on a slotted steel grill without turning it for about 15 minutes.  She said that when she put the fish on the grill it bulged up in the middle and the finished product looked as if only the edges had touched the fire.  The edges were charred black but the center of the fish was tender and lightly cooked.  We loved it.  This is a great recipe.  It may even be a candidate for cedar plank cooking.  We steamed a mixture of broccoli and cauliflower flowerets and re-heated Suzette’s mushroom Risotto with its enoki mushrooms from Sunday evening as a PPI starch.  This was a great meal, mainly because of the oily, slightly sweet tender texture of the fish on one side combined with its crisp skin on the other.  We drank hot saki with dinner and tea after dinner.   And it took less than 30 minutes to make.

On Sunday, the day before I had made the teriyaki sauce marinade and placed it and the two mackerel filets into a 1 quart plastic freezer bag in the fridge (the teriyaki sauce recipe is 7 Tbsp. of dark soy, 7 Tbsp. of mirin, 7 Tbsp. of saki and 1 Tbsp. of sugar from “Japanese Cooking; A Simple Art” by Shizuo Tsuji, page 200).  

Bon Appètit