Monday, March 24, 2014

March 23, 2014 New Recipe - Mahi Mahi Cooked two ways with Catalan Style Kale

March 23, 2014 New Recipe - Mahi Mahi Cooked two ways with Catalan Style Kale
Breakfast-Ham and potato omelet 

Suzette had brought home several heads of cauliflower last week that we needed to use.   We had processed it by removing the flowerets from the stalks and had about a three lb. bag of cauliflower in the garage fridge.

For brunch, I made a fruit salad with 1/2 of a papaya, one pineapple, a handful of grapes cut in half, two oranges peeled and sectioned, three mangoes and a squeeze of lime.  I often let the papaya and pineapple sit in the fridge for a week or two and the mangoes for a day or two to ripen.

Then I chopped about ½ lb. of the PPI smoked glazed ham and ½ shallot and ½ potato into small cubes because Suzette said she wanted to sauté them until crisp like bacon.  I then sliced about three Tbsp. of manchego cheese into slices and chopped up a clove of garlic and threw it into the potato and ham and shallot mixture.  Then Suzette brought in a stalk of lovage from the garden and I sliced it into strips.  Suzette stirred several eggs and salted them and then heated butter in a large skillet and sautéed the ham, potato, some chopped garlic greens, garlic and the shallot until they were slightly crisp about ten to fifteen minutes. Then she poured in the stirred eggs and cooked the ingredient mixture and eggs in the large skillet for a few minutes more until the egg began to stiffen.  Then she laid the slices of manchego on one side of the egg mixture and garnished them with the slices of lovage.  After a few more minutes she laid one side of the egg mixture onto the other side of the egg mixture.  The crust of the egg mixture had turned a golden brown and a bit crispy.  After a few more minutes of cooking the cheese melted and the egg in the center stiffened. 

Suzette cut the omelet in half and placed ½ on each plate and I garnished each half with more strips of fresh lovage. 



 I toasted a piece of French baguette and made a cup of tea.  Suzette made a Bloody Mary.   With a bit of peach preserves spread on the toasted bread we enjoyed a lovely brunch.

Suzette said she wanted to make the cauliflower into a Cream of Cauliflower soup for dinner.  After brunch I thawed out a bag with two filets of Mahi Mahi from the freezer.  We spent a quiet afternoon. We took the garden plants we had brought into the house for winter back to the garden and I took a nap and then we rode our bike to Rio Bravo. 

At around 5:15 I went to the garden and plucked one garlic plant and some garlic greens, a basket full of kale, about five small sprigs of thyme, about six stalks of chives and a couple of stalks of parsley.

I cleaned and chopped the garlic greens into one bowl, the herbs into a tea cup and started to de-stem and chop the kale into a third bowl, but a 5:40 Suzette took over the kale de-stemming, so I could take a shower.
 
I returned from my shower at 6:00 and asked if there was anything I needed to do and Suzette said, “Nothing, I am trying a new recipe.”  She then said, “I need a bottle of white wine, is there a cold bottle of wine for the fish in the basement.”  I said, Yes,” and she fetched a bottle of South African 2008 Zaráfa Sauvignon Blanc, which I think I bought at Trader Joe’s several years ago for around $4.00.

As I watched “60 Minutes”, Suzette was cooking away in the kitchen. By then she had made a bucket full of cream of cauliflower soup by first cooking the cauliflower in chicken broth and then pureeing it and then returning the pureed soup to the pot and adding herbs, salt and pepper and milk and half and half.  At around 6:30 Suzette set the table and shortly thereafter announced that dinner was ready.  I went to the kitchen and saw a very interesting sight.  Suzette had divided the fish filets into four about equal sized pieces and had poached two pieces of Mahi Mahi by first sauteeing half of the fish filets in butter and some of the herbs and a bit of garlic greens and when the fish filets turned white and lost their color, she added about 1/4 cup of white wine and about 2/3 cup of the cream of cauliflower soup to the pan and covered the skillet and poached the fish in the poaching medium she had made from combining the butter, wine and soup.  In another pan she sautéed the two other pieces of mahi mahi that she had coated with grated Parmesan cheese and crushed panko in canola oil (the Spanish use Spanish olive oil).

fish poached in cauliflower soup sauce
 






Kale Catalan style

Suzette also made the kale into the tapa recipe for Catalan Style Spinach from José Andrés Tapas Cookbook

Recipe for Catalan Spinach

2 Tbsp. of the good Sleman’s Chilean or other good olive oil, I diced Gala apple, ¼ cup of pine nuts, ¼ cup of seedless dark raisins and 1 tsp. of salt. 

At pretty high heat Suzette cooked the apple cubes first for 1 minute, then added the pinion nuts and browned them for about twenty seconds and then added and then added the raisins and salt and kept the skillet moving and then added the approx. 10 oz. of kale and mixed it in with the ingredients and sautéed it until it started to wilt but did not collapse.

Suzette constructed the dish very attractively.  She used pasta bowls and laid a ladle full of the cauliflower sauce poaching medium on one side of the pasta bowl with a poached filet of mahi mahi, then she stacked the sautéed panko and parmesan coated other filet of Mahi Mahi on top of the poached filet and then  ladled a scoop of Catalan Kale onto the other side of the bowl.

   
We poured glasses of Zaráfa Sauvignon Blanc and found it to go very well with the fish and creamy cauliflower sauce and enjoyed a great new recipe.   I loved the fish cooked two different ways and loved the Catalan Kale much better than the collapsed Catalan Spinach at Más last night.

In fact Más was the inspiration for tonight’s meal and the new recipe.  See the review from last night of the Mariscos Soup and overcooked Catalan spinach.  Suzette was inspired to poach fish in a vegetable sauce like last night’s Marisco soup broth made with green herbs and spinach and was inspired to replicate the Catalan Spinach tapa with our favorite recipe for Catalan Spinach from José Andrés’ Tapa Cookbook.  The idea being that she could create a more interesting and pleasant set of tapas than we had had at the restaurant and she achieved that by a couple of miles tonight. 

The use of the cream of cauliflower soup to poach the fish was a magnificent idea, which I loved and adding the fried fish filet, which is also a Spanish tapa recipe to create a fish two ways recipe was genius.
Then combining the fish two ways with sautéed fresh kale or spinach with pine nuts, raisins and apple was a lovely combination of flavors and textures.  Suzette said that mixing interesting textures was her goal.
I loved the meal and we both agreed that it was far better than the $75.00 meal we ate at Más was last night, except for the complimentary tapa that Chef Caruso made for us.

Also, the 2008 Zaráfa Sauvignon Blanc was a really pleasant surprise.  It had an intense minerality and taste of plums that went well with the fruits in the spinach dish and complimented the poached fish in cream sauce.  I am definitely going to buy more of it.   It may become our house Sauvignon Blanc.


Suzette said she was going to start serving Tapas on Thursdays at the Greenhouse Bistro in May, after we return form Europe and Morocco, and she said that these two recipes would probably be on the menu; the spinach as a tapa and the fish two ways as an entrée.

For dessert Suzette heated the PPI pears poached in glögg from last Sunday evening’s dinner and served a large warm spoonful of them over a large scoop of vanilla ice cream, like last week except this time the ratio of fruit and sauce to ice cream was better, more ice cream and less fruit and sauce.

What a perfect dinner, which is more than I can say for our meal last night at Más.   This goes to show you that one dish can destroy the wonderfulness of an entire meal and a wonderful dish among other well executed dishes can make a memorable dinner, like tonight’s, especially when you realize you are eating a new recipe for the first time.  Like the folks who saw Picasso’s radically different and new cubist paintings in 1907 for the first time.  Radically new and exciting is a good thing in food, just as it is in art.   It is what moves culture forward.

Bon Appétit

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