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.
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).
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| fish poached in cauliflower soup sauce |
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| 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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