April 7, 2016 Lunch – PPI Vietnamese Noodles, Dinner – Fish Baked In Aluminum with Rice and tropical Fruit Salsa, Cream of Celery Soup, and Pork Confit

April 7, 2016 Lunch – PPI Vietnamese Noodles,  Dinner – Fish Baked In Aluminum with Rice and tropical Fruit Salsa, Cream of Celery Soup, and Pork Confit

I ate granola, LaLa Mango Yogurt, Tropical Fruit Salad, and a splash of milk for breakfast.  Then around noon I ate the rest of the rice noodles from yesterday’s lunch.  

For dinner we decided to cook the 1 lb. of rockfish filets bought yesterday at Sprouts for 5.99/lb. in aluminum foil.  This is a recipe we first encountered at Roberto’s Restaurant , near the bus station in Puerto Vallarta, when I first visited Harold and Suzette around 1996, when PV was more of a village than a town and they owned the condo at Conchas China's Beach.

The cooking concept is simple but the result is fantastic.  For each portion you cut two lengths of aluminum foil and place a fish filet centered in the aluminum foil.  Then you add chopped ingredients to complement the flavor of the fish.  Tonight Suzette added, Chopped Roma tomatoes, shredded zucchini, sliced portobello mushrooms, minced red onion, and a sprig of fresh fennel, (in Mexico chilis are added), plus white wine and butter, and salt and pepper to make a poaching medium.  You then crimp each sheet of aluminum into a sealed pocket around the fish and ingredients, so that you create a sealed pocket inside a sealed pocket.  The double walled pocket is much better at sealing the ingredients from the direct heat of the grill.  Then you broil the pockets on a grill for 30 minutes at low heat or until the fish is cooked.  

  The pocket after all ingredients have been added and before sealing

  The final dish after rice has been added with the fruit salsa shown

This cooking method has three advantages. It braises all the ingredients together, so they exchange their individual flavors and meld them into a delicious sauce. It allows one to individualize the selection of ingredients.  For example, we do not care for chili with our fish and Suzette does not like mushrooms with her fish, so we simply eliminate them from her pocket. Finally, prep and clean up is easy.  You simply toss the empty aluminum pocket after you finish eating the dinner from the pocket. 

We like eating our fish with rice so I had made 1 cup of rice while Suzette was prepping and cooking the fish pockets. I also fetched a bottle of Santiago Station Sauvignon Blanc (Total Wine $3.99 less 20%) from the cellar to use for the poaching medium and to drink with dinner during the prep. 

Tropical Fruit Salsa

I wanted to use the Tropical Fruit Salad I had made on Sunday consisting of fresh papaya, pineapple, mango, orange, and lime juice as the base for a fruit salsa for the fish but did not have any fresh chilis, so at around 3:30 I began simmering two dried mulatto and two Cascabel chilis in about three cups of water with ¼ onion roughly chopped.  By 6:00 the chilis had softened and I was able to remove the stems, seeds and internal ribs to leave just flesh and skin.  I simmered the flesh for another 45 minutes to an hour. Then I was able to separate the flesh from the skin of each chili.  I chopped three or four small avocados, three mangos, and ¼ to 1/3 cup of red onion and placed them in a bowl with the chili flesh and filled the bowl with about two cups of fruit salad and squeezed the juice of one lime on the salsa and added a dash of salt for a quick, delicious salsa for the fish.

We the used the cooking liquid from the chilis to make the rice, by salvaging 1 cup of chili and onion infused liquid and adding 1 cup of fresh water to the pot in which we had simmered the chilis that still had the seeds and onion in it and simmered the 1 cup of basmati rice for 30 minutes. 

This gave the rice a warmer, slightly picante chili flavor. 

When the fish had cooked for 30 minutes and the rice was cooked Suzette fetched the pockets from the grill, placed each one in a pasta bowl, opened the pockets, and added about ¼ cup of fresh cooked rice to each bowl. I poured glasses of by now chilled Sauvignon Blanc and placed the fruit salsa on the table a little after 8:30.  

We ate our wonderful dinner with the clean light fruity Sauvignon Blanc from the Mendoza Valley of Argentina.  Although Argentina’s Mendoza Valley reds, such as Malbec are highly regarded, I prefer its whites, such as Sauvignon Blanc and its lovely high grown Torrontes.  

 

While dinner was cooking I brought in the celery stock I cooked on Sunday and heated it. Suzette then puréed it with the immersion mixer and then we resorted to old school methods and seived the liquid through a food mill to yield a smooth light ouree.  We had a gallon of purée, so we decided to make a Béchamel with 3 T. Of flour and about four of five T. of butter.  We added about 1 cup of heavy cream to the béchamel plus several cups of celery purée to create the cream sauce, which we added to the celery purée and cooked together for about twenty minutes at medium heat, at which time the soup began to thicken slightly into what I would call a light cream soup.

Suzette had brought in the large casserole from the garage fridge and heated the oven at around 7:00 and added the marinated pork tenderloin cubes to the oil and baked the pork into a confit by 9:00.

I see another great meal just over the horizon.

After all this cooking and having nibbled on too many corn chips during the dinner prep, I was really tired after dinner and so we retired to our bed to watch Doc Martin.  As soon as I saw it was a repeat, I lay down and went to sleep.  

Bon Appetit