One of our favorite meals: fish chowder

I spent a few days in Maine recently and ate as much of the local seafood as I possibly could, cooked at a friend’s “cottage” (Not!) on Casco Bay near Freeport.

Can I just say, the seafood market on the dock in Portland has some of most beautiful goods you’ll ever see? Fresh and glistening, the fish there are something to behold. I swear, I think I could live in Portland just for the quality of its seafood. I might even be willing to give up red meat, especially considering how much lower the price of fish is there.

My aim was to make a pot of fish chowder for a small group. It’s said that for family chowder, cod is the preferred fish. But when company’s expected, opt for haddock. This I gladly did. The fillets were thick and firm and the price embarrassingly low–just $8 a pound. The resulting chowder was sublime, so I decided to replicate it here in D.C. for a dinner party over the weekend.

Imagine my chagrin when I saw that the same haddock was selling at Whole Foods for $22–not $8–a pound. Could I justify such as expensive chowder? Chowder is supposed to be subsistence food for fishermen. While I pondered that I found myself at the newly renovated Eastern Market on Capitol Hill shopping for beef brisket. Looking around, I noted considerably cheaper fish for sale at the nearby Southern Seafood Market stall.

At first, I didn’t even notice the haddock for sale, the fillets were so small and not the pearly white I was used to. When I told the salesperson about my experience on the dock in Portland–how wonderful the haddock there was–his shoulders slumped and he sighed. “They [the seafood wholesaler] don’t even offer us that.” It had never occurred to me that the selection and quality of seafood could vary so much from one shop to the next based on the priorities of a wholesaler.

When I explained that I planned to make a chowder, the man brightened and directed me to a display of what was labeled “chowder” fish. These were remnants of cod and haddock fillets–not pretty, some of them a bit mangled–and when I saw the price–just $3.50 a pound–I decided to give them a try. How could you not at that price? (When I asked if the “chowder” fish sold much, the man replied, “We sell out every week.”)

Long story short, the chowder was excellent and nobody noticed that the fish in it cost only $3.50 a pound. We served it in our big bistro-style bowls garnished with parsley, slices of a fine country-style bread (not oyster crackers) on the side. I think we drained a couple of bottles of chardonnay with that.

My recipe for fish chowder is pretty loose. Remember, this is a dish that likely originated on a boat, where the fisherman used the simplest possible ingredients–onion, potato, fish. We’ve become accustomed to milk or cream in our chowder, and in most cases so much flour or other thickener you can stand a spoon in it. What a shame. For my cooking liquid, I prefer a simple fish stock, either a commercial stock such as Kitchen Basics or one you make yourself   from fish bones and aromatics. The very best, of course, is the one you make yourself, and if you have access to fish bones I highly recommend it. Making fish stock is pretty simple and cooks fairly quickly.

I also don’t use any thickener in my chowder, just some heavy cream near the end for flavor and to give it that traditional chowder look. I use the cream we get delivered from our local dairy. It practically is thick enough to stand a spoon in.

For cooking grease and flavor, chowder traditionally was made with salt pork. Being salted, the pork kept fine in the rudimentary conditions of a 19th century fishing boat. But salt pork isn’t always easy to find these days. I opt for pancetta or even a smoky bacon. Cut a couple of thick strips of bacon into 1/4-inch slices and lightly brown these at the bottom of a heavy soup pot. They will give off some fat, but I add about three tablespoons of butter as well–I like my chowder with some butter flavor. A bowl of good chowder, I think, should have little pools of melted butter floating on the top. Toss in an onion, peeled, quartered and cut into this slices, season liberally with salt and cook over moderate heat until the onions have softened. Add two large Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled, quartered and thinly sliced.

At this point I add four cups of seafood stock to the pot, plus a bottle of clam juice and a small fistful of fresh thyme sprigs tied together with a bay leaf. Bring the pot to a boil, then lower the heat and cook gently until the potatoes are just cooked through. Remove the herb bundle. You can make the chowder up to this point hours or even a day ahead. Just before you are ready to serve it, bring the pot back to the boiling point, add 1 cup heavy cream and 2 pounds fresh haddock cut into 1-inch pieces (or a little larger–they do shrink).

As soon as the fish is cooked through, ladle the chowder into large, warmed bowls and garnish with some chopped parsley. Serve with slices of crusty bread and creamery butter.

Finally, a summer meal on the deck

Hanger steak is not something you see every day in the supermarket. Like skirt or flank steak, it’s a fairly flat cut of meat that can be tough if not cooked properly. But it’s full of flavor. Anatomically, the hanger steak “hangs” from the diaphragm and helps hold vital organs to the spinal column. We get ours delivered from the beef herd at our local dairy, South Mountain Creamery.

Hanger steak is perfect for tacos. I season the meat simply with salt and pepper, letting it rest on the counter for an hour or so to come up to room temperature. Some chefs like to marinate their hanger steak. Try soy sauce and pineapple juice. Grill the meat over hot coals until it is just rosy in the center. Let it rest 10 minutes to redistribute the juice before cutting into moderately thin slices. On the side, I made a fresh pico de gallo with an heirloom tomato, green bell pepper, jalapeno, red onion, cilantro and a splash of lime juice. We cut up some ripe avocado as well.

Oh, and some El Tesoro tequila to wash it down.

How simple is that?

As you can see from the photo, daughter preferred hers cut into small cubes to construct a burrito like they do at Chipotle’s.

A little colby-jack cheese on that burrito?

She even cooked her own brown rice and opened a can of black beans for her burrito. This, she declared, was a healthy meal, full of protein. I had to play Debby Downer and point out that it was also full of starch. But all things considered, daughter has definitely gotten the message about eating more healthfully and is starting to have fun making better food choices.

Mom helps make a perfectly rolled burrito

And here’s what the finished burrito looked like. Daughter was planning to make one for the next day’s lunch as well.

Exceptionally clean and tender

We had the best halibut ever for dinner recently. It had been flown into Washington from Alaska as part of the buyers club organized by friend Sam Fromartz, shipped directly by the family fishing operation that caught it.

This was our first halibut. Last year we took possession of some terrific salmon that arrived whole and fresh. We filleted one and served it with Bearnaise sauce while on vacation in Maine. Another we roasted over an open fire at our friend Bob’s cabin in Virginia.

I have to say I prefer receiving the fish fresh. The halibut arrived frozen and sealed in individual, eight-ounce packages. I’d ordered five pounds, so what I got were 10 of these little packages. Too much plastic, in my view, spoils the idea of choosing fish sustainably harvested by a fisherman we know. Add to that the carbon involved in flying the fish from Alaska and I begin to wonder how “sustainable” this venture really is.

You can’t argue with this halibut as a dinner choice, though. My wife and I agreed it was one of the most tender, delectable pieces of fish we’d ever eat. We’d intended to dress it with a beurre blanc sauce, but discovered–too late–that we didn’t have any white wine for the sauce. We didn’t even have any lemons in fridge. In the end, we just seasoned it with salt and pepper and seared it in an iron skillet, then gave it a spritz of lime juice. With a salad fresh from the garden, we were perfectly satisfied.

Halibut is one of the few fish in the world that seems to be holding its own. Did you see this map that appeared in the press recently? It shows the stark decline in Atlantic Ocean biomass from 1900 to 2000. Essentially, there are no fish left to be caught. The waters around Alaska are different. They’ve been managed much more strictly. The halibut fishery had been in decline, but was sharply curtailed in the early ’70s and has since rebounded magnificently.

Pacific halibut fisheries are managed through a treaty between the United States and Canada per recommendations of the International Pacific Halibut Commission. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, halibut biomass “ remains in a healthy state in the central Gulf of Alaska and will likely continue to support harvests of the size seen over the past two to three decades.”

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program rates Pacific Halibut a “best choice.” So if you’re looking for a fish you can feel good about eating, try halibut.

Buckwheat crepes with ham and cheese

I had a bunch of buckwheat crepes left over from last week’s cooking classes, keeping them under wraps in the fridge. What to do with them? Well, one night they became dinner. We stuffed them with thinly sliced Black Forest ham and Swiss cheese, then baked them in the oven topped with a pat of butter and shaved Parmesan. Here they are, served next to some poached asparagus.

Crepe with peanut butter and lemon curd?

Daughter turned up her nose at ham and cheese. She had what she thought was a better idea: breakfast crepes for dinner, meaning crepes smeared with peanut butter and blueberry jam–or is that lemon curd?

Breakfast: crepe with poached egg

The next day, I took some crepes over to friend John’s for breakfast. Again I stuffed them with ham and cheese (I don’t mind repeating a good thing) and topped them with poached eggs. Shave lots of Parmesan over those eggs. The crepes do a great job of sopping up the yolks. Delicious.

Spit-roasting: it must be spring

We liked our first ever brined chicken so much we decided to another. Except this time we used one of the birds our local dairy delivers and spit-roasted it over live coals. This may be the best chicken I’ve ever tasted.

We served it with leeks from the garden, braised on the stove in chicken broth. A terrific meal, and so simple.

A favorite: green beans with anchovies

Last night we reached into the freezer to turn a simple chicken dinner into something memorable. Under the ice cubes was a bag of heirloom Italian green beans–our favorite variety–that I harvested and froze from our garden over the summer. They’d been blanched before going into the freezer. To bring them to the dinner table, all I had to do was turn them into a pot with a bit of water and steam them until tender. Meanwhile, I sauteed some garlic in olive oil, then “melted” a can of anchovies in the oil. Toss in the steamed green beans and you are transported back to those halcyon days of summer.

A big, pastured roasting chicken from our dairy came out of the oven stuffed with lemon and sage. We took all this to our friends Shelley and John’s house for a simple dinner where they supplied a terrific bottle of Cabernet, leftover mashed potatoes, a fresh salad and a box of Sees chocolates recently purchased in San Francisco for dessert.

What could be better?

Sometimes ugly food tastes best

A new item showed up recently in the meat selections at our local dairy: beef short ribs. Since our dairy delivers milk, cheese and meat to our home, we considered this a great development. We love beef short ribs, especially this time of year when braising meat for a long time in the oven is one of our favorite pastimes.

But these short ribs touched off an immediate debate between my wife and I. She thought they weren’t thick enough and were cut too small. I was happy just to have a grassfed short rib so easily available when finding short ribs in the store can often be such a hassle. Well, these small-size short ribs swelled into little monsters once I started browning the at the bottom of a heavy braising pot. Still, we often wonder if our dairy spends much time thinking about how their meat products stack up to customers’ expectations.

We have a short rib recipe we love seasononed with garam masala. We first saw it in the Union Square Cafe and have been devoted to it ever since. But it does involve a couple of bottle of wine and a long reduction. I wanted something easier. So I turned to the method we use for our braised oxtails–brown the meat, then some aromatic vegetables, add wine and brown stock–and the short ribs came out just fine.

So just follow the recipe I wrote up here. While the ribs are cooking in the oven, you can steam some parsnips and turnips on the stove. Mash them fine with some cream and you have a fine side dish to drench with the pot liquor.

How do you cook your steak?

It was daughter’s birthday this weekend and she requested her favorite food: steak. Normally I would seek out grassfed steak. It’s not only the most flavorful–depending on the cow, of course–but also the healthiest. Perusing the meat counter at Whole Foods, however, my eyes landed on these bone-in beauties. I can’t hardly count they number of different varieties of steak our local Whole Foods sells. There’s the regular steak, the “dry aged” steak, the “local steak” and the grassfed variety, which in our part of the country comes from a farm in Georgia. Sometimes there’s even steak from Australia.

I chose the bone-in ribeyes because they were on sale: $9.99 per pound. Sitting right next to them were some lovely rib roasts as well. Our steaks were probably two inches thick. We like our steaks thick.

Usually I will remove the meat from the fridge several hours before dinner to allow it to come up to room temperature. Some cooks prefer to start their steaks cold, which allows you to char the outside while keeping the interior blood red. We like ours “medium-rare.” About an hour before cooking, I season the meat aggressively all over with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. I don’t use any other seasonings.

My cooking method this time of year (winter: too cold for grilling outside) consists of marking the steaks hard on both sides in this cast-iron pan with ridges at the bottom. The grill marks are really just an affectation. I have no problem eating a steak cooked in a regular pan with no ridges. Once the outside is well-browned, I move the pan into a 350-degree oven and continue roasting the meat until an instant-read thermometer reads 120 degrees. How do you do that? Lift the steak out of the pan with a pair of tongs, turn it sideways and insert the thermometer. This is another reason to choose thick steaks over thin ones.

On this particular evening, we had a guest who likes her steak more “well done,” so I cooked them to 130 degrees. They came out close to “medium.” If you like, slather them with melted butter. That’s almost the best sauce there is for a well-cooked steak. Or you could go all-out and make yourself a pot of Hollandaise.

These steaks have one other nice feature: after you eat the meat, you get to gnaw on the bone.

Dinner according to daughter'specs

Write my daughter a blank check and she’d be grilling ribeye steaks for dinner every night. But sometimes the best we can do is grassfed hamburger from the beef herd at our local dairy. Daughter moans and rolls her eyes because we don’t use buns with our burgers. But look here: She devised her own solution to that–mini-burgers.

Why are mini-burgers acceptable without buns when normal-sized burgers are out of the question? The secret lies somewhere in the mind of a 10-year-old.

As you can see, she filled her plate with some of her other favorites: Caesar salad, raw carrots and dill pickles. Oh, and she’s smothered her mini-burgers with pickle relish.

This is not a meal I would have ever thought of myself. Sometimes you just have to let kids paint with their own brush.

Daughter says there's nothing here she can eat

Sometimes, you just don’t want to cook anything.

I foraged this end-of-summer meal on short notice: assorted tomatoes from the farmers market, dressed with olive oil and tarragon vinegar, shredded mozzarella cheese and a chiffonade of basil; a cucumber from the garden, seasoned with salt, white wine vinegar and dill; a very ripe cantaloupe, cut into cubes; and full strength cottage cheese from the local dairy (none of that low-fat stuff for us).

I was rather proud of what I had produced, but daughter would have none of it. “That’s not dinner!” she cried. Meaning not only did she have a complaint with each item individually, but taken as a whole it did not qualify as an actual meal.

She left the table in a huff, but returned a few minutes later to announce that she was taking her scooter to the convenience store up the street to buy dinner with her allowance. “It’s my money, and you said I can spend it any way I want!” she declared.

My wife and I sputtered that instant ramen noodles from the corner BP station did not, in our opinion, constitute dinner either. We settled things by cooking a pot of pasta and concluding that I need to give daughter more warning about what I plan to serve.

Ah, the family meal. We do love our traditions.

For more great stories about how we are taking back our food system, read Fight Back Friday.