The Catch of the Day
The kids went out with their Mom yesterday for a day out on the town. Their plan had been to go to an amusement park and go on some rides, so imagine my surprise when they came home and exclaimed, “we caught dinner!”
It seems that there was a trout fishing lake there, and all the fishing gear you could ask for. I guess Colleen and the kids are great at fishing, or those fish are extremely dumb. Either way they came home with seven beautiful trout!
Now, I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, and I have caught, cooked and eaten a lot of seafood. Never once have I ever gutted or cleaned one! Colleen showed me how, and it is remarkably simple; nevertheless, I let her continue to “show” me, and soon enough they were all done. I highly recommend this method of cleaning, as it is a lot less work for the person watching. At any rate, I think I could do it next time if there was no one else there to do it.
Anyway, it was up to me to figure out how these were to be prepared. Trout is not a particularly strongly flavored fish, so I knew it would need something to help it along taste-wise. They were not that big either, so they were going to cook quickly. And since this was the first catch for the kids, I did not want to cut the fish up or mince them or something like that; I knew the kids would want to see them in “fish” shape so that it would be that much more obvious that they were eating what they caught. Instilling a sense of pride in the kids is important to both their Mom and myself, and there is nothing that builds your self esteem like being able to provide for yourself and your family!
I decided on a corn meal coating, quickly fried, with an almondine topping. It sounds complicated, as well as delicious, but it is really not as hard as it might seem. Each step was simple enough, and it is hard to go wrong.
The first step was to cut the fish in halves; they were too small to fillet properly, and the skin is thin and tender enough to eat, so I left it on. All I did was pull out the back bone, and cut the fish down the middle, leaving fillet-shaped halves. I also made sure to pull out as many of the remaining bones as I could find, and trimmed off the fins. Incidentally, I saved the heads, tails and back bones in order to make fish stock; I am not sure how well trout works for this purpose, but I am willing to try!
The next step was to prepare the coating. One cup of flour, one cup of corn meal, a teaspoon each of salt and lemon pepper was all it took. This goes into a shallow dish in order to coat the fish.
Since I was frying them, I then got the fry pan and oil ready. I did not intend to completely submerge the fish, but I wanted it deep enough to deep fry each side. I set the element to medium-high (about 7 on my stove). Frying temperature needs to be fairly high, but you must be careful not to get the oil hot enough for it to smoke. Once this happens, the oil begins to chemically break down, and will not fry as well. Plus there is the danger of fire, and if you have never had an oil fire in your kitchen, I hope you never have one. If your oil does smoke, lower the heat, and replace the oil once it is cool enough to do so.
As the oil was heating up, I melted some butter and a small sauce pan. I cut a lemon in half and squeezed the juice into the butter, and once it was all simmering (low heat – you don’t want to burn the butter!) I added the sliced almonds. I let this simmer and begin to brown as I fried the fish.
Each piece of fish was coated in the flour and corn meal mix, and then placed flesh side down in the pan. Once the corn meal reached a pale gold color, I flipped it and let it cook for a couple of minutes more. My pan was large enough to do two pieces of fish at a time.
By the way, when you are frying anything, do not add too much at one time. Frying requires a high temperature, and if you add too much food at one time you will drop the temperature of the oil. If this happens, then you are simply boiling your food, which will not give you the crispiness you want. Also, your food will be greasier, as it will absorb farther into the food: it takes longer to cook, and there is no crispy surface to act as a barrier to the oil.
As each piece of fish came out, I put it on a plate with paper towel, and put more paper towel on top. I piled up all the fish ths way, and popped it into a slightly warm oven to keep warm until serving time. I could tell already that this was going to be a hit. The coating was nice and crispy, and the quick taste-test I had told me I had cooked the fish just the right amount.
The almondine was done at around the same time; the almonds were nice and brown, and the butter had browned a bit too. The smell of the lemon was really a nice touch.
When the fish was done I stepped back and let Colleen treat me to something else I had never had before: beet greens. I have a garden for the first time ever, and I had to thin out the beets today. The beets themselves were kind of small, and we put them aside for another day. The “greens”, if you have never seem them, are simply the leaves of the beet plant. There are about 6 or 7 for each plant, and they shoot straight up from the root on bright red stalks. The leaves are wide and have red veins, and look very appetizing as they are; in fact, I am really surprised that they are not sold in stores, or at least more commonly.
All she did with them is give them a quick steam/sautee in a wok with a bit of lemon-flavored marinade. This made it match very well with the lemon in the almondine, and it was very tasty. At first I was surprised that she left the stalks on, as I expected them to be tough, but they were very tender, and had a very beet-like taste. She normally just uses vinegar and salt, and I expect that works out well too — I can’t wait to try it! I certainly have enough beets that I can experiment with.
Normally I would also have done rice with this dish, but today was so hot that I really did not want the starch on top of the oil from the fried fish. In retrospect, the only thing I would do differently is to salt the fish a bit as it came out of the fry pan. This is an important step in frying food that I simply forgot! Anyway, lesson learned — I hope!
Yours in Good Taste
Erik Christensen