Monday, November 17, 2003
THAT Salmon (panseared with spicy soy), and yucca-cabbage delite
As daylight hours shrink, a man of any wisdom betakes himself more frequently to his kitchen. This occurred to me saturday night as Kel and I ate a sort of white-trash cassoulet with fatty pork and black beans and onions and a thick purple sauce. We had it over couscous with steamed veg and it was really perfectly tasty, but we were both looking at each other and thinking the same thing - it was good, but it wasn’t that salmon.
That salmon. It was a meal that started as a mere artifact of improvisation but ultimately arogated the whole article “that” to itself. It’s just that damn good. And when one of my offhand culinary masterworks keeps recalling itself to me and kel both, even several days after I made it, in a good way I mean, then I am moved to engage whatever influence I have, doddering and attenuated though it may be, in service of the idea that maybe this meal may be repeated, may propagate and thus may bring joy unto the masses. Easy salmon, challenging veggies. Come along and let’s remodel our dingy old RECIPE CORNER with the key data on THAT SALMON - WITH YUCA VEGGIES. Good-o.
That salmon starts as skinless fillets. We each had about 7 oz, and we both wanted more after it had been cooked. I marinated them for about an hour, ex-skin-side up, in four parts soy to one part sriricha rooster pepper sauce. During that time I dealt with the veggies and then got a dry iron skillet heated medium-hot. Now, you have a nice hot dry pan - don’t ruin it with a whole mess of oil. Just run some olive oil over your hands and then smear oil on the fillets - enough to spread the heat and keep the fish from sticking. Then put the fillets in the pan, ex-skin-side down - reserving the remaining marinade. Cover the pan and leave the fish the hell alone; check it in about 10 minutes to see if there are any darker undercooked areas in the center of the tops of the fillets - you can see if its not done to your preferences, but don’t let it cook too long. Spatulate it out of the pan onto a warm plate. Yeah, warm up a plate, it won’t kill you for gods sake.
Now get some red wine and pour half a cup or so into the hot pan, it’ll bubble up and deglaze the salmon fat; help it with a fork if you wish. Then pour in the reserved marinade and let it cook down a few minutes, then pour it into a bowl before it cooks away altogether. Pour this sauce over the salmon fillets and, if you have the stones to make them, the veggies.
VEGGIES: Red cabbage, about 1/4 of a medium one, cut into strips of about 1/2 inch by 1-1/2 inches long. Not little bitty bits and not huge honking leaves. Exercise some independent judgment already. Then a yellow onion, cut into bite size chunks. Then a yuca root, peeled and cut into bit size chunks. When you peel the yuca, go deep -there’s a cellulose sheath around the tuberous meat of the root, you want to peel through that too. Yuca have fibers running up the center so as you chunk your hunks, watch for those - maybe once they’re boiled you can pluck some out. So you’d better boil your yuca chunks, in lightly salted water for about 10 minutes; then drain them well and pluck out any obvious fibers before you dump the whole mess into a good-sized pan with half-an-inch or so of hot cooking oil in it. Again, objective yuca-based testing has established indisputably that cast iron will work better here than non-stick, but hey, it’s your funeral, I just totally rode your ass about thinking for yourself so I should just try to relax for a minute or two. Deep cleansing breaths. Good-o.
So - whew - the yuca will fry for about 15 minutes on one side on medium-high heat before they’re crisp enough to turn over for another 10 minutes on the other side. Try not to spatulate - damn I like that word now - them too much when you’re frying them - just don’t let them stick, and even that shouldn’t be much of a problem if you had enough hot oil in the pan when you dumped them in in the first place. For these last 10 minutes, dump in the onion chunks and stir them around a bit occasionally to give them a chance to cook; for the last five minutes, dump in the cabbage and stir that around a bit too. Once the yuca and cabbage are both cooked, remove the veggies into a bowl that’s lined with absorbent paper and let that drain for a few minutes; then pull out and dispose of the paper and season the veggies to taste - I like a philipino dry spice mix called adobo but Lawrey’s Season Salt is also excellent. Eat with salmon. THAT salmon. And pour that wine reduction sauce over the yuca as well as the fish.
So has it been written, so shall it be cooked. If you don’t like it - you made it wrong.
You’re welcome.
