Original Pollock

Here's the tail of a pollock I filleted... ended up not being crazy for the taste -- maybe I'm just spoiled - and I ended up putting some in chowder, and frying some down for yam pla dook foo (see entry 'exploded codfish'). Anyway, I thought it was a striking picture. The knife is a Deba, roughly a small japanese cleaver (thick blade) that seems to walk through bones and joints that stymie larger knives.

This is the end

I don't cook beef much (except for hotdogs, aka EZ protein rations), but roast beef ends were on sale at Market Basket. Here they are two ways: as a simple stir fry with green beans (ginger, garlic, sesame oil, a good light soy sauce) and better yet, a cast iron platter with sauteed mushrooms, two over easy, and roast beef hash. Rrrrrr!

Jack and Jill

There was this kid's magazine when I was little, Jack and Jill, that had a food page, and more than once they recommended a hot dog with peanut butter. My kids wouldn't eat a fried hotdog, preferring the blemishless skin of a microwaved dog, and I couldn't throw them out. Slapped them down on a fresh roll with natural peanut butter, and -- inspiration -- that sweet thai chili sauce that's perfect for this, basically a hot pepper and garlic jelly. And generic diet cream soda, they should ban that stuff.
They're not half bad, and I didn't have to throw out the hotdog or hide it in my next batch of stuffed quahogs. If you think it's wierd, I bet you wouldn't flinch at a beef satay. Unless you're a vegetarian in which case, yeah. It's gross.

Prik Kee Noo

Thank goodness for the new market basket... now I have thai chili peppers within a five minute drive... the red are considerably hotter; this made a pretty display and three levels of heat. I'd estimate them to be 125, 000, 175,000, and 250,000 Scoville units respectively. The title is the name for these in Thai, translated as mouse shit (or rat shit) peppers.

Blackened Salmon? Hah!

Why settle for blacked salmon when you could have some of my 'charred beyond recognition' salmon? Actually, most of it was great, but I did have a cast iron plate directly on coals, and the piece that was over a hotspot, well.... I palmed that one off on myself. I tend to like things burned anyway. Salmon dusted with some barbecue rub or other. I think they're mostly the same (salt, cayenne, onion, garlic, etc) but this one did have humorous copy on the side ('stimmalates the flesh...') Forgot to get a final picture in the rush. Served with a chili pepper/sushi vinegar/lime/fish sauce dressing. Incidentally, this salmon was cooked on scrap wood from the construction site next door.

Do Real People Stuff Clams?

You know what I mean. Do regular people bother to do this?

The shells are from a nearby processing facility -- I'm not saying which in case they stop leaving the shells out where i can get them. The clams are chopped surf clams from intershell -- actually not the same species that provides the shell.

Bacon-fried turkey (so I can at least tell the wife I have not brought pork in the house), fish stock, bread crumbs, browned onion, chopped clams. Broil and eat with hot sauce. These were damned good, and I have to make more.

Nearly Mieng Kham

This week's New Yorker has an article on Johnathan Gold -- the only food writer to win a Pulitzer -- ending with the owner of a Thai restaurant he put on the map thanking him with this dish Bret (nrnfoodwriter.blogspot.com) showed in Bangkok back in 98. Gold seems thrilled, but I can't see how he didn't find this one before.

Bret observed that learning this dish changed my life, and he's right. It's the Thai love for balancing flavors stripped down to bare bones, and experimenting with it taught me a lot about balancing flavors. This one is a little ersatz. I didn't have toasted unsweetened coconut, so I fried up some noodles, and used sweet onion instead of buying shallots that were four times as expensive. Palm sugar syrup to top. Good eats.