Why We Had Tacos For Dinner By Mris Age 30

[mrissa]

Maybe I'm the only one who does this stupid thing, but I doubt it, because this is the internet: when I've been sick, if I'm a little tiny bit better but nothing like well, or even if I'm not better but have just been sick for awhile, I get tired of being sick and want to do the things I could do when I wasn't sick. Because being sick is boring. And being sick since Thanksgiving? is even more boring than that.

So I announced to timprov that I wanted to try cooking dinner tonight, despite post-travel wobblies making it not particularly a great idea for me to do so. (Note: no one was even slightly injured in the making of this dinner. In fact, the vertigo is only a spice: I wobbled as I did this, I wobbled as I did that. Still not back to cooking strength. But no injuries.) Skeptically, he agreed. We had yams, because markgritter doesn't like yams and timprov and I love them, and we had sweet corn, and we had trout. That sounded like dinner to me, and not entirely unlike dinner to timprov, so onwards! Excelsior! Um.

The advantage to this plan, in the making of it, is that each thing stopped demanding my attention when the next thing would want it. I could clean the rosemary and the yams and get that in the oven to roast, shuck the corn and get that in the pot to boil, cook the bacon for the bacon fat and bacon garnish, and then cook the trout in the pan with it (and paprika and sour cherries, was my theory). So I didn't have to try to turn around a lot dealing with more than one thing at once. When vertiginous people cook, this is a big plus.

Fine. So, yams in the oven. (They're delicious.) Corn in the pot. (Perfectly fine.) At this point, timprov, who has a cold, wandered in to see how I was doing and whether he had time for a shower before dinner. "If the trout doesn't work," I said, "we can just have corn and yams and bacon!" He laughed. (timprov has always had significantly more rigid notions of what constitutes a meal than I have.) He went upstairs to shower. Bacon cooked. (Hurrah.) And then I opened the butcher paper.

See, this was ordered online. I did not watch the butcher do up this parcel of fish. I thought I had ordered trout. Byerly's thought that I had ordered a trout. So there it was, with its tail and its head, eye and all. And despite the fact that I'd taken it out of the freezer quite a bit earlier, it was still a completely solid brick of iced trout. Even if I had any experience with cooking whole fish -- even if I was interested in doing technique experiments while vertiginous, which sadly I am not -- there was no way this trout was going to be thawed enough to do useful things with in time to eat it with the rest of dinner.

So timprov, all cleaned and dressed and brushed and that, opened the bathroom door to find me sitting cross-legged on the floor of the upstairs hallway looking up at him. "So funny thing about that," I said.

(For those of you who worry about wasting food, worry not: everything could be put in the fridge and will make perfectly lovely bits of other meals. It's just that I completely ran out of upright cooking time just as we realized we would not have a main dish. So: tacos.)

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I have many good easy recipes for whole fish when the trout is thawed. *g*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lead on. The only plausible things I know how to do with whole fish are things I know not to do with vertigo.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Easiest one I know, and involving no messing with things while things are hot. (hit post too soon!)

Take fish. Inside fish, put lemon slices, garlic, and thyme (preferably fresh). Sprinkle fish with salt. Put in baking dish with small quantity of white wine and lemon juice. Cover with tinfoil or the lid of the baking dish.

Bake until flaky. Get Timprov or Mark to lift the hot fish off the bones onto a serving dish with a spatula, then turn over the fish and do the same on the other side.

Eat over rice with the delicious runny juice in the bottom of the pan drizzled over everything. If the juice is not rich enough, it can be finished with olive oil or a pat of butter.

Asparagus or spinach is very nice with this, as are tomatoes, and any or all of these things can be cooked in the wine with the fish.

Pls. beware of little poky bones, as I like all three of you. *g*

<3

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Poaching works well too, wine, water, lemon & seasonings. Have the liquids just a a bubbling simmer & cook to translucent throughout. Sides as you wish but Ms. Bear has a bunch of classics in her post.

PS: Wild rice pilaf w/cranberries & toasted pecans is real YUM!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas but I am the only big cranberry fan here, so I make my wild rice with almonds and chopped basil and mushrooms, mostly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have thyme. Byerly's claims to remove bones from their whole fish for their customers, but one must be careful anyway.

Spinach is nice with nearly anything.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Clear-steamed trout is also very nice. Cut a few deep slashes into each side of (thawed) trout and slide a slice of ginger and the white of a scallion into each. Place in heatproof shallow bowl of suitable dimension. Drizzle with small quantity of Asian sesame oil. Steam covered over a brisk boil for about 8-10 mins or until just opaque at the thickest part of the fish.

For classic Chineseness points, finish by spooning several spoons of boiling scallion oil over the top. But not if you are vertiginous, probably.

Serve with other things, one of which should be rice. A little soy sauce would not go amiss.

Save the juices from the bowl and stir them into a second ricebowl of rice, with soy sauce and maybe a little chile-garlic paste. So very yum.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

That sounds lovely.

'Scuse me, I need to get a trout.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I had tacos too, on the theory that it gives me some protein and I can pretend the lettuce actually counts as a vegetable.

I do wish I could have been there to see the expression on your face when you discovered a frozen trout in your parcel, though. As it's playing in my mind, it's the stuff sitcoms are made of. (The good ones, not the dumb ones.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Tomatoes and avocados count as vegetables.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

And if I put them on my tacos, I would count them.

[redbird]

Lettuce is a vegetable; how much you eat matters, but that's true of any veg. (I also suspect that the kind of lettuce matters.)

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yam, corn, and bacon tacos? sounds like dinner to me...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think the odds of talking timprov into that as a meal are even lower.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I think that could be a meal, given that we have cheese.

It would be terrible, but a meal.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

that frozen vs. thawed thing gets me every time. i want steak for dinner. the steak is a solid block in the freezer. i put the steak in the nuker. the steak is now rubbery and half-cooked and gross. i make a pot of pasta with balsamic vinegar. no more steak. sadface.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

All for Charley! All for Charley!

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

he agrees most heartily

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

There are two tricks to this. The first, and generally simpler one, is to put the steak into barely lukewarm water. Large amounts thereof, to the tune of 5-6L (1.5 ga) or so. Takes about an hour for a 1.5lb steak to defrost most of the way.

The other method requires one piece of equipment: The largest, heaviest, cast iron skillet you possess. Put the steak on it, and wait. Gotta love the massive thermal heatsink that is cast iron. About 45 min. for the same steak, though YMMV with skillet weight.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I have only heard this story told as legend, but I believe it is true.

Some years ago, another friend of mine also wished to make the feast piscatorial. The mackerel that was procured from the local asian market that morning was very fresh, and put promptly into the freezer in ready anticipation. Later, after it had been thawed, and to my friend's great horror, the fish objected to being gutted. It began flopping wildly and bloodily.

My friend did the only sensible thing to do with a violent, partially gutted living fish. She screamed and beat it to death with the cutting board. Then she got fast food.

I don't think it was a taco, though.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

jesus what! that's the weirdest thing i've read in weeks.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I might've gotten details wrong. I don't remember for certain if put it in the freezer or the refrigerator. The rest of it is as I was told.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Now that's what I call a very fresh fish. Reminds me of the story my friend Pete told of his sojourn in Japan.

He went out for sushi and realized that if he ordered raw shrimp, the shrimp would be fresh enough to object. Pete got squeamish and asked the waitress if she could bring him some shrimp who were no longer living.

The waitress was indignant and aghast. "You want me to serve you food that is not fresh?!"

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

At a Japanese Food festival I went to they were serving fresh uni (sea urchin). I'd never heard that urchin was tasty, so I didn't try any of the free samples that were being scooped out of the urchin still waving its spines.

Also, as it turns out, I did have details of that little story above wrong. The fish was an unknown variety, purchased pre-gutted and on ice. It was on getting it home and preparing it for cooking that it got angry.

[moiread]

> Maybe I'm the only one who does this stupid thing, but I doubt it, because this is the internet: when I've been sick, if I'm a little tiny bit better but nothing like well, or even if I'm not better but have just been sick for awhile, I get tired of being sick and want to do the things I could do when I wasn't sick. Because being sick is boring.

That hardly seems stupid to me. You just have to be careful of which Healthy Person activities you choose, as you did, and if it weren't for the fact that the trout was secretly in possession of all its parts, it sounds like you would have succeeded triumphantly at making the dinner you'd planned.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And made it very hard to get through my evening PT in the process. So.

[moiread]

Ah. That kind of context does change things.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Woo cooking! And mmm, corn, yams, and bacon sounds like a good dinner to me!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I knew there were people I could count on to be on my side with this.

[redbird]

Oh, absolutely. My only problem with that dinner is that it's in Minnesota and I'm not.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Corn, eh. Yams, never had. Bacon counts as a meal on its own, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If you feel like trying yams, here's what I would do: get a big one (they're all big ones). Scrub it really well and lop off any iffy ends. Chop it into pieces, bite-sized or two-bite-sized. Clean some fresh rosemary and pull it off the branch. Toss the yam pieces and the rosemary in a bowl with some olive oil and some sea salt. Put them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, bake in a 375 F oven for 30-40 minutes.

I did it without the parchment paper once and got kind of burnty bits on most of the yam pieces -- not burnty enough to be inedible, but it's better this way. There are obviously other things to do with yams, but the basic flavor here is yammy and good.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds good. I love yams, but hardly ever cook them. I have a spouse who is not big on the yam taste. He's not going to be home for dinner for the next two nights. Grocery store run!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The number of advantages to having a spouse out of town is fairly small; best to take advantage of the ones that present themselves!

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Corn yams bacon. Mmm. Though I do look forward to hearing what you do with the trout, I've never cooked a whole trout. Or eaten one, actually; I accidentally ordered one but didn't realize it would come with the head on and bones it, and I traded it to a friend.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I used to say I didn't eat things with heads on, but then I got Angry Trout at a Thai restaurant near us in Hayward. Oh the bliss. It was so worth the staring eye to get the Angry cheek flesh.