Skate wings!? Skate’s have wings?

Les Halles
Skate Grenobloise, page 1oo.

Our third attempt in the Les Halles handbook was Skate Grenobloise. Skate wings. After hearing horror stories similar to those of shark fin procuring, I was skeptical (of both the stories and the actual fish). Labeled as a “junk fish” in the book, I was pretty sure we’d have an extremely difficult time tracking down the elusive wings. I was right. After being promised they would have them on Thursday, we drove down to Whole Foods after a long day of work/school, in the middle of rush hour to snag some of the elusive fish. Guess what? They didn’t. Not altogether shocking, tracking down hard to find ingredients only to come up empty handed is my lot in life. Unhappily, we grabbed some tilapia as a sub and made out way home (back through traffic).

I swear the fish monger-etts told me that they would have skate wings. And after this grueling trek into downtown Bellevue (who the hell designed the Whole Foods parking lot anyway. That guy and I are going to fight) I am hereby resolving to call, Whole Foods, Uwajamaya, Viet Wha, Big John’s PFI, The Spanish Table… the next time we go a hunting for the, as Kevin puts it ever so eloquently “eh, do we really need that?”

Ok, so skate, er tilapia gernobloise combines two of my favorite flavors, salty briny capers, and luscious rich butter. And on fish! How can you go wrong? You can’t! We simply coated the fish in seasoned flour (thank you Kathy Casey’s Dish Delish Cha Cha seasoning sea salt), pan fried it in butter then made a quick sauce of segmented lemons, butter, capers and homemade croutons.

FYI a la grenobloise means with a sauce that hails from the town of Grenoble, in the Dauphine region of France. After having finished memorizing dozens of archaic French sauces for a recent test, I was tickled to find that I recognized many sauces and preparations in this cookbook. Espangole? Know it. Blanquette? Know it. Beurre Rouge? Know it. A la charcutiere? Um, hello! Know it.

(Yes, go ahead and point out that I don’t know the beef cuts in French)

What were left of the croutons were great (Mary has a tendency to aggressively “graze” key ingredients-(What, I’m hungry, plus I need to make sure that they taste ok. What if they were rotten, or worse yet, poisoned? I do it for you toodie.), slap the fish next to some greens and you were good to go. The fish takes a lot of the credit on this one, oh, and butter. Can’t really go wrong with that combo. Oh, and the leftovers were great, even cold.

Recipe Ease. 9, maybe a 5 for Kevin. He can’t segment lemons, or oranges, or anything that needs segmenting.
Time. 8. The prep can take a bit if your knife skills aren’t up to par, but actually fridge to dinnertime was quite low.
Make again. 10. This is a perfect light fish preparation, great, I’m sure with just about any white fish.

Beef made for salad…Salade d’onglet

Les Halles Cookbook
Salade d’onglete, page 123

Ever since returning from Korea I’ve been in a state of bliss every time I order a steak/chef/cobb salad, basically a largish, meal sized salad. Tough to come by in the “Land of Morning Calm/No suitable salads over here, move along sir.” So excited was I by this recipe that I literally fantasized about the leftovers I was sure to have the following day of work, that’s some good salad-fantasy.

There would be no left overs.

No, poor little Kevin would have no leftovers. Let’s first start with what the heck is onglet steak? No, you don’t speak French? Know your cuts of meat in French? Neither do I. I barely know them in English. Though I did develop a little ditty to help me remember It goes like this (to the tune of head, shoulder, knees, and toes please- you’ll have to imagine the tuning fork) Chuck, rib, loin, round, loin, round. Chuck, rib, loin, round, loin, roun-oun-oun-ound. Brisket, plank, flank and shank. Chuck, rib, loin, round, loin, round.

So instead of figuring it out I just bought what I knew, and what I like, flat iron steak. This time at the Ballard Sunday Market from Skagit River Ranch, an organic meat farm out in Sedro Woolley Washington. (I finally looked it up and found out that onglet just means hanger steak. c’est la vie)

I love flat iron steak, and the salad did turn out so good that there were no left overs. That said, I do think hanger might of been better. Slightly more tender (although a quick pound would of probably tenderized the flat iron into delicate submission), ours was a tad chewy. What really made this dish was the marinade. Soy sauce, ginger, and garlic. So simple, yet so divine. A good marinade can make an old shoe taste good, so a nice piece of meat and some locally sourced greens? Fuggeddaboutit.

Chewy Schmewy, it was good. One of the called for ingredients brings me to point close to my heart, commercially made stock. You can pretty much guess Bourdain’s position on these quart containers of salty liquid flavored to resemble a homemade chicken, beef or vegetable broth. Bourdain encouraged Kevin and I to make out own, “Canned beef broth or watery bouillon will not reduce into the kind of rich, full bodied, mothersauce, you are looking for. For some things, you need to do it right.” It isn’t that Kevin and I are so lazy that we just can’t lift our sausage-y fat fingers to hoist up a stock pot large enough to fit a toddler, or cook down the backs, wings, and feet of chicken over long hours with mire poix and a boquet garni, really, it is just that we need the time to do it, so Trader Joe’s Chicken Broth it is.

I was able to deglaze my first pan with this recipe and I can definitely tell you I’ll be back. I’ve always been a fan of drippings and the leftover “goods” (the correct term is “fond”) of a good sear and with a little wine, some scraping and some reduction. I felt like an actual cook. Not a chef, but at least a cook. Good stuff.

Recipe Ease 2. Very straightforward.
Time 7. Aside from the overnight marinating, a quick weeknight meal.
Make again 10. Without a doubt, yum.

PS. I also know a song about Sedro Woolley. It goes like this. “Hamburger hoedown at the farm. Hamburger hoedown, boy I’m starved. Hamburger hoedown yipp-i-o , Hamburger hoedown in Sedro. Burn them burgers, burn them burgers, burn them burgers. Yee-Haw.

Thank you, thank you.

<Bow>
<exit stage right>

Imitating?

So following our month of North African, Vietnamese, and Spanish cuisine, we thought we’d regain lost confidence and pound out some quality dishes; channel out internal cigarette-smoking, crappy sport sandals wearing and most importantly, all around French bistro extraordinaire, Anthony Bourdain. Don’t knock us for reaching.

In a heated tie with a plate of Polish specialties in Greenpoint, Les Halles provided me with my best meal in NY this past February in the form of an exquisite bowl of steaming pork products that I just can’t stop thinking about. It was a thing of beauty and one that we will be soon (attempting) to recreate, the infamous charcuterie garnie.

Anthony Bourdain and I have a love/hate relationship. I used to hate him, but now I kinda love him. I was one of those non-religious vegetarian uppities Bourdain continuously laments in his books and on his shows. But after traveling around South East Asia, and putting nausea-inducing foods stuffs into my mouth previously imagined as some sort of P.O.W torture, I came to realize the guy has some validity to the culinary rhetoric he preaches.

In his book, “Les Halles Cookbook: strategies, recipes, and techniques of classic bistro cooking,” Bourdain flexes his notorious sarcastic wit in such a way that you feel as though he is that cooler, older brother, one who will eventually instruct you in the ways of cool, but not without a few punches in the gut first.

(I would like to point out that I bought this very book at Half Price Books, and it was this purchase that Kevin called- because he knows when I am cookbook shopping- when the “discussion” about how many cookbooks I have occurred. I just thought you should know.)

Enough about that. Our first two recreations came in the form of a Mediterranean standby, moules a la Portugaise and asparagus & haricots verts salad.

To be honest, mussels totally freak me out. I am just going to say it. Even though I know my father, mother, and grandmother read this, I don’t care. They look like vaginas.

Of the yonic bivalves, Bourdain writes,” it is ridiculously easy to cook mussels. The bang for your buck factor …is very, very high: Dump stuff in a pot, cook for a few seconds, and drop into a bowl and you’ve got a great, good-looking comfort meal.” And he is right. Compared to the last month of 2 plus cooking hours, tonight’s meal felt at first, wrong, as though we missed some 19 steps instructing us to run the mussels around the house in a counter clockwise motion, then rinse them in the shower, or something crazy. But this combination of chopped parsley, sliced chorizo, garlic and onions in white wine took less than 15 minutes. Freekin’ easy.

MMMM, K. The first recipe, the salad, we can take little credit for it’s greatness. The thing was made with fresh asparagus sourced from the Redmond Farmer’s Market and it was tops. The green beans sufficed from the grocery store but it was the asparagus that stole the show. Note to those in the PNW: If you can, get out to your local farmer’s market this weekend and grab some! A quick blanch, a vinaigrette (punched up with Mary’s insertion of zest) and some segments and this thing was good to go. Tasted like summer and the ingredients, all I need!

Asparagus and Green Bean Salad

This recipe asks us to merely blanch the asparagus, something I never, ever do. Come to think of it, the only vegetable I ever blanch is the green bean. I’ve always roasted my asparagus, and it was hard to fight the urge to chuck Bourdain’s book in the rubbish bin and go ahead with asparagus and haricots verts salad a la marie, but fearing that Bourdain would refer to me a “pussy” I went a head and blanched the suckers. Know what? He was right. They were good. The trick is to only keep them in the water for a few minutes. So short of a time that if you were to walk away from the boiling pot of salted water to say, get yourself a beer or refresh your glass of wine, and say check the latest celebrity gossip on perezhilton.com it would be too late. Ruined. Just stay there and watch the pot. It will boil; beer and perez can wait.

The mussels relied mostly upon a decent broth (wine), some decent meat (chorizo) and some decent mollusks (from Whole Foods). If anything, I only recommend cooking the mussels on the shorter end than on the longer. I truly believe they are done once they start to open. Getting tender mussels seems to be a thing you usually have to do at home, I blame too much broth at restaurants and heat lamps, bah!

A little crusty bread, in this case a whole-wheat baguette (which I at first dismissed as an awful purchase) was all that was needed to round out the meal. Along with the salad this thing could’ve been served for any occasion and impressed.

Recipe Ease: 1 for both. Unless you are new to cooking mussels, then maybe 3, but pretty darn easy.
Time: 9. Super quick for both. Waiting for the water to boil for cooking the asparagus and green beans took the longest.
Make again: 9 for the salad, 5 for the mussels, because, you know, vaginas, ew.

Bye bye New American Chef.

That is it. Over. We’re done with you New American Chef and your crazy recipe ways.

Chicken and prunes ain’t just for grandma

Chicken Tajine with Prunes
Recipe by Adbel Rebbaj, from The New American Chef, page 413

Morocco has turned out to be quite the boon for the cooking Crowes, coming to the tasty conclusion of chicken with prunes. This recipe had striking similarities in ingredient list to our earlier post of Cornish hens with pomegranate/honey so I was a little worried. This time however, we took implemented out biggest substitution/addition/modification to a recipe.

Yes, fearing another fatty, soggy, tasteless mess, I made a couple executives. After fabricating the chicken (I am getting better and better at this, but often find that I am using my fingers almost as much as my knife, to separate tendons, remove cartilage or a bone, and to the skin. Does anyone else do this?), I opted to remove the skin and the bones from the thigh. The thigh has to be my least favorite cut of chicken. Frankly, I don’t like much dark meat period, but thigh, it is just to tendon-y and that bone! It just gets in the way.

We opted for naked chicken. Yup, unzip the coat and you’ve got some tasty insides. Keeping the bone in the legs we figured would store up juiciness to counterbalance the lack of a winter coat on the bird. We also went for chicken broth over water for the 50 minute simmer, also a good move, (thanks babe). Why we didn’t do this before is beside me. It was such an easy substitution that restuled in a more savory dish with depth. The end result culminated in our biggest success as of late.

Uber succulent chicken in a broth-like sauce so delicious I had to get every last drop. The roasted almonds and quickly cooked prunes played off of each other as well as apple pie and vanilla ice cream and quickly converted Mary to the dark side. I personally love prunes, even keep a bag in my desk but am often gunshy to admit (like my undying love for Steely Dan and America the band), you can’t shake what you’ve been brought up with and grandma always had some prunes on hand. Smart lady.

Your grandma brought you up on Steely Dan? Yowza. It is true, Kevin is a mini grandpa, a man who actually likes prunes. Me, I’m not big on dried fruit all that much, but I was pleasant surprised to find that the prunes naturally melted into the sauce, the texture naturally contrasting that of the crunchy roasted almonds; the sweetness meeting the savory of the chicken broth.

If one dish has Kevin and I rethinking Moroccan food (and prunes) this is it.

Dish Ease 3 If you know how to break down a chicken, you can make this with your eyes closed.
Time 5 Like most things cooked in tajines (or dutch ovens) the flavors take almost an hour to develop
Make again 9 This was such a satisfying dish I’m sure it will go into our Rolodex of weeknight favorites. Again, an easy entertaining dish.

Lambs Love Lemons

Lamb Tajine with Lemons and Olives.
New American Chef, page 409, recipe by Rafih and Rita Benjelloun

The play between sweet and and savory, salty and sweet in Moroccan cuisine was fully on display with this recipe.

I so disagree. I found this recipe to be bland, watery, and on the whole very sad.

This recipe also included our first time cooking lamb (something we’d been looking forward to for some time) and turned out to be a moderate success. The first obstacle presented itself in the form of meat procurement. Finding organic lamb shoulder? Not so easy. Finding lamb shoulder in general was difficult. Ballard farmer’s market. Nyet. Whole Foods downtown? Nadda. Finally we charmed the butcher at the Bellevue store into cutting us a couple chunky cuts and were on our way.
As you can imagine, shoulder cuts contain a whole lot of ligaments, silver skin and generally nasty looking bits which needed to be mostly done away with in order to be “trimmed and cut into pieces.” One would assume that those “pieces” should be bite-size or of the proportion needed to easily ingest. Being the culinary school maven that she is, I ceded this operation to Mary and she did a great job commanding about a pound of lean meat bites out of over two pounds of shoulder. Looking back I would imagine that in Morocco less trimming and longer cooking times would be involved in order to melt the fat away and season the dish in general.

I was quite surprised with how much skill trimming this cut of meat commanded. The shoulder contained a large bone, and incredible amounts of elastin. For the price, about $5 something per pound, I thought what I rendered was pathetic. Now, having completed Culinary 101, I know that long, low heat cooking breaks down elastin, however I was hoping that it would break it down completely, like to make it disappear completely. But naturally it didn’t, and I continuously pulled out bits of gelatinous blubber from my mouth as I trudged through dinner.

The preserved lemons (those made a few days earlier-see post) trumped the store bought variety by a mile and would recommend anyone contemplating buying them to stop. The green olives and lemon pulp mingled well with the melt in your mouth lamb but I could of dealt with slightly more sweetness. A few tables of sugar or honey added to the tajine in the last stages of cooking would of been nice. Same with the saffron, although I’m starting to feel like my palate may be muted to the delicate flavors in some way. “Needs more saffron” has become a steady refrain in my dining repertoire.

More than sweet, I felt that it needed more salt, and I would have prefered less water. This was more of a soup than a classic tajine stew (just a side note. We don’t have a tajine, they are quite difficult to come by in the PNW, we could have dropped $140 on one manufactured by Le Cruset, but do you think the Moroccans use French cast iron? We didn’t either).

All in all, it was about so-so. I can see where they were going with this dish but felt (like Mary) that it was too watery and the flavors to subdued. Would still love a tajine hook up if anyone knows of where we might find one in or around Seattle, drop us a line.
Ease: 3 (the meat trimming the only task remotely difficult)

Time: 4 (about two hours start to finish)

Make Again: 2 (would love to do a decent lamb tajine, just not with the limited ingredient list)

Was it the Halibut or was it the recipe? Either way, Cooking Crowes 4, New American Chef, 2.

Coming home to a marinating halibut fillet is always nice. As much as I love cooking, there is little better than walking into an operation with a head start. The fact that Mary cooks about ten times faster than me makes it even better, no skin off her back and a load of of mine. A recurring theme presented itself tonight, the layering method of cooking in a dutch oven/tajine. After peeling and slicing some absolutely gorgeous carrots procured last the treasure trove that is the Ballard Sunday market we layered what were left (Mary’s worse than anyone when it comes to kitchen grazing of key ingredients) on the bottom of the pan. The recipe called for 2 carrots to line a largish Dutch oven or tajine, guess they weren’t talking about the spindly (yet candy sweet delicious) organically grown local offerings. Must have been talking about the tree trunk variety found in five pound bag.

I think what worked with this dish was the familiar combination of ingredients, more Provencal than Moroccan, well, with the exception of saffron and S paprika. Despite being shallow poached in a dutch oven, this dish was the essence of summer cooking, fresh, clean flavors, and incredibly moist. By the way this is an excellent entertaining dish. Did I mention that I even concassed tomatoes? That’s how much faith I had in this dish, I, in my home, way away from the expectation of my chefs, I concassed, for pleasure.

The only hickup, which wasn’t really much of a hickup at this point, was the utter lack of direction and missing steps in the recipe (the calling card of The New American Chef). “Put tomatoes, garlic and cumin in pot and cook.” No oil huh? How many pounds of burnt garlic has that resulted in? 20? 30? Expecting as much, I ‘improvised’ by adding some fat in two steps of the recipe which called for none. At least the grammatical/editing mistakes were kept to a minimum. I suppose I’ve realized with time, that cooking out of this book takes a little bit extra. An element of surprise may lurk at every line and paying attention to that fact alone does make you a better chef.

Do I think this lack of key information was something the publishers planned? No. I believe, as I normally do, that those behind the book, Wiley, cheaped out on the editing, leaving it up to chefs and those in the industry to “catch” errors they don’t see. This reminds me of living in Korea and reading English press releases edited by either incompetent native speakers or those over reaching their abilities. At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter, information has a way of getting through, it just makes those responsible look amateur. Rant over.

Rant-o-licious, that’s my toodie. By now with this book, we just laugh when we find these mistakes, but Kevin makes a valid point. Because the Dorenburgs books are aimed at people in the industry, do they assume that these folks can just take their mis-directions and run with it? Even culinary professionals need clear precise directions to ensure success. There is a well known and well loved cookbook titled A Tuscan In the Kitchen, by Pino Luongo, in it readers find a list of ingredients, the amount left blank, to be determined by one’s creativity. But the directions are there. And frankly, unless you are baking, where precise measurements count, it is the method, not the amount.

Ease: 2 very straight forward
Time: 5, having the fish marinate for an hour can put a cramp on a week night dinner.
Make Again: 1, we loved it. Constantly throughout dinner, we kept mummering, “Oh my god this is so good!” I would make it in a heart beat for a dinner party.

Cornish Game Hens. Tastes Like Chicken

This week Kevin and I venture into the world of Moroccan cuisine driving blind. We’ve never been to Morocco before, heck, we’ve never even been to a Moroccan restaurant before, and for foodies who pride themselves on their wide range of culinary know how, we are a touch self conscious.

Our first dish, Cornish Hen with Pomegranate Honey and Roasted Almonds, a recipe by Rafih and Rita Benjelloun, chef and owners of the Imperial Fez in Atlanta (New American Chef, page 408), utilized a slew of ingredients most familiar to us, onions, parsley, ginger, cloves, honey, pomegranate juice, raisins, almonds, and sesame seeds.

The dish began with Mary quartering our small feathered friends after entertaining herself with an impromptu marionette session. She had them can-canning and roger rabbiting like a regular Jim Henson. I was leery of leaving the thick skinned hens in their coats, noting that it must of been extraordinarily cold where these guys once roamed, their skin was like a down parka!

Let me say a quick word about Cornish game hens. They taste like chicken. My point here is that unless you are feeding individuals with dexterously small fingers such as young children or oumpa lumpas, the novelty of a petite bird is replaced with mild annoyance at the petite amount of meat one must work to get off the bone. Had we made this recipe with a regular old chicken, the left overs would have gladly been gobbled down the next day, rather than hanging out the back of our fridge with exiled Trader Joe’s hummus. Might I add they are ridiculously expensive! 18 smackers for two at whole foods.

After roasting (baking) some Almonds (great stuff, will be doing so for snacks in the future) and dressing up our minute fowl in the Crueset, we were more than excited to taste our workmanship. The smells emanating the kitchen were promising and after plating we were ready. First bite…pretty tasty! But my earlier concerns with the mega skin proved true. These hens must of been able to take an insult because they were about half skin, once I found the meat, good but come on! Give me a chicken, turkey, duck or goose any day.

Some notes on the dish, the honey/pomegranate combination was a winner next to the smoky/woodsy flavors of the almonds and is something I’d like to try again, perhaps in a warm salad with goat cheese and shredded chicken…hmmm? Always nice to be inspired by recipe if not altogether blown away.

Recipe Ease 3 (that is if you know how to break down Cornish game hens)
Time 5
Make Again 8. But this time we’d us big chickens, without skin. Nice dinner party dish.

Pho, deconstructed

Pho, from The New American Chef, page 383, recipe inspired by Pho Bang.

To end our week of Vietnamese cooking, we stood up to the challenge of making pho from scratch.

By now I’m sure that everyone out there knows what pho is. But to not make an ass of u or me, pho (pronounced fa. Really. Stop saying Foe. It is Fa) is the iconic soup of Viet Nam. To the Vietnamese it is more than just beef soup with noodles, it is their one pot meal, comfort meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner meal. Usually served up in small roadside eateries, with little more names than Pho 93. It is my biggest, perhaps only vegetarian regret that I didn’t try a bowl while in Viet Nam.

While I can’t claim pho as my only vegetarian regret, I can attest that it was a tragically missed opportunity (not to say the vegi option isn’t amazing, it is, especially in Saigon, or according to Lonely Planet, Hanoi!). Our Pho began with so many cuts of meat, I wondered if true origins might have been a “whatever’s on hand, toss it in the pot” kind of affair. In reality, pho recipes are closely guarded secrets and families pass them down like precious jewels to deserving heirs.

The stock is composed of ox tails (which I expected to be all of similar size, but as I began pulling them from the shrink-wrapped tray I realized that this was one ox tail that had been chopped to bits. Had I wished, I could have reassembled it, matching up the pieces like legos!), beef tendons, and beef shank. Should you decide to make pho, please get these not so familiar cuts of meat from a Vietnamese grocery store like Viet Wha, it will just make your life easier. Plus you can but pre-sliced beef round for the actual soup!

Seasoned with slices of ginger, star anise, cinnamon sticks, and cloves, the aroma wafting through the house had us in good spirits for a sure success. Kev’s, however, dampened today when he removed to the broth from the refrigerator to find a big’ole bowl of ox tail broth jelly (I guess he didn’t remember that collagen dissolves into gelatin).

In reality, I didn’t forget, I had simply forgotten how nasty that stuff can look day two. Going back to a take home coq au vin Mary made at Le Cordon Bleu back in Seoul. That nervous first peak once the tupperware lid has been popped open, only to reveal that ominous thin white layer of exposed fat and oil. Quickly over my uneasy stomach, I skimmed the fat and set the savory jello form of future pho aside.

Once the mise en place is set, cooking up pho is a cinch. The ox tail jello dissolved into a velvety rich soup (it needed salt, I am a salt monkey, I know, but it really really really needed just a big’ole pinch of salt), and was ladeled into our individual serving bowls graced with rice noodles, thinly sliced beef. A small serving plate held all the fixings, cilantro, mint, and basil leaves, bean sprouts and lime quarters. As good as it was, I don’t think I’ll be quitting my Than Brother’s pho habit, how can you go up against a free cream puff? A half-pint of Starbucks Mud Pie Ice cream doesn’t even come close.

Ca Chien Saigon

Crisp Red Snapper with Chile-Lime Sauce. Recipe by Hoc Van Tran, published in The New American Chef, page 381.

For the Hoc Van Tran number, we opted for some beautiful Talipia that caught Mary’s eye while shopping and in the end, it substituted admirably. Pretty basic fish prep, dredged in flour and fried after our friendly monger cleaned and scaled the fish. A little southeast Asia cocktail of fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and chili pepper and our newly crispy buddy was ready to be ingested.

Kevin and I don’t have much experience with whole fried fish. A frightening encounter with poor flipper in Beijing, and a nice small snapper on our honeymoon in Mexico, but I am a fan of fillets, steaks, traunches or darns (think seared tuna, traunch sliced on the diagonal, darn, straight up and down). Until now. Unbeknownst to me, whole fried fish stays incredibly moist and flavorful. I was kinda hoping that that seasoned fried goodness would magically present itself in some edible fashion.

Cooking a whole fish, frying away in an a skillet, lying in a pool of corn oil was a little sad. Seeing it in its living form invoked visions of the Faith No More video. I would have liked to see a little action, a little fight, but Kevin and I just watched, quietly, as our fish lifelessly went along its frying business.

I don’t know what she’s going on about, nor do I, dear reader, know what a traunch is, or didn’t until about two minutes ago. See, this is educational! With this section of the book we’ve explored fish sauce ad nauseum and it can, render mortals nauseaus at times. The deep funk wafting about our kitchen has taken some getting used to, like the first time meandering the cramped aisles of any fresh market in southeast Asia.

I agree, fish sauce is the path to funky smelling town. But that sauce was fork licking good. Kevin and I have debated weather or not to write up the recipes, but I am not sure about copyright issue, so how about we just give you the sauce recipe. That way if you have nemo on hand (whole or fillet) you too can delight in the redolent wafts of fish sauce

1/4 cup fish sauce
1/2 cup water
2 Tablespoons Sugar
3 Tablespoons lime juice
2 Tablespoons prepared chile paste.
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 scallions, white and green onion chopped

Combine the fish sauce, water, sugar, juice, and chile past in a bowl and set aside. Cook fish to desired method of preparation. In a large frying pan, heat one tablespoon oil. Add the garlic and cook until lightly browned. Add the scallion and the reserved sauce. Bring to a boil and remove from heat. Pour sauce over fish and serve. Licking spoons and fingers is permitted.

Recipe ease 2 (super easy!)
Time 5
Make again 9 (easy entertaining dish. Plus you can freak your guests out by serving them a whole fried fish! To quote RR “How Fun Is That?”)