Fish Hash

 

What fish hash looks like when I accidentally make it

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? No worries. This is not a recipe for fish hash, at least not in the usual sense. But it is about cooking fish and lessons learned.

My mom was a wonderful cook—except when it came to fish. A child of the landlocked Midwest, she loved seafood and fish, but my Canadian father retained enough of the Brit about him that he wanted a roast of beef or leg of lamb with potatoes. That’s what she cooked. The only fish I remember her cooking was halibut which she poached in milk—you’re right, it’s not my best memory of Mom’s cooking.

I inherited Mom’s taste for fish. We had neighbors who became my adopted aunt and uncle and used to take me to their country club for dinner. Invariably I ordered fish, and she, a devout Catholic, said, “Oh, honey, you don’t have to do that. It’s not Friday.”

So here I am, master of my own kitchen for some sixty years, and I’m still tentative about fish. This does not include canned tuna and salmon, which I fix in a variety of ways all the time. And it does not include salmon that Christian does a masterful job of grilling.

But, fish. Recently I followed a recipe for baked cod. It met with medium success.

Baked cod

I’ve had more luck with sole, which to me is the most delicate, most succulent fish—and it’s reasonably priced. Delicate not only in taste but also in texture—and therein lies the problem. Despite following directions to the letter, sole falls apart in the skillet when I try to sauté it, and we end with fish hash—wonderful flavor, but no eye appeal. And food, Mom always said, is half eaten with the eye. Jordan chose sautéed fish for its crust over the crustless baked, which is easier to do but not as delicious. 

The other night, though, I had medium success sautéing filet of sole. Here’s what I did.

Sautéed filet of sole

1.5 lbs. sole

Butter

Salt and pepper

Flour

White wine

Lemon

Salt and pepper filets to taste. Lightly flour (shake a little flour on them and gently rub it in with your fingers). Here’s the trick: I had been cooking fish on medium low (275)  on my hot plate, because the induction hot plate heats quick and fast. This time I put it on medium (375) and the fish held together better. If you don’t have one, quick get a fish spatula—makes all the difference.

I had to do the fish in two separate batches, which presented a warming problem—if I use hot plate and toaster oven at the same time, I trip a circuit breaker. So I warmed the oven, then sauteed the fish, and kept the first batch in the still-warm toaster oven.

When the fish was all sautéed (and some of it will still be hash) and in the oven, I poured a glug of white wine in the skillet (glug is, I think, Sam Sifton’s measurement from the New York Times cooking columns—the true definition is the gurgling sound liquid makes when poured, which tells you nothing about measurement). I’d say a Tbsp. or two of wine, enough to loosen and scrape up the crusty bits from the skillet. Add a good squeeze of lemon and a dollop or two of butter (you can see how precise this is) and let it all make a sauce. Pour over the fish and serve—and just forget to mention the word hash.

Even the teenager at our house ate this, and Jordan and I enjoyed it the next day for lunch. I will confess we had salmon two days later, and they had just returned from New Orleans where they ate lots of seafood and fish, so the plea was, “No more fish for a while.”

But that sole sure was good.

 

Those retro dishes from your childhood

Jordan and Christian’s friend, Gary, has been waiting all pandemic to come from Dallas for the tuna casserole I’ve promised to make him—a delicacy my resident family won’t touch. We’ve quipped and commented about it on Facebook for a year now, but the date is approaching. Everybody’s vaccinated, and we feel safe to gather. A couple of days ago I mentioned I’d made chicken Divan for son Jamie, and Gary said we’d have to add that to the rotation. At which point, Christian jumped in, said the recipe sounded good to him if we could substitute something for the broccoli; he suggested potatoes, which misses the whole point of the dish. So then I got carried away and said I also have a great recipe for tuna Florentine. Gary is threatening to move west for food. (Do you get those terms mixed up—Divan, Florentine? If it’s Florentine, it’s over spinach; if it’s Divan, it’s over broccoli.)

All this is by way of saying I think I’m finding my cooking niche—at my advanced age. I’ve been advocating American food for some time, although I’m quick to appreciate the food customs of many other countries. Still, these days I find Thai and Indian dishes often too spicy for me and African and Middle Eastern recipes so trendy they’re about to crowd out some old favorites from my childhood—like tuna casserole and chicken Divan. It’s easy to argue that there is no such thing as American food, because our dishes, like our population, are a melting pot. I’ve thought of that this week cooking for Jamie—we had the chicken, then a St. Patrick’s Day corned-beef meal, and, tonight, eggplant Parmigiana. Yes, they are imports, but they are also dinners I remember form the 1960s and before.

One problem cooking older recipes is that packaging has changed. I have recipes that call for a roll of garlic cheese—you can’t buy that in the store anymore. Now I’m wondering if you can buy frozen broccoli spears. I couldn’t find them online at Central Market and settled for fresh flowerets, which worked well. When Patricia McDonald did an updated Helen Corbitt (she of Neiman Marcus fame) cookbook, she worked hard adapting recipes from the Fifties and Sixties to today’s quantities and available ingredients.

On Facebook occasionally you see memes asking, “Does anyone still eat this?” I’ve seen that question about meatloaf and salmon patties; chicken Divan, however, is something I haven’t heard a peep about in years. But one bite, and I remembered how good it is, with a rich wine sauce. So here’s what I did.

Chicken Divan

2 10 oz. pkg. frozen broccoli spears (or use fresh)

½ c. butter

6 Tbsp. flour

½ tsp. salt

Dash of pepper

2 c. chicken broth

½ c. heavy cream

1 Tbsp. white wine

1.5 lb. chicken breast, cooked and diced

½ c. Parmesan or Pecorino

           Cook chicken, cool, and chop; in skillet, melt butter and blend in flour, salt, and pepper. Add chicken broth slowly and cook until mixture thickens and bubbles. Stir in cream and wine. Place broccoli flowerets in 12 x 7 x 2 oven dish. Pour half sauce over. Top with chicken and pour remaining sauce over all. Top with Parmesan.

Bake 350 for 20-30 minutes, until sauce bubbles and Parmesan is lightly browned.

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day!

This greenest of holidays all year seems to cry out for an Irish dish. Corned beef and cabbage is the traditional, of course, and I’ll be fixing a pot, though I’ll sauté the cabbage in butter, rather than boil it, and then finish with salt, pepper, and a good dollop of sour cream. And I’ll share it with my younger son, the one who will eat cabbage with me.

Other dishes you might try to mark the day include shepherd’s pie—the English version of this ground meat and mashed potato pie is made with beef and called cottage pie, but the Irish put their own twist on it by using ground lamb and calling it, appropriately enough, shepherd’s pie. Otherwise, not much difference in the two, but if you make it with lamb, be aware there will be quite a bit of grease to pour off the meat.

The Irish are also fond of colcannon, in which boiled cabbage is added to mashed potatoes, along with a bit of sautéed onion. Irish stew is always a good choice—made with lamb rather than beef. The Irish have their version of that universal dish, potato cakes, called boxty and made with grated raw potatoes. And any good Irish meal should have bannock—that flat loaf of quick bread, usually not yeast-rising, that is served in wedges like a pie.

I have a St. Patrick’s Day child—Jordan’s birthday is March 17. Trouble with that is she wants her corned beef in a sandwich, wouldn’t touch cooked cabbage, and thinks shepherd’s pie is often “too heavy.” So what can I serve her? Reuben dip. She and Christian, neither one of whom would eat sauerkraut on a bet, love this dip. I’m working up to trying a Reuben meatloaf on them. Meantime, the dip will do. Note: instead of the mayonnaise, ketchup, horseradish and relish, you could use an equal amount of Thousand Island dressing. I prefer to avoid the prepared version and make my own.

Reuben dip

8 oz. cream cheese

½ cup mayonnaise

2 Tbsp. ketchup

1 Tbsp. bottled horseradish

1 Tbsp. dill relish

2 cups Swiss cheese, grated (about 8 oz.)

2 oz. deli corned beef, chopped

¼ cup sauerkraut, well drained

Grease a baking dish, pie plate, whatever will fit your toaster oven, and spread dip in it. Bake 350° for 20 minutes. Nice to use pumpernickel cocktail bread or rye to dip.

Have some of your homemade Thousand Island dressing left over? Use it to make a Big Mac Salad—crumbled hamburger, a bit of dill pickle, tomato, grated cheese, chopped lettuce. Toss with the leftover dressing for a great lunch salad, because I can almost guarantee you won’t have left-over Reuben dip. You can pretend Big Mac is Irish.

And don’t forget the green beer! It’s simply beer with green food coloring in it, easy to do at home. In my hometown of Chicago, they dye the Chicago River, which runs right through downtown, a bright green at nine in the morning and the color lasts several hours. I don’t like to think about how much food coloring that takes! But sure ‘n it’s a lovely sight.

An Irish proverb:

There are only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish,
And those who wish they were.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A retro dinner and a twist on an old recipe

 

tuna casserole

A few years ago, a small group of friends gathered on my front porch for a retro dinner. On the menu: onion soup dip, tuna casserole, and that orange Jell-O with shredded carrots and pineapple that everyone’s mom made in the 1960s. I can’t remember what we had for dessert, but I do remember the guy who had apparently never had onion soup dip before and asked his wife, most seriously, if she could get the recipe. With a grin, she said she thought she could manage it. We also learned that if you make that dip with fat-free sour cream, it’s abominable.

But in advance of dinner, one friend said she seriously considered whether or not she could eat tuna/noodle casserole. Apparently, she had bad memories from childhood. And that’s still true today—folks either love it or hate it. None of my family will touch it, but Christian has a good friend who is itching to come from Dallas for supper, so I’ll make him tuna casserole. And my reluctant friend? She liked it.

The casserole touches on a second culinary problem—do you cook with canned soups or not. Many cooks are purists who claim they would never, ever patronize the Campbell company; others use those soups in everything. I am somewhere in the middle, pretty much a from-scratch cook but with several tried-and-true recipes that call for canned soup. Sometimes I find I get in trouble when I try to substitute for the canned—in fact, that happened recently with tuna casserole. So here’s my recipe, a twist on traditional tuna but not too proud to use cream of mushroom soup:

Tuna casserole

1 c. white wine

Assorted dried herbs—thyme, parsley, oregano, summer savory, tarragon, etc. (avoid Mexican spices like cumin); just throw the spices into the wine

1 small onion, chopped, or three or four green onions

½ c. celery, diced fine

2 Tbsp. butter

1 can cream of mushroom soup

1 7½-oz. can water-packed tuna, drained

1 c. carb filler of choice, cooked—noodles or rice

½ c. green peas

1 small can French’s fried onion rings

Boil wine with herbs until the herbs turn black (about five minutes). Remove from heat.

Meanwhile sauté onion and celery in butter. Add to wine, along with soup. Add tuna, drained, or 1 cup diced chicken or turkey, the carb filler, and green peas for color. If there’s not enough liquid for your solid ingredients, add more wine. You can also vary the amount of meat and noodles or rice to suit your taste. Put into casserole dish and top with canned fried onion rings.

The size casserole dish you use will depend on how big you make your casserole, but it’s best to have a shallow dish so that more of the casserole gets fried-onion topping. Also if you’re using a toaster oven, as I do, you want to keep those onions as far from the top heating element as possible, because they burn easily. Maybe put them on for the last ten minutes or so. Bake at 350° until bubbly and onions are brown.

Here's a quickie that I do with tuna when I don’t want to make a casserole for just me—I fix creamed tuna (it makes Jordan run from the room screaming). Amounts here are approximate. Put a hunk of butter (2 Tbsp?) in skillet; sauté onions and celery; sprinkle with flour (1-2 Tbsp?).

Add liquid, a bit at a time, to make a smooth white sauce—you can use milk, but I prefer chicken broth (and you could use cream of mushroom soup and dilute a bit with wine or broth). Add a glug of white wine. Stir in drained, flaked tuna and green peas. At this point, you can call it done, or you can add cheese. Grated cheddar is good—stir it in and let it melt and get cheesy. If you want to top creamed tuna with Parmesan, put it on toast and run the whole thing under the broiler until you get a nice brown topping.

Serve over rye toast or, if you want to get fancy, in puff pastry shells. Enjoy and imagine yourself back in the sixties. Perhaps it takes people of a certain age to appreciate these recipes.

Another week of bare grocery shelves—and a pantry recipe

 

Cheesy chicken casserole--
Tastes even better than it looks.

This week has been like the beginning of the pandemic lockdown all over again—bare grocery shelves. Jordan reported several items she couldn’t get, over and above toilet paper—like all the bread shelves were empty, and of all things, she couldn’t find the frozen hash browns we wanted for a casserole.

I have to eat a little bit of crow here. When pandemic started, Jordan loaded us up with staples—the cabinets in my kitchen, which are limited in space anyway, are filled with cans of cream of mushroom soup, tomatoes, beans—one whole shelf of beans! We have enough rice for Coxie’s Army, and every time I use up the egg noodles and think I’ve freed up a little space, she buys more egg noodles. Crackers anyone? We have your pleasure—Wheat Thins, Ritz, saltines, rice crackers. And the good canned tuna and salmon from an Oregon cannery—we could eat fish daily for a month and not run out. I do admit the latter is my fault, and I’m mostly the one that eats it.

On Sundays, we try to do a special “Sunday dinner,” but last weekend, like most folks, we were about out of anything fresh, and Jordan was reluctant to go to the grocery. She announced we would have something out of the cupboard and the freezer. So I plowed through the appalling collection of recipes I intend to try some day and found a casserole of chicken, refried beans, and cheese. Here’s what we did:

Cheesy Chicken Casserole

1 32 oz. can refried beans (we used refried black, believing, rightly or wrongly, that they are a bit more healthy)

1 can Rotel, flavor of your choice – recipe called for original, but I like lime with cilantro (and to think all my years as a Midwesterner I never heard of Rotel!)

½ onion, diced

12 oz. Velveeta, cubed

4 c. shredded, cooked chicken

1 cup corn, cooked and drained

½ c. cilantro, chopped

½ c. cheddar cheese, grated

Optional garnishes: chopped green onion tops, pico de gallo, maybe even corn chips

Directions:

Use a 9x13 baking pan and grease lightly. Spread refried beans in the bottom.

In skillet, sauté onions in a tiny bit of olive oil; add Rotel and Velveeta, heat slowly, and stir to mix. When cheese is completely melted, add the chicken, corn, and cilantro. Stir well.

Pour the chicken mixture over the refried beans. Top with plenty of grated cheddar.

Bake at 350^o until cheese is melted and mixture is a bit bubbly—about 20-30 minutes. Let it sit for a couple of minutes to set up and then serve.

Our verdict? Absolutely delicious! One of the best Mexican-style casseroles ever—and also one of the easiest. I could eat this once a week. It definitely goes into the regular rotation of dishes in our household.

I bet there are hash browns on grocery shelves today, but Jordan’s wise planning paid off with this recipe, and, other than gentle teasing, I won’t mention overstocking again. If you stocked your cupboard, what things—besides toilet paper—did you think were essential?

The ubiquitous salmon croquette

 

Salmon croquettes

I am amused that on Facebook you occasionally see a picture of a platter of salmon croquettes, with the caption, “Does anyone still eat these?” I am here to shout, “Yes!” A childhood memory and still a favorite food today. Just made a small batch—one for supper and two for leftovers—they make the best sandwiches with mayo.

But I set off on an internet search for croquettes and found they are defined as small cylinders of food, with filling and a binder, breaded and fried. According to that exalted source, Wikipedia, croquettes are found in almost every cuisine throughout the world but each has its own twist. The filling may be salmon or other fish (tuna or mackerel), ham, chicken, potato (Martha Stewart has a recipe for those online), and the binder may be mashed potatoes, thick brown of bechamel sauce, wheat flour or wheat bread. Croquettes may be small nuggets or as long as your finger.

Forget all that. Here’s what my mom taught me: never use any filling except crushed saltines. They bind better than anything else. Mom did shape them like tiny logs, which I have found difficult to work with—you have to brown three or four sides. I shape them into a pattie like a hamburger. Mom also not only used the saltines to bind the mixture, but she rolled the shaped croquettes in more saltine crumbs. I find that difficult too—crumbs fly off in every direction. And croquettes coated in crumbs tend to burn more quickly. So I leave out that step.

A side note: Honey Boy salmon (pink) from the grocery is fine, but I order salmon by the case from a cannery in Oregon. It is a family business; they fish, not with nets, so no dolphins get entangled. In fact, dolphins often swim alongside next to their boat. And they cook the salmon only once, after it is canned (most canned fish is twice cooked). The results if a product with wonderful flavor. (They also sell tuna, smoked tuna, and smoked salmon.) I’m sure there are several such small fishing vessel companies in the Northwest.

Here’s what I do:

7 oz. can salmon

1 egg, beaten

1 green onion, chopped fine

Salt and pepper to daste

A pinch of dry mustard

A dash of Worcestershire

Fine cracker crumbs, enough to enable you to shape the croquette (you don’t want too mushy, but if you get it too dry, it won’t hold together).

Mix together and sauté gently (I prefer butter) until browned on both sides. After all, the fish is already cooked, and you are only heating it and getting that good crust. (I am getting so hungry writing about this!)

Serve with lemon wedges. (I like lots of lemon on them.)

Leftovers (who has leftovers?) freeze well.

I have made croquettes with tuna, ham, and chicken, in addition to salmon, but I prefer the salmon. A neighbor tells me her kids consider tuna croquettes traditional on Ash Wednesday and beg for them. She adds a bit of chopped tomato and sometimes cilantro. And that’s another good thing about croquettes—you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want. The only way to ruin them is to miss the consistency.

Don’t laugh, but a favorite meal for me, all these years later, is a salmon croquette (or sometimes two), sauteed spinach, and a can of diced tomatoes (Mom canned her own, but I’m not that much of a purist) mixed with butter and crushed saltines (just not crushed as finely as for the croquettes).

Never tried making croquettes? You really should. Haven’t made them in years? It’s time to put them back on your rotating menu.

 

A good country cook

 

When my children were little, we spent many a happy weekend—and sometimes a week at a time—at a guest ranch near Ben Wheeler, Texas owned by good friends. Charles Ogilvie taught radiology at the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, and his wife, Reva, ran the B&B and did all the cooking. They had several guest cabins on the property, although the children were dismayed to learn that other people stayed in “our” cabin and that it wasn’t really ours. There was a stocked small lake, with paddleboats, where my boys loved to fish so much that they would get up at dawn. We hiked Charles’ nature trails, watched the beavers transform a pond, petted the horse, sometimes burros, and once a doomed Longhorn steer, went to town on Saturday nights for catfish, and watched corny movies in the conference center they had built. The kids thought it was the best place in the world.

While the children fished and dabbled their toes in the water at the small beach area, Reva and I cooked. She was a great, down-home cook, a Missouri farm girl transplanted to Texas. We had huge feasts on the screened-in front porch of their house, looking over the lake at twilight. It’s about as close to heaven as I’ve come.

Charles leased his pastures, since he couldn’t care for livestock during the week, but he often kept one feeder calf in a pen not far from the house. One particular calf, however, was so adept at escaping that he was named Houdini. The kids loved him and always stopped to pet him on the way from the main house to our cabin (a good half-mile walk that included making your way across two cattle guards). One night we had beef for dinner—I don’t remember what cut or how it was cooked—and Charles asked, “How do you like the meat, kids?” They all chorused that it was great. With a grin, Charles said, “You’re eating Houdini.” Nobody ate much after that.

Here are some of Reva’s recipes that still use often. A note I feel compelled to add: I do not like bell peppers, especially green, and they don’t like me. I never use them—except to make Reva’s good beans, and then I slice the half pepper in pieces big enough that I can pick them out. Somehow the beans wouldn’t be the same without that pepper.

 

Aunt Reva’s good beans

1 3-lb.-4-oz. can Ranch Style beans

1 28-oz. can diced tomatoes (or two 14-oz. cans)

1 onion, chopped

½ green pepper, seeded and diced

Drain beans, but do not rinse. Put into crockpot along with other ingredients and simmer all day if you have to. (You can probably get by with less, but it’s nice to let them thicken up.)

 

Aunt Reva’s chili relleños

2 4-oz. cans whole green chilies

½ lb. sharp cheddar (or as much as you want to use)

5 eggs

¼ c. milk

Grease and butter a pie pan. Spread chilies in a single layer on the pan. Cover with grated cheese. Mix eggs and milk and pour over cheese and chilies. Bake at 325° for 30 minutes or until eggs have set. Great, easy breakfast.

 

Aunt Reva’s asparagus

2 c. asparagus (The recipe called for canned, but I use one bunch of fresh, trimmed and lightly cooked.)

1 c. sour cream

¼ c. mayonnaise

2 Tbsp. lemon juice

Buttered breadcrumbs

This actually doesn’t come with directions, but Reva used to lay the asparagus, fan-shaped, in a pie plate. For easier serving, I put it in single layer in a small rectangular baking dish. Mix sour cream, mayonnaise, and lemon juice and pour over asparagus. Top with breadcrumbs and bake until topping is brown, and dish is heated through.

Reva and Charles are long gone, and the kids and I treasure these memories. We also treasure the recipes. Nothing like learning from a good country cook.

With this column, I hope to get back to posting my “Gourmet on a Hot Plate” blog every Thursday. Happy cooking, folks.