Savoring Saveur

Saveur magazine is not one of my regulars. I’ve picked it up a few times on the newsstand; my go-to cheesecake recipe is actually from Saveur. But when “savoring a world of authentic cuisine”, as the magazine’s tagline asks its readers to do, involves buying new equipment or venturing to Chinatown or Little India for ingredients (excursions I do enjoy … but not ones that generally work for me on a random Friday afternoon), I tend to do my savoring in restaurants. Saveur recipes are frequently more demanding than I, alas, can handle most days.

All that said, I picked up the January/February issue last week and really enjoyed it. It was a special edition – “The Saveur 100 Home Cook Edition”. The issue features an interesting list of 100 dishes, extraordinary home cooks, cookbooks, food markets, and essential pots and pans.

I cornered a few pages and prepared the Whole Roasted Red Snapper Friday night (except I used striped bass since buying a three-pound red snapper for two and a half people didn’t make a lot of sense). As you can see in the not-perfectly-centered photo above, you nestle a whole fish inside an aluminum foil packet with clams, kielbasa, fennel, fingerling potatoes, lemons, and herbs. The recipe also calls for olives, which I forgot to buy, so I subbed in briny capers. You sprinkle the mélange with salt, pepper, and white wine and roast it in the oven for about 35 minutes. I slit open the foil packet and brought the whole thing to the table on a large dish.

And we just dug in. We ate and ate and ate until there really wasn’t a whole lot left. Rosa loved the kielbasa and asked for more clams. For me, the fennel and the fish were the star. Dave was pretty happy with all of it. The ingredients retained their individual flavors, but everything had an aromatic, mellow tenderness from being cooked together in the moist environment of the aluminum packet.

It was also a very interactive dish since throughout we’d put a few nibbles on our plates and then reach back in for more. Probably not the most sanitary meal, but if you’re with family or close friends, I highly recommend it.

Click here for the recipe.

Fish = Cake

Fish is confusing. Many nutritionists and public health advocates call it one of the best foods you can eat to promote good health. Many species are high in the famed omega-3 fatty acids, and almost all fish is high in protein and low in calories. But… and of course there’s a but…

Many species are overfished, leaving our oceans depleted. Some species that are farmed are done so in a way that’s terrible for the environment and for your health (farmed Atlantic salmon for example). Then there’s the whole mercury issue, which I know has scared some people off of fish entirely.

Personally, I err on the side of eating more fish. It’s been the basis of healthy diets for millennia AND I always feel so darn virtuous after I’ve eaten it. Like I could easily justify a piece of cake for dessert!

But, I try to choose my fish responsibly, so the seafood is good for my family’s health and the environment’s health. My favorite way to do this is to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch site. You can browse fish by type, and the site will fill you in on health and environmental concerns. And, if that’s too much work for you you can simply look at Seafood Watch’s clear-cut recommendations: “Best Choice”, “Good Alternative”, and “Avoid”.

The site also shares some astonishing fish facts. Did you know that orange roughy live up to 100 years or more? And, even more amazingly, the fish is sometimes called a “slimehead”? Yummm. But, don’t worry about eating slimehead, because according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, orange roughy is a fish to AVOID.

Photo courtesy of Colin Purrington.