I love quail. Especially the semi-boneless variety, since my fine-detail butchering skills wouldn’t do anywhere near this good a job without mangling a whole lot of cute little birds. And they defrost really fast in a bowl of tepid water, making a four-pack an excellent choice to grab from the freezer on an evening when time is fleeting. Once mostly thawed, I put the quail in a container full of goat whey to which I…
Month: June 2010
The weather lately has been amazing–hot, sunny, and alternating between oppressively humid and perfect. Last night we finally got the rain we’ve been needing, making this year so far the polar opposite of last “summer.” Besides the vegetable garden, which is doing well, I’ve been doing some simple landscaping with fruit-bearing plants to establish low-maintenance, high-yield beds that will provide us with lots of food in years to come. The marginal strips around the edges of our almost acre are pretty scruffy, and inhabited by some pretty scrappy and tenacious weeds. Previous attempts to dig them out and plant have failed, except with big things like lilacs or aggressive things like day lilies. So this time around, for fruit and flower beds alike, I’m just sheet-mulching.
The blackberries going in.
So herewith day three of our ocean-derived sustenance. It’s telling–and extremely wonderful–that the scallops we received on Wednesday, cooked tonight, were sweeter and fresher tasting than anything we’ve ever bought from a store. Anybody who reads this and happens to live in the Hudson Valley would be well-advised to seek out the Fishmonger and get themselves the royal hookup. It honest and for true does not get much better than this unless you’re a deep-sea angler. I cut these circles out of square wonton wrappers with a jar and a knife because I couldn’t find my biscuit cutter.
With a pornucopia of freshest seafood in the fridge, dinner this evening was pretty easy. That’s not to say that I didn’t make an unholy mess of the kitchen, of course, because that is the manner in which I roll. But the actual food was pretty easy. To start, because the family was deep into “My Side of the Mountain” (my absolute favorite book when I was about 7 or 8), a couple of quick salmon hand rolls for the cook.
I had a pretty interesting meeting and interview today with the subject of my next article, and Jen (who was driving) kindly agreed to make a detour on the way home so we could pick up my fish order. It’s great that the fish is back, and we took excellent advantage of its return: wild salmon, scallops, and–most interestingly, because of a long hiatus–shrimp. We haven’t bought shrimp for a long time, because they’re mostly farmed in horribly destructive ways or wild-caught in horribly destructive ways. These, from Laughing Bird in Belize, are raised in inland ponds with filtered seawater and vegetarian feed. The company has received approval from the World Wildlife Fund.
What do you do when “burgers” is the request for dinner and there’s no ground beef in the house? Visit the chest freezer, for starters, to grab a bag of local, grass-fed stew beef. Then, because it’s so lean, a goodly portion of homemade prosciutto fat, and because a custom grind clamors to be bespoke, a handful of herbs (lime thyme, chives, oregano) and a clove of garlic. The result (plus a pinch of salt…