comfort food

[cris]

This week's catch were Black Back flounders. I picked up four of them from the back of a truck in Harvard Square, brought them home, beheaded and gutted them, then cooked two of them in a steel pan with a thin layer of salt and a squeeze of lemon. silentq had signed us up for a CSF back in March. It was an interesting notion -- like farm shares

Comments

Lobsters

[anonymous]

Once in college, I decided to pith lobsters before cooking them, having read that that was a more humane death than boiling them to death.
I found a suitably long and pointy knife in the drawer of my then boyfriend's kitchen (I was living on campus still), put the knife at the point indicated in the Joy of Cooking illustration, and shoved-only to find that I suddenly had a violently twitching crustacean impaled on the tip of the knife- evidently I had not succeeded in cleanly severing its nerve cord.
It was pretty traumatic, and the second one was even worse.
From then on I decided I could just live with steaming them.

cleaning of seafood

[anonymous]

Flounder actually isn't so bad. What's annoying is porgy because they're particularly hard to scale. If you need more practice degutting fish, the best is butterfish (it's inexpensive and its flavor reminds me of cod), then move on to sardines.

You don't know Lovecraftian slime until you've cleaned a scallop, and then scallop guts seem to amplify in scent as they age in the garbage can. Fun!

-- Tina

-- Tina

Re: cleaning of seafood

[cris]

heh, yes, one of the oversights in setting up the fish share was getting our delivery on Tuesdays when our trash pickup is on Mondays.

We got a couple of porgies halfway through the share, and I wound up baking one in salt largely because it allowed us to skip the scaling step.