M. not being much of a fish eater, I have try to take advantage of her absence to experiment with fish dishes in the hope that once I perfect them, I can get her to eat them.
Tonight she’s out at the West Side Lounge with the ladies, and I’m making brook trout steamed with ginger, scallions, red peppers, and shiitake mushrooms. I made two sauces: one a sort of dipping sauce made of local cider vinegar, ginger, hot peppers, and soy sauce, and the other a thicker Chinese-black-bean-paste style sauce: garlic, Chinese black bean paste, sriracha, hot peppers, sesame oil, olive oil, and miso to sweeten and thicken.
I plated it all Iron-Chef style.
The faults are as follows:
- Steaming robbed the peppers and scallions of their color; I should have sauteed the peppers separately, and reserved more of the green part of the scallions as a garnish.
- It didn’t need two sauces. The thicker sauce is probably the one to keep. It would have been improved by using about a cup of white wine or sake, and by remembering to sautee the garlic before adding everything else.
- Trout is probably not the best fish for this. Flounder or tilapia might be safer; cod, skate, or grouper might be more interesting.
Secretly Ironic 