Monday, May 21, 2012

Jammin Salmon

Want to cook a whole fish?  Here is how we did it.

Call the fish market and order your fish cleaned, scaled, and deboned.  Ask them to leave the head and tail on. We used salmon (about 6lbs).

1. Soak two cedar planks in water.  Do this minimally 30 minutes before you want to cook.

2. Open up your salmon and add:
-1 thinly sliced white onion
-1 thinly sliced lemon
-1 cup of fennel fronds
-sea salt and fresh ground pepper
-fennel butter (2 sticks of softened butter combined in a food processor with fennel fronds, honey,a little orange juice, sea salt and pepper).  Make up your own proportions.  Taste it, see if you like it. Put it back in the fridge and let it cool down again.

3. Close the fish and tie it.  Use butcher string and tie it every three inches. 

4. Heat a grill to medium.  Place the cedar planks on the grill. If you can turn off the burner directly under the planks, do so. Place the fish on the planks.  

5. Flip the fish after 20 minutes.  Then cook the fish for about 20-30 minutes, or until the center temperature is 135 degrees.

6. Remove the fish from the grill (don't let the head come off, like we did), cut off the string, and serve.





Monday, May 7, 2012

Holy Guacamole

It's rib night.  I assume you have already read that post from a few months back.  We needed a great appetizer to go with the ribs.  Guacamole is an obvious choice.  Guacamole has to be made fresh. Store bought guacamole is gross.

A few notes:

Picking out ripe avocados is critical to guacamole success.  They need to give some when you squeeze them, but not be mushy.  It's a fine line, and takes some practice.  If you can't find ripe avocados, just make something else.  Unripe avocados just wont work at all.

Guacamole starts turning brown after about 30 minutes, if left uncovered.  Leaving the pit in the guac does nothing.  You can drizzle lime juice on top and refrigerate it, and that will help a little bit, but really what needs to happen is oxygen must be kept off the guac.  Use plastic wrap and cover the guac by placing the plastic on top, so no air interacts with your appetizer.

.5 medium white onion diced
2 Serrano peppers diced (for hot guac use both peppers and include the seeds, for medium use both peppers and remove the seeds, for even less hot use one Serrano and remove the seeds)
1-2 tablespoons of kosher salt
.5 bunch of diced fresh cilantro

Combine these four ingredients.  You can muddle them, use a food processor, or finely dice them together.

now add:

meat of 5 avocados
juice of three limes
1 health splash of olive oil
fresh ground pepper

fold all this together (I like to leave it chunky)

check out the video: