Carroll and i alternate weeks cooking & shopping & cleaning up for dinners, the whole kitchen thing. Works fine: week on, i do it, and i enjoy it. week off, she does it, and i get to coast, which i like a lot too! Often, for my week, i work out a week’s menu which i post in the K, a) to remind me what i’m doing, and b) to let C know. Not this week, tho. I’m shopping, getting a bunch of stuff, then each day figuring out something for dinner.
MONDAY: baked halibut, new corn on the cob, tossed green salad. Simple, eh?
BTW, here’s how to bake halibut to perfection: Get halibut filet, ⅓ to ½ pound (½ lb is a lot) per person. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit. Rinse and dry the halibut, coat with olive oil, salt and pepper, pop it into a glass baking dish (pie pan etc). When oven is fully heated, bake for 20 minutes per inch of thickness of the halibut. That most often means 20 – 22 minutes, because halibut filets are usually not much over an inch in thickness before baking (they puff up a bit in the oven). if your filet were 2 inches thick (never happens), you would NOT bake it 40 minutes. The add-ons after the first inch are small and gradual.
As for the person who says, “Oh I like mine a little better done,” give ‘em the less thick half of the filet; there’s always a difference. (You can also do the whole thing at 375 instead of 350, to boost it. But do not, PLEASE, overcook it in response to that person’s fears. Halibut should be wonderfully moist and flakey, also white; at that point, it’s done right.)
So you’re wondering, does this work for all fish? Answer: most fish. Salmon wants less time in oven. It so easily gets overcooked and dry. Cut it back to, say, 18 minutes at most for an inch. It should be pink, moist, and flakey — not crumbly, for God’s sake!
TUESDAY (tonight): I got home at 5:45, so to eat by 6:30 I did a quick and yummy beef stir-fry.
First i set the table to get that out of the way, then got the rice ready to turn on. I carved off a chunk of tri-tip, maybe ½ – ⅔ pound, sliced it into pieces 1 – 2 inches long, ½ inch wide, ¼ inch thick, and set it aside.
At 6:00 I turned on heat for the rice water (once water boils and rice is added, it cooks 20 minutes, sits and breathes 5 minutes, and hangs out ready).
2 cloves garlic minced; 4 or 5 tiny yukon potatoes, ½ white onion, 10 or so green beans, ⅓ large red pepper, all of them cut up and ready to add. Heat 5 – 6 tablespoons olive oil on high. When it almost smokes, toss in the garlic, stir 15 seconds and add the other veggies. (You can hold back onions or red peppers and especially green beans for less cook time to your taste.) Stir fry enthusiastically. Add salt, pepper, ginger, a tad of ground cardamom seed for gravitas and, eventually, a thimble of sake for the steam and, oh yes, the taste. When near being cooked but not quite, remove all that and set aside.
Add oil again to the wok and, when hot, toss in the meat slices to brown, tossing frequently enough to let them know you care. Season with salt, ground cumin, that ground cardamom seed again, and cayenne (yes, cayenne: don’t be afraid!). When meat is happy, return veggies to wok, toss on a bit of tamari sauce, stir-toss for a mere instant, and you can thicken the brew with a teaspoon of corn starch and a dash of water mixed in – quickly, just a minute.
Serve immediately over rice. Goes extraordinarily well with a River Road Petit Syrah, a recent addition to that vintner’s list.
Oh yeah!
