Farmed or Wild: I'll Walk On the Wlld Side

First I'd better tell you that I grew up eating really fresh fish, fish that someone caught hours before we ate it.  My experience with trout was that I would go fishing in the Colorado Rockies with my parents, who fished with flies.  They would catch rainbows or German Browns, and put them into a grass-lined creel,  (the old-fashioned wicker kind) .  In late afternoon we would hike back to the cabin or wherever we were staying, and my dad would whack the fish on the head, clean them and start a fire.  I think he lit wood over some rocks.  When the fire was hot, he would heat a large black cast iron skillet over the fire, and then dip the fish into a mixture of flour and corn meal.  Some sort of fat was put into the skillet, maybe lard or bacon grease, maybe Spry or Crisco, and the fish would be fried up for dinner. 
This nearly ruined me forever for eating "restuarant" fish, but that's another story.  The important thing here is the fish were fresh and caught in the wild.  They tasted beyond fabulous.  You can't imagine how good they tasted.

We lived in Chicago for many years, and some restaurants had a Friday night fish fry, which was usually acceptable,  but for serious seafood,  you had to eat at the Cape Cod Room at the Drake Hotel and damn, the fish was wonderful but the prices were high. 

When we moved to Boston, we discovered Legal Sea Food, in fact I worked above their Kendal Square location for many years.  Always good fish.  We also bought it from Cap'n Marden in Wellesley to cook at home and that was also tasty, too.  I like seafood plain, like my Dad cooked the trout. Not gussied up with fruit or dairy products or Chinese spices or anything weird.  Preferably not served over pasta.  Fried potatoes or French fries, yes; coleslaw, yes. 

Now we come to the crux of the matter, that being salmon.  There are those who will tell you they can't tell the difference between farmed and wild salmon and my answer to that is that they have ruined their palates with bad food, processed food, overly sweet food and junk food and cheap Chardonnay.  Farmed salmon is sort of mushy, full of dye, and has an off-taste all it's own.  Wild salmon is beautiful, naturally red and tastes fresh and wonderful, and clean, just like a fish should taste.  We only ate wild salmon three times this summer because it cost a fortune, but boy, was it good. We grilled it with nothing but salt, pepper and olive oil.

I was horrified and appalled when Legal Seafood at the Harborside had farmed salmon on the menu.  "It's from Norway," said the server.  "It's good."  Well, it still had that "down on the farm" flavor and I didn't like it.  So I'm a salmon snob.  So be it.  

Farmed salmon is not as good as fresh.  I wouldn't eat anything full of dyes and antibiotics (sea lice, anyone?) for health.  Nope.  Better just scarf down a fish oil

capsule everyday.

Otherwise, go for a walk on the wild side. 

Irene Cometh and Beantown Clobbered By Motown

The rain woke me at 6:30 a.m.  Not my usual Sunday wake-up time.  No wind yet.   Decided to get up and make the pesto sauce in the blender before the power went out.  Nice fresh basil picked yesterday.  You never know how the garden will survive a storm.  My flowers are just at their peak again.  Sigh.  All the heavy pots are crowded together in a protected spot.

Decided to take a shower while I could still see.  Too weird to shower in the dark.  Cats seemed calm.  Reading New York Times Book Review to find Kindle books for an upcoming trip.  Looked at "combined" best seller list and saw nothing, and didn't even find anything on the hard cover best seller list.  Maybe I will just read what Obama did.  Looked like a good list in spite of the sniping.  So far as I know, almost off the recent presidents have liked mysteries and crime stories.

Thought about cleaning a few leaves and crud out of the storm drain, but that is probably a lost cause.  Still considering.  Last night's Boston baseball was too tedious with all the rain delays in the double headers.  The Sox did well.  Not so with the Patriots.  What happened there?  Beantown clobbered by Motown. 

Now I am running the dishwasher to get the last dishes.  Laundry done.  Food prepared.  By the way I make the pesto for a chicken pesto dish.  It's just bite-sized pieces of white meat chicken dressed with Pesto Genovese.   My recipe is from the old Time-Life Cooking of Italy series.   Best Pesto Ever!  In addition, we're having the rest of the orzo salad, a Mediterranean salad that was delicious.  I first ate the chicken pesto at Bertucci's, a Boston restaurant chain that started in Kendall Square and always had the best food.  It was part of an antipasto platter.  I don't think they have the dish anymore.  It is alas, gone, like the stuffed clams and the mussels au gratin at Legal Seafood.  So chez Grapeshot we have delicious foods that require absolutely no prep tonight.  And wine.  Leftover peasant plum tart for dessert.  Lots of Sunday papers to read and the necessary light to read by.  Plenty of cat food.  Yes, the cats must eat. 

The serious part of the storm is to get here in a few hours.  We're ready, but of course, nature can play some nasty tricks.  Very nasty.  Stay safe.

Out and About in the City

Yesterday we were at an art auction in downtown Boston, and as usual, the trip had an educational aspect, but not in the ways one would anticipate.

Hint: if you like to avoid eating with small children or if you have small children and would like to go out to eat, Legal Seafood in the Park Plaza neighborhood on a rainy Friday is just the ticket. I ate the spicy fish and chips (Yowza!) and S.O. had gumbo. Drank a glass of Fernaccia from Tuscany that hit the spot.

Fashion. Black is the new black. You can mix black and brown. Who knew? A black top and slacks with a tan safari type jacket is the cat's meow.

Jeans go with everything, especially with long legs. Ballet flats good. Long blond hair always good, the less styled the better. Boston didn't look so unstylish yesterday, but maybe because I am so friggin' out of it. My navy blazer and tan slacks looked so . . . yesterday, so suburban, so matronly.

If you have a new house and need good art on the walls--we are NOT talking Kincaid here, hie yourself to one of the Skinner auctions and pick up some nice paintings under $400.00. Hard to believe, when some of the shopping center art in its yuckky awfulness goes for thousands. Portraits are especially a good bargain. Tell someone it's your great aunt.

Weird man on the subway, asking for spare change. Usually someone weird on the subway, but that's the not-so-discreet charm of the city.

Get out and about. Away from the TV. You didn't want to hear about Sarah Palin's trip to Ireland anyhow. The plane refueled. Hey, I saw the coast of Vietnam once. Does that count?
O.K. enough.

Grapeshot

Life, As Usual, Imitates Art

Yesterday we were showing an out-of-town friend the Stata Center on the MIT campus (designed by Gehry). She was very excited as we circled the building, moving from one interesting view to another. Then apropos of the mention of a redevelopment of part of the Brooklyn waterfront, she said that some people hate change and they are probably the most sensible ones.

In Festival Madness, I have a scene between the main character and an MIT professor emeritis, walking around the Gehry building and he is talking about change and how even information technology people may hate change.

One of those really weird moments.

Some other weird moments this week. In Borders, looking for a birthday present for said friend. She is an historian of sorts, European History, and the new book about the conference in Vienna (1816?) looked like fun. S.O. were looking at the book, trying to make a decision, when a very old gentlemen approached with what I took to be his verging on elderly son. Old man stared at the title, "Vienna, " and announced, "I was born there." I made some inane but friendly remark about only having been there once, and he said, "they killed everyone," and walked away. I assumed "they" were, of course, the Nazis, and his memories were sad to say the least. We bought the book.

Big checkout line, and in the line was a mother, a son (maybe three years old) in a stroller, and an older daughter, perhaps nine or ten. Kid in stroller was screaming at the top of his lungs, "I want that game, I want that game." Over and over ad nauseum. Obviously, he wasn't going to get "that game," and he wasn't going to shut up. A sensible woman would have told the little girl to take him outside and walk the stroller back and forth until she had checked out, thereby sparing the customers the assault on ears and sensibilities.

My friend remarked, "she should have slapped him on the head," but I said, "my god, they would arrest you for that nowadays. " Finally another clerk appeared and led the back of the line to another register where the screaming was less intrusive. The clerk appeared to think a slap on the side of the head might be a good thing, too. By then, pretty much everyone did.

Kid was still yelling and now kicking when taken out of the stroller and put in the car seat. He didn't get "that game." My god, the racket. Made a good case for birth control. Honestly. So it went at Borders.

Yesterday, a stroll through two museums, Harvard Square and a fitting end of the day dinner at Legal Seafood.

A Woman Walks Into a Bar

This evening I was in Kendall Square, where I worked for 12 years, my old stomping grounds as it were. Of course everything changes. The firehouse is now a boutique hotel. There are fancy bus stop shelters, and a new Au Bon Pain. But other things look like they always did, at after the subway stop and the hotel were completed and the holes in the ground were gone.

Legal Seafood is still there, but the fish counter is long departed, and even the restaurant has been totally remodeled. I didn't see the take-out window, but maybe it's there. Legal Seafood was the first place ever where I felt comfortable sitting at the bar as a woman alone. I worked upstairs in an office and it was the kind of job where you put in a lot of hours after working hours, so I would bop down to Legal, have a glass of wine and an appetizer at the bar, and go back to work.

In the old days, I had a small mussels au gratin. The cheese and the garlic and the buttered crumbs offset the wine to a wonderful degree. At one point they changed the recipe--and the butter and the cheese were greatly reduced and it never tasted right after that.

I switched to stuffed clams which were ultra-delicious and arrived on a bed of salt and then they disappeared from the menu, too. Like I was the appetizer kiss of death. Who knew?

The last item I settled on was the shrimp wontons, fried of course. Always delicous. They too disappeared for a short time but are back again with a small seaweed salad. Yum! Just right for a small repast with a glass of crisp white wine and one of the delicious hard rolls with melty butter. It can't get much better than that.

The couple next to me had some kind of fish cake concoction, seaweed salad and brown rice. It looked like health food, and they weren't drinking, either. Rather pasty looking pair. Well, what can you expect? Naturally they hadn't touched their butter.

If you think I make snap value judgements, you're right. I do.

The couple on the other side, yowza! She had bluefish with mashed potatoes and onion rings, the best of both worlds. He had lobster bisque and a humongous salad with frisee, pears, walnuts, blue cheese, pancetta, maybe. It looked so good. They were obviously not health food freaks, and they looked like more fun, too.

The event I went down for offered a small meal, it turned out. Wraps and water. I hate wraps! All that doughy tasteless mess. Yuck! Wraps and cheap greasy pizza should be barred from--well, from anyplace I have to eat.

The event was boring and I sneaked out early. Just in time to write my blog.

So the man will burn again on Saturday. The moon is so full and it would be wonderful to be on the playa tonight, listening to the techno beat and drinking and talking and making the scene. I've been reading a little Kerouac in prep. for the big anniversary on Wednesday. You are celebrating aren't you?

We're trekking to Lowell, MA to see the infamous scroll and to hear part of the reading of On the Road. Remember. The road is life.

When I lived in Houston and drove to Galveston on the Gulf-Tex Freeway, I felt one with the car, and the car was one with the road which was one with the earth which was one with the universe and there was this great interconnectedness, and then I would get to sleazy old Galveston and drive on the beach and eat flounder stuffed with shrimp and cruise by the bishop's palace and gape at the oleanders and the funky parts of town and before you left you always had to put a quarter in the little carwashes to get the salt off the car and sometimes the gulf was warm enough for swimming in March.

Grapeshot