Steve Irwin's Revenge

Looks horrible, doesn't it? But looks can be deceiving.

What is it? Skate. Every now and then, my fish monger has skate wings. Yes, they look pre-historic, but they also always look very fresh. They remind me of the Croc Hunter, Steve Irwin, even though I know it was a different devil-like underwater flyer that killed him.

"He's a beauty, eh?"


Several weeks ago, I put aside any concern about appearance and decided to give skate a try. Maybe I'd avenge Steve by eating the evolutionary cousin of the fish that sent him to the great croc hunt in the sky.

The store cleaned the fish for me, removing the cartilage and leaving four long fillets. Even though the fillets were relatively thin, they were firm. Instead of flakes, the flesh consisted of lines up and down the length of the wing.

Different. I decided on a simple saute. I melted about a tablespoon of butter with a tablespoon of olive oil over a medium heat. After salting and peppering the wings, I dusted them in flour and put them in the pre-heated pan.

The fillets cooked well, but curled at the edges. On my second cooking, I laid a pot lid on the top to force the flesh into the hot butter and oil. This worked well, although it took off a little of the flour.

After about five minutes, I flipped the fillets. After another five minutes, I checked and the meat was still underdone, the surface a little too soft. Concerned, they would fall apart, I carefully flipped them again, but they held together well. In a couple of minutes, the flour browned and I had a really nice crust. I turned a final time, seared a crust on the last side and served.

I've done this recipe twice and found that you really do need to turn the fillets twice. Don't worry. They stay together as long as you're careful.

The taste: outstanding. The flesh was firm, but tender with a unique taste. The first time I made them, I laid out lemon, but my wife and I quickly concluded it was unnecessary. Salt, pepper, flour, plus a little butter and olive oil was all the skate needed.

One caution. Be careful not to overcook. The second time I made the fillets, they came out slightly overcooked and a little stringy, although still delicious.

A final note. My fish guy gave me too much so I froze some. It froze beautifully, losing virtually none of its taste and texture after a week-plus the freezer.

Get Cracking

How many times has this happened to you? You have an egg. You crack it on the lip of the bowl, piercing the yoke and/or shell bits tumble into the bowl with the egg. What's more annoying than fishing tiny shards out of slippery egg white or having to throw out an egg you planned to separate because of a punctured yoke?

Anthony Bourdain has the solution. His "No Reservations" show this week was all about technique. He and his famous and not-so-famous guests demonstrated basic techniques for everything from roasted chicken to spaghetti to . . . cracking an egg.

How to avoid the egg-tastrophe that I described above? Easy, says Jacques Pepin. Crack the egg on a flat surface, the counter for example, not the bowl lip. You don't break the yoke. And because your egg is away from the bowl, shell fragments won't fall in.

I tried this last night while making bread pudding. It worked brilliantly. The shells came apart easily and there was no struggle to keep pieces out of the mixture.

Yes, there is a better way to crack an egg. Who knew?

Net Neturality in Danger

Like this blog and the idea that anyone can start one that everyone can view for free? Enjoy surfing the net without restriction? Love free and easy access for just $20 a month?

Get ready to kiss it all good bye -- if you don't act.

The Internet as we know it depends on "net neutrality," the FCC policy that requires Internet providers to treat all content equally. They can't, for example, compel YouTube to pay them fees, make you pay for different levels of access to content or slow or block sites they don't like or aren't paying them.

Big media corporations hate net neutrality and want to destroy it so they can make you pay a lot more for Internet and force you to look at just their sites or ones that pay them. Unfortunately, Comcast yesterday won a catastrophic ruling from a federal appeals court significantly curbing the FCC's authority to enforce net neutrality.

Passivity has become a core American characteristic in the last two decades. Americans just stood aside as the tax code was tilted toward the rich, regulations that protected them were gutted and they were, at the very least, misled into a disastrous war. Indeed, passivity is what Fox News, for all its Sturm and Drang, seeks to breed: all that stuff about the country going to hell, Iraq being a disaster, Bush letting New Orleans drown, the need for health care and other reform? It's all lies. So you don't have to do anything. Just be passive.

We can't be passive on this one. If we are, we'll lose one of the few things that still works for ordinary people in this country, that allows for free speech and expression, that is controlled and shaped by individuals instead of huge, rapacious corporations. So don't sit on your hands. Write your federal and state representatives and the White House, do everything you can to save net neutrality.

Otherwise this blog and millions of others will go dark, destroyed by the same greedheads who have done so much damage to our country in the last 20 years.

Counting Calories

One part of the recently passed health care bill that's getting a lot of attention is the requirement that chain restaurants prominently list their food's calorie content. This article quotes a representative of the ueber-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute decrying the requirement as nanny state-ism run amok. People should take responsibility for themselves, he says.

I am not totally without sympathy for that argument. I take a very dim view, for example, of McDonald's-made-me-fat lawsuits.

But that attitude fails to recognize the monumental influence, power and sophistication of modern marketing. McDonald's advertising budget is bigger than the GDP of many small nations. What chance does the individual consumer have against that?

Personal freedom means making your own decisions. That requires information. But if all the information you have is spin and lies from food companies, can you really exercise free choice? You think you are making a personal choice, but actually you are being manipulated by giant corporations seeking to sell you crap.

When cutting edge advertising was putting a Burma Shave sign on every roadside barn in America, you could make the libertarian argument that everyone should be responsible for themselves. But that ad did not seek to manipulate, to twist reality, as modern advertising does. It just says "Burma Shave."America's eating habits, which are largely shaped by marketing and advertising, are catastrophic. The only way to improve them is to even the playing field by countering all the misinformation, and the only entity that can do that is government.

So, I support listing calories on menus. Doing so increases, not decreases, freedom by providing diners with the information they need to decide what they want to eat -- not what Big Food wants them to eat.

Paprika Chicken and Oven Rice

We had friends over for dinner this weekend, and I prepared two of our old standbys, recipes I've been making since 1998 when I first read them in the New York Times Magazine: paprika chicken and oven rice.

In those days, there was much less food writing in the Times. The recipe at the back of the magazine was the paper's culinary cat's meow.

Today, the magazine recipes are often impossibly eccentric, requiring unusual, esoteric equipment and ingredients (12 spice powder and a milk press? What the heck are those?). For practical cooking, the Wednesday food section is the star.

Back to the recipes. Both are easy and perfect for guests because the prep is done long before they arrive. so you can socialize while dinner cooks. In spite of the relatively large amount paprika ( a tablespoon), this dish is not spicy. I'm not sure why, but suspect that the sour cream absorbs much of the heat.

A couple of notes on the chicken rice. Olive oil works just as well as butter. And I find three cups of chicken stock overpowers the rice, as well as turning it an unappetizing nut brown. I use two cups of stock and a cup of water.

A wonderful dish, especially on a cold winter's night, that we never tire of. It also makes for great leftovers.

Crate Art

I recently discovered crate art, labels that growers affixed to produce boxes from the late 19th century until the 1960s. As distribution went nationwide, wholesalers and later the government needed to track the origin of fruits and vegetables. What started as a practical necessity turned into an art form, with intricate, colorful, eye-catching lithographs of perfect produce and perfectly fruited plains.

I love these labels because in contrast to most food marketing today, which almost always hawks highly processed products, they aim to make simple, unprocessed fruits and vegetables desirable, delectable, exotic, even sexy.

Crate labels all but disappeared in the 1960s as growers moved from crates to boxes and more practical if less aesthetically pleasing methods of tracking produce developed.

Here and here are websites that sell antique produce labels. Take a browse. They are fascinating. Some examples:



I have a weakness for labels from Redlands, California because my great grandparents lived there:


Inevitably, America's history of racism is reflected in label art, ranging from mildly politically incorrect . . .


to outright racist.

The Year of Eating Dangerously

This blog is getting a lot of attention in the wake of Jamie Oliver's horrifying window into school lunches. This teacher is eating the lunches at her school for a year complete with gut-wrenching photos. Blech! If this doesn't make you demand some culinary perestroika , I don't what will.

I long ago gave up on school lunches. The food is horrifying. And disgustingly standardized. My part of Connecticut makes the best pizza in America, but the schools serve card board topped with ketchup probably baked six months before in Fargo, North Dakota, frozen and shipped nationwide.

I bake a batch of skinless chicken thighs every weekend, varying the recipes, and give my daughter one plus a salad and a container of pineapple rings. Here's a photo of this week's Asian-marinated chicken thighs:


Here's the recipe: Remove skins from five to six thighs. Whisk together one tablespoon each of soy sauce and Chinese cooking wine or sherry plus one teaspoon each of sugar and sesame oil. Marinate thighs for half an hour. Bake at 400 degrees F for 48 minutes (an odd time, but I've baked this many, many times and I find they come out perfectly).