Brazilian fish stew

There's many things I like about this recipe, starting with how good it tastes. I had a craving for a fish stew kind of thing and this recipe from the book The Brazilian Kitchen by Leticia Moreinos Schwartz popped up on a blog called Leite's Culinaria.

So here's a couple of great things to start with -- the boom in cookbooks that puts so many new, classy cookbooks on the market. And a blog like this one by David Leite, himself author of a cookbook called The New Portuguese Table. I'm not sure I'll buy either cookbook. I looked at Leite's at Politics & Prose and I'm doubtful we'll ever be fans enough of salt cod to make it worthwhile. As for the Brazilian book, I'd like to take a look at it before buying it.

But this recipe for a moqueca is really good. The key is a type of Brazilian palm oil called dendê. Its reddish-orange color lends an exotic warmth to the dish and undoubtedly some nuance of flavor. So where do you find this palm oil? The blog has a not-so-helpful link to Kalustyan's mail order. But I thought if any place here carries it, it would be A&H Gourmet and Seafood Market in Bethesda, because it is very Portuguese in nature. Sure enough, A&H had dendê oil, so I got a couple of other key ingredients while I was there -- monkfish and A&H's own homemade fish stock.

So this was another great thing about this recipe. It's nice to explore new sourcing for food and A&H proved itself to be a great resource.

The recipe itself calls for sea bass, but adds that you should experiment with different kinds of fish. When I asked the guy at the counter which of his choice of the day to take for a stew, monkfish was his first thought, and that suited me fine, because it's a fish I've always liked since I got to know it as lotte in France. The complete recipe can be found at the link above, but the short version is: you marinate the chunks of monkfish in dendê oil, olive oil, ginger, garlic, onion, scallions and cilantro for three hours. You then put the chunks in a casserole, sprinkle them with lemon juice, salt, pepper, and bake them in a 350-degree oven for 10 to 12 min. In the meantime, you sautee the other half of the ginger, garlic, onion, and scallions you chopped in more dendê oil, then put in some chopped green and yellow pepper and let soften, add fish stock and bring to a boil, add coconut milk and bring to a boil and then simmer till the fish comes out of the oven. You put the chunks in the sauce and simmer for a few minutes, then add chopped tomato and sliced palm heart and warm them up, sprinkle with more cilantro and serve four people.

The monkfish worked really well because it's firm and has a great texture for stew. I found the moqueca even a little better on the second day because the flavors had blended more together while the monkfish remained plenty fresh. It's a colorful, warming dish -- I would have put the photo here, but Leite has a whole section on permissions and copyrights, so you will have to look at it on his site at the link above. Instead, I've put the cover of the Brazilian cookbook, though the stew on the cover is a different one, because I don't think anyone gets upset about that.