Fish rule

I had a craving for fish so I went to The Fishery and ended up getting fish for both lunch and dinner. Just for myself, because Andrea doesn't eat anything that tastes "fishy," I got the Spanish mackerel fillet, which I don't see there all the time.

Mackerel is supposed to be especially good for Omega-3 and I've dabbled with the canned version. I was wondering if this skin-on fillet was going to be too fishy even for me.

I sprinkled a little salt and lemon juice on it, dredged with flour and shook of excess and fried it in some olive oil. It looked thicker in the skillet than it did in the store but it fried up quickly. It tasted really good, bursting with a freshness that made me feel I was right at the ocean. I served with just a green lettuce salad, using one of our splendid Italian olive oils and, in keeping with the Spanish theme, some sherry vinegar.

For dinner we had salmon, which Andrea does like. This time, the Scottish farm salmon looked better to me, so even though it was more expensive this is the one I got. We usually just get the regular farm salmon. The wild salmon is almost too lean for Andrea, but I find the domestic farm salmon pretty fatty. This was a good compromise, unctuous but full of flavor, and, again, very fresh. We served it with broccoli that was parboiled and sauteed in oil and garlic.

Fish are great when they are very fresh and The Fishery has never let us down on that score. The guy breaking down the fish was alone when I came in so he quickly finished scaling a couple of big fish while I waited. But this is one place I never mind waiting -- I could watch them work the fish as entertainment. One funny note: The broccoli I bought there, I noticed when I got home, had a Safeway band on it, so I don't know whether Safeway delivers them wholesale or they just go over to the store and buy retail for resell.

Stachowski's

A couple of reliable foodie friends separately recommended this Georgetown deli to us so we made the quick trip down the Parkway Sunday for a twofer -- sandwiches for lunch and a cold cut spread for the Oscars.

Everything they said is true. The handcrafted charcuterie looks great and everything we took home tasted great. While not quite a real butcher shop, it doesn't have the boutique-y air of the dreadful places in Alexandria. Somebody there knows something about charcuterie, though probably not the eager young assistant who helped us but who erred on the skimpy side when we ordered a slice of pate or a quarter-pound of soppressata -- will watch more closely next time.

The sandwiches are truly stupendous. Mine was packed with thick slices of hand-cut pastrami, warm and smokey and not too greasy, between slices of a dark, grainy bread from Bakery Lyon -- our new favorite bakery -- that was strong enough to bear the strain. It was way too much for one meal. The pickles were also delicious. Andrea got a turkey club that was equally packed with tons of turkey, layers of bacon and some fresh-looking avocado.

In addition to the two homemade items above, we got some very nicely sliced Serrano ham, that was a wonderful melt-in-your-mouth cured ham. Our haul from Stachowski's, combined with our cheese from Cowgirl Creamery made a great spread for watching the Oscars, washed down with our respective wines, a Spanish tempranillo for me and an Italian Gavi for Andrea.

Will definitely be back for sandwiches and samples of the other charcuterie products, and why not try the meat while I'm there, though one of our friends was not impressed with this side of the business. More to come.

Pork tenderloin with caramelized pears

This Epicurious recipe was a real home run -- simple and delicious. I had a couple of small tenderloins -- less than a pound -- from Blue Rooster, so made a half-recipe. The tenderloin gets cut into 1-in. medaillons, flattened and quickly sauteed. Served with the pears sauteed in butter and sugar and the sauce which is wonderful balance of shallots, butter and cream with a lift from pear eau-de-vie and a splash of pear nectar.

It makes a pretty plate. The tenderloin was very tender and tasty, the sauce divine and the sweet Anjou pears were a great foil. We served with roast broccoli that had some shredded assaggio cheese sprinkled over it and I drank a Nero d'Avola wine from Sicily (one of the wine pairings mentioned in Epicurious). A keeper.

Cashion's Eat Place

First time back in a long time, found the best feature to be the bar. Fun, comfortable, good drinks. I had the signature fig-infused, barrel-aged  Manhattan -- pretentious but a nice smooth drink. Dinner was fine, though service was erratic -- one of those waitstaff who is so chatty and eager to please that they spend way too much time talking to you and other diners instead of getting on with it. One of our party got the wrong dish and ended up eating dinner after the rest of us were practically finished.

The bread, outsourced to Bakery Lyon, was outstanding. Serving portions for the food were stingy -- the sampler of mezzes was evidently intended for one person, not be split at the table as we did. Thimble-sized servings. I had the pulled goat, which tasted good but was again on the meager side. Cheese plate typically had slices the size of a nickel.

Would not rush back for dinner but would sit at the bar.

Savory braised chicken with aromatics

This is the first recipe I've tried from Niloufer Ichiporia King's My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking, and it's a good reason to try more.

Parsi refers to the descendants of the Zoroastrian Persians who came to western India more than a millennium ago, settling in Guajarat and spreading out from there. Robert Kaplan talks about them in his book Monsoon, which was the first selection of my new book group. I had bought this cookbook some time ago, but was daunted as I am by most Indian cooking by the need to find garlic and ginger purrees. However, I discovered a jar of each in the pantry, purchased at some point at an Indian grocery store and forgotten about. I will probably get around to making my own some day but these store-bought versions seemed a good way to get started.

The recipe is simple and worked well for a weekday. This is one of those talky cookbooks -- which is fine -- but I almost missed her note that it is better to brown the chicken thighs separately because those we get in the U.S. are relatively fatty. Otherwise, they are browned in the skillet after you sizzle the cinnamon stick, 5 cloves, 3 cardamom pods and 3 dried red chiles in 3 Tbl of vegetable oil.

The dish is called khari marghi, and the variation that seemed most appealing to me was the pateta ma marghi, which adds potatoes to the simmering chicken. Also, in the case of fried potatoes, King suggests using coconut milk or milk as the braising liquid to make a good gravy. I had a can of coconut milk in the pantry, so I lengthened it with a bit of milk and added it to the skillet with the aromatics and browned chicken to simmer for 30 to 40 min.

For the fried potatoes, I found a nice technique at Simple Organized Living. I peeled and quartered the California Golds, dried them and then -- this was the nice innovation in this version -- put them in the microwave for 3 to 4 min. so that the interior would have a chance to pre-cook. Often recipes have you parboil the potatoes to get this result, but this was an easy alternative. Then I fried them in a good amount of oil, drained them and added them to the braise about 15 min. before the end.

My execution was not flawless and I had problems here and there with the seasoning, but that was easily fixed and it made for a very nice dinner. I had a salad and an Umbrian Merlot to go along.

Braised pork belly with glazed turnips

Another easy Molly Stevens recipe. I got the pork belly from Blue Rooster farm at the Sheridan Farmer's Market a few weeks ago and picked up the turnips at the Bethesda Farmer's Market on Sunday.

Pat the 2-lb pork belly dry and put on a rub of black peppercorns and toasted coriander seeds chopped not too fine in a spice grinder and then whirred again with coarse salt to mix. She also wants dill seeds chopped too, but since I could only find dill weed I mixed some of that into the rub. Rub all over and cover with plastic for a day or two.

To cook, pat it dry again, brown fat side down in olive oil for 8 min or so, remove and saute coarsely chopped carrot, celery and onion for another 8 min or so. Add chopped garlic, 4 whole cloves and 2 bay leaves for another minute, add 1/2 c. white wine, boil down and add 1 c. chicken stock. Bring to simmering, put the pork belly in fat side up and put in 325-degree oven for 2 to 3 hrs. Let cool in braising liquid, remove, make cross hatch in the fat, degrease and strain braising liquid and keep 1/4 c. for the turnips, and return pork belly and braising liquid to pan and put in 425-degree oven for 20 min.

For the turnips, peel and cut into 1-in. wedges, put into skillet with some fat, 1 tsp sugar and the reserved braising liquid, bring to simmer, cover and cook 10 to 12 min., then remove cover and let liquid evaporate.

The pork belly had a wonderful flavor but was very fatty and rich. The turnips almost scorched because it is too little liquid but they were very tasty and it was a perfect combination. Served with a salad.

Wines of Italy

After living in Paris for 11 years, I felt pretty comfortable with French wines. I have a feel for the various regions and labels and for the most part understand what I am getting. Italian wines, by contrast, have been a terra incognita, with the obvious exception of Chianti Classico. Italian labeling was never as systematic as the French and in any event Italian winemaking lagged the developments elsewhere, often giving them a fusty air of mediocrity.

That's all changed now, though the bright new designer labels don't really give you the same kind of information as French labels. In his How to Love Wine, NY Times critic Eric Asimov suggests a self-tutorial as a way of getting to know wines. Buy a case of different wines, he says, and systematically try them, with food as rule, and make careful notes as you go along.

So as part of my new Italy fever, I've embarked on a self-tutorial on Italian wines. Addie Bassin's, it turns out, displays their large collection of Italian wines by region anyway, so it was fairly easy for John, who assisted me, to select 6 wines in the $15 to $20 range (which Asimov says is the sweet spot for good value) from different regions. I already had a little notebook for recording wines -- I briefly tried to record them all but realized that was pointless because I would rarely buy the same wine again -- and it has now been re-purposed for this self-tutorial. As a further study aid, I'm using Google Maps tools to customize a map and locating each wine as it is consumed. In my map searches, beautiful photos of vineyards kept coming up, so I created a pinboard for these.

Much like learning the language itself, it will be a slow process requiring some patience. But the reward presumably is that I will be much more conversant with the world of Italian wines. According to Asimov, you can drill down further in subsequent stages. For instance, if you find that you like the Piedmont wines best, restrict your tutorial to those wines, and then to a particular terroir in Piedmont and so on.

Coffee grinders

I scoffed, I'll confess, when I read that coffee aficionados nowadays insist on having a burr grinder to prepare acceptable coffee, taking it as a simple ratcheting up of the fetishism that overtakes so much in our pursuit of food today.

However, as I read more, I began to wonder if there was something to it. The argument is that a blade grinder, like my trusty old Krups, chops and chops at the beans over and over again, resulting in uneven chunks and, when continued for enough time, a slight burn taste as the machine heats up. A burr grinder, by contrast, touches the bean just once, theoretically grinding it evenly as it passes through. The speed of passage governs whether it is a fine or coarse grind.

But when I saw the large, clunky grinders at Williams Sonoma I thought I'd never get one because they take up too much room. At Sur la Table, however, they had the Capresso Infinity grinder, which is much more compact. Two different salespeople there on separate visits claimed they had that grinder and used it and loved it. The coffee really is better, they insisted. It was an Amazon reviewer who finally tipped the scale, though, because he said he had tried a different coffee maker (check), a different filter (check), filtered water (check), but it was finally the burr grinder that made the difference in getting a really good cup of coffee.

So I took the plunge, and yes, the coffee does indeed have a cleaner, brighter, fuller taste. In fact, it's pretty amazing how much better it tastes. The new grinder fits right in the spot where the old one was and is in fact much easier and neater to use. At this point, I'm totally happy with it.

Chicken noodle soup

Two points to make about a delicious soup that we ate for days nursing a cold: 1) it marked one of my rare attempts to cook something without a recipe; 2) it was the fruit of my alternatives to WF campaign.

It's surprisingly hard to find a recipe for this classic -- not even Joy of Cooking has one. Also, I wanted to make it on the basis of the chicken stock I cooked according to Sara Jenkins' recipe, so I wasn't making soup from scratch. I made the stock from a "soup chicken" from Mick's Chicks at the Sheridan School farmer's market, plus an extra carcass he sells for stock and the usual aromatics, simmered for 4 hours and strained. Most of it I froze into ice cubes and stored in the freezer but I used some of it for what was essentially a deconstructed chicken soup.

The stewing chicken was useless after 4 hours so I bought 2 of the humongous skinless boneless breasts from Broad Branch and poached them in water with sauteed mirepoix. I shredded the cooked chicken into some of the stock and added the poaching liquid and mirepoix. I also added back some of the fat I'd skimmed off the top of the stock after it cooled. I boiled the Mueller's dumpling noodles separately, then added chicken and noodles and poaching liquid until I had the right balance in the soup, and stirred in some chopped parsley. It had, needless to say, a wonderful chicken flavor. I kept it going through the week by adding more of the chicken or noodles as needed.

So, yes, how hard can it be to cook this without a recipe. I feel like I left something out (cloves? bay leaf?) to round out the flavor, so will pay more attention the next time I do have a soup recipe. None of the ingredients came from WF.

Braised root vegetables with lentils

This vegetable extravaganza from Deborah Madison is perfect therapy for someone like me who cooks in order to something with their hands. There is a ton of peeling, slicing, chopping, mincing, boiling, sauteing, braising, mashing -- but the result is a rich, earthy stew that is perfectly satisfying.

Rather than duplicate the long and complicated recipe here, this time I will just refer to Madison's Local Flavors. There are 4 separate steps to produce this assembled dish. The first is make a red wine sauce with dried porcini, mushrooms, onion, carrot, celery, parsnip trimmings, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, rosemary, salt, pepper, flour, tomato paste, red wine, mushroom soy sauce and butter. Then you make the braised vegetable dish with red pearl onions, those parsnips you trimmed, carrots, mushrooms, olive oil, butter, and more more salt, pepper and aromatics and some that red wine sauce. Separately, you make a potato and rutabaga puree and in another separate pot, cook the lentils, either black "caviar" or French green. To assemble, make a mound of puree in a deep dish, spoon in the braised vegetables and the cooked lentils with more of the red wine sauce and top with chopped parsley. The red wine and aromatics give it a French country flavor. The root vegetables hold up well as leftovers.