I’m sorry the photography sucks. I never have enough light. Contrary to what it looks like, this is NOT a breaded piece of offal. It’s fish. Tasty, tasty fish.
I call this “Kitchen Destroyer Cod.” It’s another Cooks Illustrated recipe, which reliably kicks out recipes that are incredibly tasty, and occasionally more involved. The breading on this sucker was huge and crispy and awesome, but it took a good deal of time to make, and dirtied about three dishes all by itself. That’s why I call it the Kitchen Destroyer. Here, have a look for your self. The black bean salad was a variation on an Alton Brown recipe, which kicked serious butt.
I’ve you’ve been playing along at home, you may have noticed a great deal of thyme being used in the past few recipes. In fact, before I started the Foodblog, I had made French Onion soup, which ALSO used thyme. So why all the thyme? Because fresh herbs both ROCK and ARE EXPENSIVE. Normally I try to grow my own, but I had to ditch my herb garden when we moved to North Carolina. So when you have them, USE THEM.
The other thing of note with this mean is the fish. Fish is great. I love fish. So do a lot of other people. Lots of people have become really good at fishing, actually. So much so, that populations are starting to crash. Food doesn’t taste good if you know you’re doing damage by eating it. So what you do is check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium website and print out their pocket guide and stick it in your wallet. And use it. Kroger and the like don’t always do a good job of telling you where your food comes from (and their seafood isn’t the freshest either), so your best bet is something more like a Trader Joes, or a local Fishmonger. As my buddy Ian pointed out below, Trader Joes still sells fish like Orange Roughy that just can’t be fished sustainably – so you can’t buy without thinking here. But it has been my experience that it is easier to find seafood that meats the Monterey Bay Aquarium guidelines here than at mass-market grocery stores. It’s a complex issue, which is why you NEED to print out the pocket guide and tuck it in your wallet. That should be a good guide. If your store won’t tell you where it came from, go somewhere else.
Maybe you don’t really care too much about fish populations, but I think you should. We’re running low on a lot of fish. Consider orange roughy; this is one ugly bugger of a fish that we couldn’t catch until recently, because it lives so far down below. Why are we bothering with this fish if its so hard to catch? Because we’re starting to wipe out the easier fish species. Oops. The problem with orange roughy is that they can live to about 150 years old. The fish you’re eating for dinner is older than you. Couple that with their sporadic breeding habits, and you’ll find that there is practically NO sustainable way to eat this fish. It will just be gone.
At any rate, there’s a good deal to this issue, and I suggest you listen to this really good Teri Gross interview if you’re interested. Fish is so good, it would be a shame to crash it to oblivion.
