Things wot I Made Then Ate: Tuna

This tuna meal follows the dinner at the Aquarium Restaurant located within the Denver aquarium.

Coincidence?

Why yes, actually. In fact the tuna was brought from the freezer to the refrigerator to defrost before we decided to go out to dinner, much less before deciding on the Aquarium Restaurant, which we would never have thought of in the first place were it not on the list of restaurants participating in Denver Restaurant Week.

The spinach is regular frozen chopped, but it doesn't have to be. It is heated in a pan with fresh garlic, steamed with water and sake. Seasoned with S/P and the extra spices used to coat the fish, loathe to waste those good seeds after having laborously ground them, then mixed with ricotta cheese to lighten along with pecans and craisins.

* 1/2 package of frozen chopped spinach.

* 1 large garlic clove

* handful of pecans

* 1/2 handful dried cranberries

* 2 tablespoons sake

* 1/4 cup water to steam spinach

* s/p + surplus ground spice seeds used to coat fish fish

1) The seed coating for the fish is prepared in advance.

2) The sauce for dipping the fish is prepared in advance

3) The spinach mixture is prepared concurrently with the fish frying which takes only two minutes, so the spinach is started first with sake garlic, pecans, and dried cranberries and ricotta at the ready. It's all about timing.

Sake and ground spice seed go in both the spinach and the dipping sauce. See? That there is what you call matching flavors. All we pros do that.

These seeds are used as much to create a buffer between the pan and the tuna as they are for flavor, although they do pack powerful punches of flavors. Tonight I am not interested in appreciating the delicate difference between fish types as with sushi, rather I am imbuing this fish with alien flavors in extremis. I would not do this if I were entertaining.

A heavy mortar and pestle is used rather than a coffee grinder, in order to better control the size of the crushed seed. We do not want powder and we do not want a bunch of irregular sizes from dust to unprocessed whole seed, therefore it is done by hand.

* black peppercorn

* coriander. If you are using British nomenclature, as you can see, I am referring to the seed not the leaf.

* house chile flakes, a mixture of various dried capsaicin chiles, smoked and unsmoked, that were previously picked apart and ground by hand. Better than anything you can buy, and I do recommend it. It comes out differently each time depending on the packaged chiles one starts out with.