Look out! I'm becoming quite good with sauces. A perfectly fine standby sauce for fish is butter with lemon juice and capers, especially sautéed fish because you already have the hot pan going. Oil + acid = vinaigrette, so it works for vegetables too. This sauce is elaborated with surplus liquid from the ceviche. No point in letting that go to waste. The ceviche liquid contains water, lime, ginger, fennel, and onion. About half a cup added to the sauté pan after the fish was removed. A half a lemon was also squeezed into the burnt buttery pan. It was thickened with a scant teaspoon corn starch, thus its alluring attractive glaze. Next time I'll add maybe 1/2 teaspoon of sugar or honey or something, just for another dimension, that'll be like WOW !
The vegetables are my new temporary favorite thing, zucchini with barely warmed tomato. Here, rounded with onion and garlic and presented on a bed of cut Romaine. The lemon, ceviche juice, butter sauce was substituted for dressing. So the plate is unified by the sauce, the fish with the vegetables.
Let's get scientifical for a moment, shall we? OK, here goes.
The great thing about Pacific salmon as contrasted with farm-raised salmon, is the diet and the exercise of the natural fish. Wild salmon has a varied diet. It's a naturally rich color, the result of feeding on shrimp. The pink in shrimp is carotenoid astaxanthin, an antioxident. Farm fish is dyed with a color from the chemical company Hoffman-La Roche. Search: [+cantaxanthin +salmofan +"Hoffman-La Roche] Wild salmon has the desirable levels of DHA and EPA from the Omega 3 fats. The human brain is 60% fat, half that fat is DHA. DHA stands for docosahexaeonic acid, for whatever that's worth, and EPA stands for Environmental Protection Agency. Just kidding, EPA stands for eicosapentaenoic acid, for whatever that's worth to you. The human body can make its own DHA and EPA from plant sources but the conversion of ALA, which stands for Alpha-linolenic acid, for whatever that's worth, is insufficient. Populations have been followed that used to have access to a steady diet of wild salmon. By carefully studying those populations once their access had been closed, it has been found the incidences of heart disease, diabetes, undesirably high cholesterol, and obesity increased dramatically from near zero to, well,
A LOT! Search: [+"karuk tribe" +salmon +health], go on then,
search, I said.
Wild fish is measurably cleaner than farmed fish. Farmed fish are fed an industrial diet. Their flesh contains significantly more toxins, including PCBs and dioxin than wild fish. Search: [+"farmed fish" +toxins] Farmed fish have a lot more fat on their bodies, but a lot less of the desirable omega 3s. They don't get much exercise. They're also stressed by overcrowding and a little bit sad, but now that's just me thinking it.
There is, however, this itty-bitty little teeny-weenie unresolved concern about mercury concentrating in higher orders along the food chain. The detectable amounts of mercury in wild salmon are negligible for adults, but uncertain for the developing brains of infants. For that reason, salmon should probably be avoided by nursing or pregnant women and infants. Fish oils purchased commercially are completely free of toxins and are good substitutes.
See? The lesson here is the same lesson as all the lessons; whenever industry interjects itself between you and your source of food, it goofs on it. It's the nature of industrial food. Why, it's enough to drive a person right back to the very basics, then in'nit?
Now, you're probably wondering, "Bo, how did you get so smart? What are you basing your information on? Huh? " I read books all the time, that's how. And then you probably want to go, "But how do you know its all true? Huh?"
Because I said so, that's how.
End of scientificalness.
