Halibut salad

God, I love making my own salad dressing at home, freed from the tyranny and limitations of commercial bottled dressings. 

Who do those people think they are anyway? Hornswoggling entire generations of unsuspecting consumers into thinking that they and they alone are the only way to go. Ask yourself, "What did people do for salad dressing?" ... before the industrialists with their ranks of marketeers came along with their fancy emulsified concoctions of suspended ingredients and their convincing promotional campaigns and all of their many arrays of expensive colorful products of convenience, so often woefully wrongly misleadingly named?"  French dressing? The French claim no such thing as that awful goop. 

Oil + vinegar, the simplest dressing of all

Oil + vinegar +prepared mustard, the most simple emulsified vinaigrette

Oil + vinegar + prepared mustard + diced shallot, + salt and pepper, ordinary vinaigrette

Oil + vinegar + prepared mustard +honey, + salt and pepper, simple honey-mustard dressing 

The oil can be any type at all, vegetable, olive, any type of nut oil, even bacon fat. 

The vinegar can be any type of liquid acid, my favorite is rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar, wine, Champaign, balsamic, citrus acid, even grapefruit juice. 

Besides honey, any sweetener at all will expand the profile beautifully. Commercial products use HFCS, but you can use any jam or preserve, Golden syrup, maple syrup, refined sugar, sweet juices.

Any finely diced allium will impart its unique bite, any herb at all will breathe its unique breath. 

So there you have it. Go forth now and claim dominion over your own salad dressing destiny and break the surly bonds of bottled dressings.  

* The crowd roars with exuberant applause * in my head. 

The halibut was prepared a few days ago here for masa empanadas and it is still very good. It's almost gone now. There is only about 3/4 cup left. But the halibut would be great without all that treatment intended for empanadas. Just simply blanching a  a halibut steak or a fillet in any blanching liquid or flavored water, or unflavored water for that matter, under the boiling temperature, even so low as 150℉ / 65℃. The fish will be cooked through at internal temperature of 140℉ / 60℃.  That is where it will be at its most tender. Other fish types you will want to cook even less because they dry out when completely cooked all the way through. This halibut was seared in a pan with vegetable ingredients and flavored oil. After the spices and onion and garlic heated through, I cut the heat down to low and I stood there and watched the chunks of halibut change from translucent to white-opaque then removed the whole thing from the heat immediately. The leftover portions are reheated in a microwave from cold to warm for less than one minutes. The fish chunks are still light and tender. I have really been enjoying this single halibut steak in various forms and over a period of days. 

Fish tacos

A fish taco just sounded weird to me. But believe me, it is not weird. It is actually more delicious than any other type of taco I've ever had, and that is saying a lot because I live in a taco-oriented culture, where meat tacos are the norm.

The halibut fish mixture was prepared previously for the halibut masa empanadas and described down there ☟☟ two posts prior to this. The corn tortillas are from the same batch of seasoned masa, this time pressed more thinly as proper corn tortillas and fried completely which translates to about 45 seconds on each side on moderately high heat. 

Man, if I knew one halibut steak would go this far I'd have cut it in half. It is quite incredible altogether. There is already diced onions in the mixture along with uncooked tomato and uncooked cucumber. Reheating the mixture even gently for a mere 30 seconds cooks those raw ingredients if ever so slightly. Recombined with more fresh raw tomato and lettuce moderates the absurdly overly-seasoned halibut. It is still unidentifiable as halibut, but no less delicious. I am amazed. 

Truth in advertising laws require me to report that the taco photographed below is held together with two toothpicks. The toothpicks were cloned out in Photoshop. Your floppy taco will not be this cooperative. You'll have to keep holding it. We could deep-fry the tortilla into this shape for a crispy shell, or just use commercial shells, but I did not want to do that. We can also use flour tortillas instead of corn tortillas, it's all good, and I have enough of this brilliant halibut mixture still chilling so you might not have seen the end of this yet. 

Two batches of beans were prepared. The first batch was small. The beans were soaked overnight then boiled the next day in water with baking soda added. They lost their color, they broke apart, they slipped out of their skins and looked awful, like maggots in a pile of dark wet fuzzy cocoons. They were delicious with salt and pepper. I ate them while I prepared another small batch using a pressure pot. 

The second batch cooked for 30 minutes on first-level pressure in seasoned water. These are more firm and equally delicious with the seasoning cooked into them by force. They are drizzled with olive oil on the plate, mostly for photography purposes. It is a trick that we food stylists types do that we learned from creative cooks. Lidia Bastianich tells us, "It makes the food smile." Then she smiles charmingly. 

Spiced potato

Ridiculously over-spiced potatoes. Much like the aloo part of gobi aloo, except more severe and a bit out of kilter. If you were ever to have something like this served to you then you would most likely return it. I love it. Although I do prefer irregular chunks of potato over these shoestring cut pieces. I already knew that but I tried it again anyway.

The thing is, I have tons of spices and I want to combine them into homemade curry type concoctions and see what happens. I keep chile powders in the freezer that I picked up from the spice shop; aji amarillo (that means 'yellow'), chipotle, which doesn't taste exactly like chipotle in adobo, ancho, which barely resembles actual dried poblano that I know as ancho, and habanero which will burn your face right off no matter what its form, and the like. I bought all the varieties the main downtown Savory Spice Shop had that day along with a bunch of other things. Surprisingly, it did not cost a fortune, I was prepared to accept much worse. 

So all those chile powders went into hot vegetable oil. One by one, I added cumin, coriander, my two favorite things, cinnamon, celery salt, that's only part of the 'C' category,  turmeric, regular kosher salt, white pepper, but not crushed black pepper, because -- what? -- do you think I'm insane? 

A single teaspoon of mango chutney is plopped into a mixing bowl to await the cooked potatoes.

A single medium-size Yukon Gold potato is cut into matchsticks then parboiled in water. Strained to air-dry then dumped into the  seasoned oil. 

You know what? I learned from a video recommended by a commenter here, Peter Hoh, I think,  that you must add turmeric late in situations like this because it gets wiped out and fails if it is added too early. 

The parboiled and fried potatoes are lifted into a strainer again then dumped on top of the mango chutney and tossed around to coat. The chutney cools, moderates, compliments, contrasts, expands the profile, freshens all of the nearly oppressive combined powders, especially the fierce and insane culmination of chiles.  

I'm thinking, "Man, if I have a worm in my gut like that awesome colonoscopy video that was passed around recently, then it's probably freaking out all over the place." My mouth is still in a happily dazed state of shock. 

Halibut masa empanadas

Actual legal empanadas are made with wheat-flour dough, with a filling of beef, pork, chicken or fish, then baked or fried. They're much like the pasty in Britain. The dough here is made of masa.

I saw masa empanadas prepared with chicken filling and then deep-fried, but I did not want to do that. I pan-fried them briefly but not thoroughly and then steamed them lightly by drizzling water into the hot pan without soaking the dough. That cooked the portions that were not touching the pan. The effect is much like tamales without the corn husks and different from fish tacos because the masa is incompletely firmed, that is, the masa is not an actual tortilla. It needs a sauce. I used homemade tzatziki that I had on hand and that worked well. These are seasoned so extremely that it's impossible to identify halibut, so it's probably not the best use for this excellent fish. 

Masa is amazing. Mix approximately equal portions of hot water to masa flour, possibly a little more water as this batch here. It blends easily, much more easily than wheat flour. This batch is seasoned with cinnamon, cumin, cayenne, black pepper and salt. 

The halibut steak is diced into chunks. Such an awful thing to do to halibut. My only excuse here is that I have a ton of it, possibly a few pounds,  and I'm experimenting with something different. The cubes will cook and then be smashed, its own grain will determine the final texture

Seasoning is heated in a pan with butter, lots of it. Cinnamon, coriander powder, cumin powder, habanero powder, chipotle powder, cayenne powder, see there?, three chile types, black pepper, sea salt, celery salt. 

The halibut chunks are added and cooked gently and only briefly until it turns to from translucent to white-opaque and begins to flake.

The halibut chunks are smashed with a spoon. Japanese sake is added, but it can be any liquid. 

The tomato is added raw and off the heat. Tomato was planned, cucumber was impulse. 

The mixture was taste-tested, deemed insufficiently hot. After all that chile powder, even with habanero which will blow your hat off, it still wasn't quite there so I added this red chile which looks like a ripe jalapeño but is actually considerably hotter. 

The masa dough is pressed more thickly than ordinary tortillas. 

The masa disc is filled with two tablespoons of halibut mixture then folded and the edges pressed. The edges glue themselves together much more readily than wheat-flour dough. It's surprisingly easy.

I am delighted with how cooperative these things are. They didn't break apart, they didn't stick, they didn't dissolve when steamed, they did cook completely through. They're fast enough that the tomato and the cucumber inside stays raw. 

Now for something entirely unrelated to empanadas.

I finished my brother's pop-up card in time. I put off the project so long that I had to really slap it together. Pretty much like every school assignment I ever had. It's not like I'm not being creative in the procrastination period, after all I am thinking about it. If you would care to look, this card is a simple one-pager about ridiculous penguins doing perfectly unpenguiny things.

Update: At this point my brother has one son. His wife said, "Look, he made two baby penguins. That means we're going to have two children."

Turns out they did.

Several years later, he called and told me that he went out to dinner with friends for his birthday and he took his new card and all the previous cards that I sent to him and his wife in a bag including this one and showed them all to his friends.

I didn't realize I had sent them both so many. I had no idea the two had been saving them. They don't seem like the saving card type of people. He told me that his friends were amazed. They just shook their heads and told him, "your brother is out of his mind." 

Breakfast, bacon, eggs, hash brown potatoes

Typical American breakfast, minus buttered toasted bread with jam. (I have a very nice toaster, a common device seen in every household, but I spurn commercial sliced bread and I do not care for the silly thing sitting there idly all the time on the countertop using up its useless footprint and hogging an outlet insouciantly, so I put it away. Same thing with a coffee maker and espresso machine. I'm weird that way.) You will see this meal served at home tables, diners and cafes throughout the land, north and south, east and west, and most certainly the middle where I'm at. 

One of the jumbo eggs seemed heavy, the second jumbo egg less heavy, so I weighed them. One weighed 80g. or avoirdupois 2+3/4oz. The lighter one weighed 68g. or  2+3/8oz. So that's 22g or 3/8oz. difference which is almost half an ounce which is a lot when we're talking about just two + ounces. 

When I cracked open the heavy jumbo egg two yolks plopped out. 

Woohoo! *glees* , *does the happy double-yolk dance* , *drums the countertop with the spatula*, *makes a joyful clamor* , *creates doubt about sanity*. 

The bacon is baked in the microwave/convection combo oven on high convection for 15 minutes. 

The potato is Yukon gold which is probably an in between starchy and waxy type. It was shredded by machine because that makes better potato shreds than a box grater. The shreds were rinsed, blanched in hot water, frozen, then fried. All those extra steps had nearly zero effect on the result. They were alright, but they were not what I was imagining they would be, all toasty on the outside and tender on the inside. They were almost there but not quite. But I'll tell you, I seasoned them heavily by toasting whole cumin seed along with fennel seed. Then added an excess of coarsely cracked black pepper and mixed chile flakes, with coarse sea salt and granulated garlic. Then cooked all that seasoning first with sliced onion. Wow! My dad would love this for a radical change of pace. Why, it's enough to make you forget you're eating stupid dull bland boring starchy potatoes.