This is the slightly neurotic backstory to the cook fish story

So I woke up this morning and really didn’t want to get out of bed, but I did manage to barely get out of the house in time to acquire the 20L stock pot a nifty Philadelphia food person had offered on Twitter. I did not do public transportation, nor the brisk walk I had thought might be fun. I drove. But still – pot acquired. And even though I had grabbed a small book I’d made and a bar of fancy chocolate to offer in exchange, I did not remember to hand them over… a bit out of sorts today.

But then I was in the vague vicinity of the one place in all of Philadelphia to get reliable fresh seafood. So I stopped in and made a fool of myself and clearly admitted I knew nothing but would they please point me toward something fun. And I ended up with a pretty whole fish, which I asked them to fillet and give me the bones and head and all so I could make stock.

So I get home and have to look quite hard, but I do find a close-ish parking spot off of the snow emergency route (oh, hey, looks like we’ll probably get more snow).

So I get home and do the dishes, so I’ll have a clear workspace for the fish. And there are a lot of dishes (just because). And I open up the fish, and there are only two lovely fillets – no bones or bits. Grrr.

But I’ve got this weird thing going where I should have left five minutes ago, if I were going to go to work, but I have to get the fish sorted before I leave. No idea why I can’t just shove it in the fridge.

So I trim the awkward bits (not really awkward in the real world, but I was looking to make them smaller, anyway, so that was my excuse for picking on the thinner area) off the fillets and set them aside to dice and make ceviche. And I wrap the now 3.5 and 4 oz fillets back up tightly and back in the plastic bag. Next, I pull out my ice bin and line it with foil before I put in the bag with the fish to approximate the rig Alton Brown had which took up a whole shelf in a decoratively empty fridge.

And then I look at the clock, and I could just put on clothes and grab a cab and make it to work five minutes late… so I start preparing the ceviche. It’s a weird disconnect that happens sometimes, but not so much since I quit being stressed from college. So I called out sick and had a great day of it.

Many of my food experiments are directly the result of instigation from my friend Meghan. And her latest blog post about eggplant sludge, though not attractively named, was also inspiring.

Luckily, another friend had recently gifted me with an eggplant from her organic produce delivery service, which was getting on in days and needed to be eaten quickly in a dish where appearances didn’t matter.

Eggplant and Pasta

In 1 teaspoon of olive oil, I sauteed 1 diced yellow onion and then 3 minced cloves of garlic.

Once the onions cooked to translucency, I peeled the eggplant and cut out any brown spots, and then I took my box grater and just grated it right into the pan.

In reference to my friend Meghan’s post, I’d been chatting with her about whether or not salting eggplants was useful, and there was googling. The end conclusion was that pre-salting doesn’t ‘draw out bitterness,’ but saltiness does counteract bitterness.

So I salted the hell out of this dish. Erm, buy which I mean that I took three chunks of fancy pink Himalayan salt and ground them down into regular powder and added that to the dish such that I was pleased with the saltiness and there was not noticeable bitterness.

I also cut small and added two dried peppers – one cayenne and one other one I dried, which memory tells me was a red jalapeno but could have been something else similar, too.

When it looked a little dry, I peeled and cut in the edible half of the tomato my friend had also given me for urgent consumption.

And then I cooked it until the eggplant was not only soft, but also releasing liquid, then seasoned with a generous amount of cinnamon and black pepper.

Shamelessly (well, mostly shamelessly), I then added about half a cup of jarred tomato sauce. (Yes, I’ve had bad jarred tomato sauce, and I see why you don’t like it. But Classico rarely has off flavors, has a wonderful product as a base for sauces, and I love the jars for reuse.)

Mixed in 4 ounces of cooked macaroni (selected because that box was in front of the queue, but it was a good pairing for the sauce), and that made two generous portions.

Because I’m back on the Weight Watchers wagon, I topped it with 2 thinly sliced scallions and about a teaspoon of freshly grated parmesan.

So please explain to me what to do with this fancy Himalayan Pink Salt.

The crystals are too large to sprinkle on top to finish.

And when you grind it down, it only looks pink next to other salt.

Is it mostly useful in a pretty, transparent grinder and then used as you would regular salt?

Or is there a way to take advantage of the pretty without having to buy purely decorative hardware?

note: This salt was given to me gratis for review by Marx Foods as a result of the entry I made for their free black garlic. There were many more things in the new sampler, too, so there will be several entries mentioning them in the near future.

Tags: allia, eggplant, pasta, salt, tomato

1) As of the wee hours of the morning, I’m an aunt.

2) I did not get the house on which I made an offer – over the weekend, someone else also put in a bid for the house, only full asking price.

3) I have a new laptop. Oddly, it’s still in the box.

4) Made more truffles – for the help_haiti auction. They are getting mailed out today. Made a box to fit them all perfectly, too, and I might be even more proud of that because the little muffin wrappers were ornery and hard to keep squished together and tidy.

5) back on the wagon for Weight Watchers. Over about the 8 months off the wagon (wherein I discovered rudimentary baking), I only gained 11 pounds, so I’m not too badly off. I restarted also to enable my boss’ quest to fit into her pants.

6) have new kitchen toys: a salad spinner (birthday present and something I’ve been pining after for years and years) and a pressure canner

7) While planning for the house, evaluated apartment. With sufficient boxes, I think I could pack up to move in about 4 hours. Maybe less.

8) I’ve lost my apples tree in the back yard to termites and heavy snows. If I’m not moving, I am worried about the summer. I’ve long suspected that the shade from that tree was the main reason I could manage without air conditioning.

9) Okay, now I have to get dressed and mail packages, including one addressed to a brand new baby, probably still in the deeply unattractive stage… though after 12 hours of unproductive labor, there was a C-section, and I hear those babies are supposed to be prettier – at least their head shapes are less silly, but they might still be purple. No idea. No pictures yet.

10) This week, I have to reserve all the side trips and stuff for the Rome trip.

11) I need to call the property manager and ask them to check that my neighbor isn’t dead. (I haven’t seen him for a couple months and for a couple other reasons)

ETA: …erm… actually, he was dead. But they were already/recently aware. /eta

12) I did my taxes. Federal ones have already been e-filed. Now I have to remember to mail in my state taxes. There was a terrifying moment when I thought I owed almost as much to the state as I’d been getting back from the federal government. Then I saw I had entered the state withholdings line with a decimal point in the wrong place. ~whew~! All is well with the world. I requested direct deposit so I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I’d still be at that mailbox when the check came.

I was sitting here very impressed by a chef on twitter praising one of his prep cooks for cutting up cilantro (because, really, who does that? Giving random praise by name for doing simple tasks well is awesome.)

And then I popped out, and my student worker was running around keeping a whole room full of microfilm users educated and happy – I’d had no idea we were having a rush. So I sent off a note to my boss.

Car found!

It’s suspiciously close to a fire hydrant, but that’s where the city put it, so I’m leaving it there until streets are better.

Fine high, but not as bad as I’d been willing to grit and bear. So I’ll call that a win.

Now to summon up energy for the rest of the cooking I had planned

• Chana Masala – Done, turned out really well! Wonderful flavor and a spice level that’s just challenging for me
• bread baking – Done, got it nice and chewy like storebought bead (yes, this was a goal)
• canning 1 more batch of stock – ETA:Done, now I have a full case of 12
• and starting a pot of beans and ham hocks

Oh, yeah, and I promised the cat I’d clean her water fountain

So I gambled and lost. My car has been towed.

Fine, it was a risk I knowingly took because it had been a hellish week, parking spots were scarce and last Snowmageddon I’d moved off the snow emergency route and ended up plowed in and painfully excavating the car for two days while those who’d stayed had it easy. And I figured I was okay with the consequences.

I’m oddly not okay with it. My car getting towed has got me all depressed and doubting my judgment and avoidy. Which is a little disturbing, but I plan to repress all that with further baking.

However, it did throw off my cooking game, and I should not have tried my first ever batch of brownies while iffy. And I apologize to everyone I called at midnight with random brownie questions – even though no one answered and that was confusing because I was pretty sure people would be home. But if the phone ringing frightened you because you thought a relative might have died, I’m very sorry – I just hadn’t noticed the time.

Right, so car has been towed. So I called the hotline for having your vehicle towed from a snow emergency street, and they couldn’t find a record of my car. So they told me I should just go out in the snow and wander about the two intersections where they were taking towed cars. Only these two areas aren’t places that had spots open before it snowed, and I’m a bit confused by the crazy. I don’t want to go out and randomly wander. And then the emergency hasn’t been called off yet, so if I do find my car, then where to I put it? I thought right after the streets were plowed curb to curb, I’d be able to put my car back.

Meh.

There’s not a single flake here yet, but I am so rooting for the snowpocalypse. (even though back in my day when we had snow, we just bitched about it a bit and shoveled it)

Even though I don’t get off work until 9pm and will be walking back through the thick of it, I can’t wait. I brought boots to work in a bag.

But I so want a weekend where I can’t leave the house. It probably means that I’ll have to take vacation days somewhere in this month to visit my grandmother during the week, but still. A whole weekend where I can’t go out.

Oh, yeah, I also want the snow to reach New York. Please. So it’s credible I can’t visit (even though I never told her I planned to visit this weekend and even though I warned her my February is crazy busy… it’d be nice to call her for my birthday without her being all disappointed I’m not there). Maybe I’ll even go up for Wednesday and Thursday (Fridays are right out because then I’d have to attend the bridge lessons from hell).

Right, so – snowpocalypse. YAY!

I have plans. I want to make vegetable stock and try canning it in the new pressure cooker.

And last time I saw my mother, she brought ham hocks and chicken leftovers. And I have crazy fancipants dried beans… and there could be soup.

And chana masala.

I bought a lot of carrots, and some is going in the soup (and the peels are going in the stock), but I might also play around with chutneys.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll try baking something that isn’t bread. There’s a brownie recipe for which I have all the ingredient.

And I could clean. It looks like it won’t be high enough above freezing for laundry until Thursday.

Oh, and I could work more on books. I am missing the official deadline for Fun-a-Day, but maybe I can turn things in on Monday. If not, I’ll have done stuff. And I have some longer term projects to work on, too. La la la.

And a book to read! I’m 3/4 through Spindle’s End

It’s going to be a great weekend! (if it’ll snow as promised)