The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (32 page)

Add the cooked shrimp and simmer until they're heated through, about a minute or two. Remove from the heat, then stir in the minced basil or parsley and add a few squeezes of lemon over the top. Serve over hot pasta or rice.

 

 

Preseason protein with a few simple seasonings before cooking, such as a bit of olive oil, coarse salt, pepper, simple herbs or seasonings, a squeeze of citrus, or a splash of vinegar.

Use fresh garlic. It adds punch the way jarred garlic doesn't. Some markets offer cloves of peeled garlic as a time saver; they are commonly used in professional kitchens.

Spice it up. Many cuisines add spicy ingredients as an inexpensive way to add a sassy, satisfying note to otherwise simple dishes.

Finish dishes with a “bright” flavor at the end. Normally this is a bit of acid and/or an herb, in this case lemon and fresh herbs. Small amounts of vinegar, especially flavored ones, can add a lot of flavor in a finished dish.

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CHAPTER 10

 

One of the first things I discovered about Mike was that he didn't like fish. Sure, he was a fan of fish and chips, but most people would probably eat a brick if it was deep-fried. In Paris, when I brought home a complicated dish from culinary school featuring monkfish stuffed with delicate crab meat and wrapped in prosciutto coupled with a beurre blanc sauce, he simply said, “It's not bad. It tastes like chicken.”

In the years since, he's warmed up to fish. But the reasons for his initial resistance were often expressed by many of the volunteers. They felt uncomfortable selecting seafood, and I suspected this led to the inadvertent purchase of lower-quality fish. They told tales of fish stinking up kitchens and relentlessly overcooked fillets that turned out too tough, too oily, or too bland.

North Americans eat relatively little seafood, about sixteen pounds total per capita per year, a paltry showing compared to the sixty-plus pounds of chicken we consume each year. Just 7 percent of our diet includes fish and shellfish. By comparison, it makes up more than 25 percent of that in Asian countries. Most health-care experts suggest increasing fish consumption to ensure adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids. A growing body of research suggests that omega-3 can help deflect everything from heart disease to stroke, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and even clinical depression.

I was gung ho on teaching a class about fish—until I went to see a screening of the utterly depressing documentary
The End of the Line.
If you're unfamiliar with this, it focuses on the havoc wreaked on various fish species due to commercial overfishing and is often referred to as
An Inconvenient Truth
for the oceans. Overfishing happens based on consumer whims. Take the blackened redfish craze that gripped the nation in the 1980s. To feed the extraordinary and sudden demand from restaurants and retailers, commercial netters caught redfish by the millions, devastating the species within the space of a few years. When Chilean sea bass
²⁹
ended up on every menu years later, the same thing happened. More than twenty species are included on various overfished lists.

So my initial enthusiasm shifted into a dilemma: Should I even do a class on fish? Most of the students commented that they might eat more if they knew how to make it.

“Are you kidding? You have to do a class on fish,” Lisa said. “This is Seattle. The airport has bronze salmon embedded in the floor. Why don't you bring in Ted as a guest teacher? He's a total Jedi master when it comes to fish.”

I mention my chef friend Ted often but fail to point out that he trained at the Culinary Institute of America and spent a dozen years in the industry. His early career during the 1980s involved catering for the PBS channel in Boston. As a result, two of the regular visitors to his kitchen were Paul and Julia Child. “She'd come in and ask, ‘What are you making, Chef?' But then she'd have to go out and mingle,” he told me. “You could tell she'd rather have been in the kitchen.” Although he's now a financial consultant to the tech industry, Ted never lost his appetite for the kitchen.

Several of the volunteers arrived early. I took it as a chance to catch up with them as Ted, Jeff, and Maggie set everything up.

“So we've started to buy vegetables regularly from this farm stand near our house,” Gen said. “We told them we were going to a Mexicanthemed party that night. Seriously, you should have seen the reaction from the owner!” She seemed anxious to tell the story. “He and his wife went back and forth, insisting that we had to make this amazing sangria from a recipe his grandmother brought from Peru.”

The farm-stand owners gave Gen the recipe and helped the pair organize all the stuff to make the sangria. Just when they wondered if perhaps it was a grand marketing ploy to persuade them to purchase extra produce, the owner asked if they wanted any tamales. “They were making tamales for this big party. We said sure, we'd try some. They gave us this huge bag of tamales for free.”

Gen and her boyfriend rushed home. “We were using this big wine jug for the sangria, trying to shove the fruit through the ittybitty hole at the top,” she said, pantomiming the scene and laughing. “It was kind of chaos. We had to cook all these tamales and make the sangria and rush to the party.” But they were the hit of the night. People were impressed.

“It's funny, but that made me realize that there's a whole world beyond the supermarket,” Gen said. “That kind of interaction would not happen at a grocery store. I feel like I've made friends with them. We're part of this little community. It's really kind of cool, and I don't know, this sounds sort of dorky but it makes me feel like, wow, cooking can be fun in a way I never imagined.”

Jodi had arrived in time to hear the end of Gen's story. She joined the discussion.

“That's so crazy you just used the word
fun,
” Jodi said. The past weekend, her friend had come over to cook to see what she was learning from the project. “After an hour of cooking together, my friend turned to me and said, ‘Hey. What's up with you? I can just feel the tension! You are like a madwoman. Cooking is supposed to be fun!' ”

Jodi said that she looked at her friend, sipping wine and relaxing. “It just kind of hit me. I realized that cooking is not supposed to be so stressful. Why do I put myself through all this anxiety? There was always a part of me that worried about screwing something up. But at that moment, I don't know, I just had this moment of clarity.” She paused a minute. “God, I sound so confessional!”