Posts tagged “fish”

Cooking in Packets Seals in Juices & Flavor

Salmon Kleftiko Packet

During the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks, Klefts were irregular guerilla fighters. Among their many feats, Klefts famously stole sheep and roasted them slowly over buried fires. This trick prevented the Ottomans from smelling meat and finding the guerillas.

Kleftiko is a lamb dish named after the Klefts’ ...

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Easy Homemade Gravlax: Key Ingredients = Salmon + Time

Slicing Homemade Gravlax

Gravlax, salmon cured in sugar and salt until it is silky smooth, is expensive to buy, but easy to make. Once the fish is filleted, it takes about 10 minutes to put gravlax together. Two or three days later, you’ll have perfectly cured fish.

I make gravlax from sea-caught wild Alaska ...

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Tuna Tartare from San Francisco’s Aqua Restaurant

Tuna Tartare Ready to Mix

On an eating trip to San Francisco, we enjoyed a meal at San Francisco’s Aqua restaurant when Michael Mina was still the chef. Everything we ordered was delicious; there was not a single false note among the dishes we devoured.

At the time, Tuna Tartare was one of Aqua’s signature dishes, ...

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Cooking from the Pantry: Canned Beans and Tuna

Tuna Beans Ingredients

We all have kitchen standbys: recipes we’ve cooked a hundred times and can throw together without thinking. Standbys are delicious and turn out well even when we’re tired or inattentive.

One of my reliable standbys is white beans, baked with olive oil, garlic, sage, tuna, and lemon juice. I’ve never been ...

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Anatomy of a Recipe (with Recipe for Savory Fish Cakes / Ψαροκεφτέδες)

Recipe Book 002

Before I wrote Tastes Like Home: Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska, I rarely wrote down recipes, though I occasionally made a few notes about what I’d prepared. If I ever went back to the notes, and I rarely did, they were incomprensible, full of half sentences and incomplete thoughts. I could ...

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National Dish of Sicily: Pasta with Sardines and Fennel

Sicilian Pasta with Sardines and Fennel

 

After returning from language school in Taormina, Sicily, my sister continued to crave Sicilian food. She discovered a recipe for Sicilian Pasta with Sardines that was so good she ate it for dinner, and then for breakfast and lunch the next day.

Pasta with Sardines is one of Sicily’s classic dishes, ...

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