Deconstructed Fish Tacos with Grits

Just in time for Cinco de Mayo, a new twist on a classic dish

Tacos are the ultimate fast food.

So let’s slow them down a bit, shall we? Because sometimes we need to savor. This dish keeps all the flavor of the original, but makes things more knife-and-fork friendly.

We replace corn tortillas with grits (also made from corn, so lots of savor there). Then we mound the other ingredients on top, for an open-faced taco.

The result is fancy (and good) enough for a dinner party. But easy enough for a quick meal. Nothing fishy about that.

Poached Salmon

A foolproof way to cook America’s favorite fresh fish

Summer is here in North America — and that means we have wild-caught fresh Alaska salmon in our markets.  It’s the best-tasting salmon we’ll be able to buy all year. 

This seasonal delight turns any meal into a feast.  And it never fails to impress, because most people think cooking fish is difficult. 

Almost everyone has a fish-cooking horror story.  Fish fillets and steaks tend to be thin, so they cook fairly fast.  That means there’s a fine line between almost raw, overcooked, and falling-apart flaky.  And even if we cook the fish perfectly, the surface can sometimes get a bit too dry, particularly if we crank up the outdoor grill.

Enter poaching.  When you cook fish in liquid, it remains moist and luscious.  And because poaching provides gentle heat, you have a bit more leeway than with other cooking methods.  So if the fish is finished a few minutes before the rest of dinner, no problem.  A fatty fish like salmon can stay on hold (off heat) in its cooking liquid for a good 10 minutes.

And poaching is easy.  If you can boil water, you can poach salmon.  Really.

Poached Scallops

A Basic “How To” That You Can Use in Many Recipes

Poaching is one of the best ways to cook scallops, shrimp, and many types of lean fish.  The gentle, even heat provided by simmering can cook seafood in a few minutes.  And because the seafood is surrounded by liquid, there’s less danger that it will dry out.

But it’s not often that you poach scallops or fish and eat them plain.  Usually, poached seafood is served with sauce, and sometimes the poaching liquid becomes the basis of that sauce.  Indeed, there is a whole school of French sauces that start with reducing the liquid used to poach seafood.  (In the future, we’ll be working our way through some of those famous recipes.)

Knowing how to poach seafood is essential for many recipes.  Today, we focus specifically on how to achieve a perfectly poached scallop.  We’ll need poached scallops for a dish we’ll be discussing later this week.