Twitter is such a great thing. I just wrote that. It’s too late to take it back.
I met Becky Selengut through her book “Good Fish.” I was on a sustainable fish kick at the time. The kick turned into a lifestyle, and here I am, still eating squid, mackerel, and wild Pacific salmon caught by people I trust in sustainable ways. I know about things like pots and longlines, and dredging and trawling, and I know about the multiple kinds of antibiotics in farmed salmon, and the ridiculousness of feeding perfectly delicious wild fish to farmed fish to cater the North American and European obsession with tuna and salmon. As though there are no other fish…
Mahi mahi? Was that endangered? Apparently there are sustainable versions of that, says Seastar restaurant in Seattle. When did that happen? Taylor seafood thinks mahi mahi is sustainable too, so I believe it. That’s where a good part of the high-end Seattle restaurants go for their sustainable fare. I was privy to a $90 geoduck purchase there, for example. That was pretty cool.
I then met Becky Selengut through twitter, when I started trying to make her recipes and amid some success, had a few problems. I questioned her vanilla-cauliflower char. After a long conversation and a lot of char re-trials, we agreed to disagree, as food is subjective and I like bitter olive oil less than she does. But I loved the sweet cauliflower-vanilla-apple combo, and I loved the simple cooking method of the rich fish (it’s only rich when it’s wild…not farmed, so look for dark fillets from, generally Alaska. At least that’s all we can get here in Quebec. In Newfoundland you find wild char from Labrador. You also find farmed junk from Quebec here, which is fine if you’re more a locavore than someone who’s devoted to flavour. Both worthwhile causes, I think, when balanced).
So when I went to Seattle to write an article for Air Canada’s EnRoute and to play at the Modernist Cuisine lab, I took advantage of the opportunity to meet her, and to write her into the article.
Interview with Becky Selengut and Loki Fish at the Columbia City Farmers Market (Click the link to listen. We talk sustainability and affordability, and the different kinds of wild Pacific salmon available in Seattle).
We met originally at the Columbia City farmers market and talked about sustainable salmon with Loki Fish, after which she gave me a ride to my bus stop and allowed me to stop at her house to pick blackberries while she let her dogs out. She made fun of me at the market for wanting to buy them since they’re an invasive species in Seattle and grow everywhere. She tried to convince me to buy blueberries but I don’t do that because in Newfoundland, where I’m from, you don’t buy blueberries either. You pick them wild. $8 for a pint? No. There you laugh at people who pay that price.
So I got my white shirt covered in blackberries, twisting myself under branches and between thorns, looking for the sweetest ones to bring back to the lab. And at the lab nobody cared…
Turns out there’s a bush just outside the entrance. So there I was, covered in blackberries, one cookbook author laughing at me with my obsession with blackberries, and a whole bunch of professional cooks seeing my covered in purple, so proud of myself. Fortunately I brought a change of clothes for Maxime Bilet’s going away dinner. 20 courses with exceptional wines and all sorts of modernist treats merited a dress, for goodness sake. I kept the heels in the bag, because who bring a pair of heels to a dinner in a laboratory?
The next day I met Becky Selengut again. This time at another market, the Queen Anne market, where she was doing a cooking demo. She made the seared tuna dish with ratatouille from her cookbook.
But she made it with seasonal peaches instead of figs. Now, figs were in season too, but peaches were everywhere. Figs were more in California. Peaches were Washington. She had these huge hunks of tuna steak and a skillet of tomatoes and zucchini and onion going. The cherry tomatoes were like cheating, they were so sweet. No acidity at all.
And the sweet peaches could have been figs, they were so sweet and juicy. The reason I had never made this dish was actually because I feel that if I buy fresh figs in Montreal it’s a sin to cook them.
The season is so short and the figs we get up here aren’t amazing, so it’s best to eat them at their peak ripeness, mouthful by juicy, fresh, raw mouthful. Preferably over a sink. Much like peaches, except the figs here don’t drip like that since they’ve been shipped so far. I did a lot of sink-dripping peach-eating in Seattle.
But Becky’s version with peaches was amazing. My 2 mouthfuls were better than all the tamales, tacos, honey, jam, pickles, and muffins I could have bought at the market. Food trucks are important at this market. Not like Portland food truck important. But sort of big.
And I had also interviewed Becky Selengut awhile back for CKUT radio in Montreal. She was lovely about the whole olive oil thing. Overall I’d loved all her recipes. Sustainable Quebec seafood is a bit different than Pacific, but her writing is hilarious (check her out in Edible Seattle) and her explanations of what to buy, how to buy it, and how to cook it are spot (prawn) on. (Horrible joke. No one should let me write.)
Other stand outs from her book I’ve made include the salmon with pinot noir (not farmed Atlantic), the shrimp with tangerine powder and smoked chipotle, and the green coconut curry with halibut. Basically, when I don’t know what to do with fish I go to that book. And then I laugh, and then I cook, and then I eat a great meal.
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