Exciting developments with seafood

This winter, I’ve been learning how to cook fish.  Every Saturday morning at the winter farmer’s market, I’ve been buying super-fresh fish from the Globe Fish ladies (direct from Boston Fish Pier) and every Saturday evening I’ve been gaining confidence and mastering the two central challenges of fish-cookery:

• how to turn it over in the pan without destroying it, and
• how to know when it’s done.

My guide has been “Ad Hoc at Home” by Thomas Keller, which E. received as a holiday gift from his boss.  It claims to contain “family-style recipes” but at first glance the recipes seemed too fussy for my cooking style (duck…roux…gastrique…).  But, there are some good basics here, and well-written instructions.

Caramelized sea scallops. I made these three different weeks, partially because they were so good the first week it was all we could think about, partially to practice my scallopsmanship, and partially to use up the clarified butter I made the first week. The scallops from the fish ladies are so sweet. After brining them for a few minutes, searing on each side in the clarified butter, then squeezing on some lemon juice, they’re done. There’s a neat trick to scallops: they stick to the pan until they’re ready to turn. Once they loosen up, they’re ready to flip over, and it’s easy to do it.

Wild cod en persillade.  Yesterday, cod and haddock were the two thickest non-salmon fillets available. Tip from the fish ladies: although the haddock had skin to deal with, it was sweeter than the cod. So I dealt with the skin, which was actually easy to remove with a sharp knife, and made wild haddock en persillade instead. I watered down some whole-grain dijon mustard and brushed it over one side of the fillet, then dipped that side in bread crumbs. A persillade is a mixture of bread crumbs and parsley, but I didn’t have any parsley, so at this point I was making wild haddock en bread crumbs. After one or two minutes in hot pan on the stovetop, I moved it to a warm oven for 8 or so minutes, finishing it up without the need for any messy spatula aerobatics. Joy of Cooking makes the audacious claim that “all fish is done at 137 degrees.” So that’s how I knew it was done.  Yum, yum, and yum.