Breakfast

Catfish Veracruz.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: none.

We made this dish the night before so I had leftover sauce as well as two leftover raw catfish fillets. Still, making this unusual sauce with tomatoes, olives, capers, cinnamon and cloves--a Mexican classic--does not take terribly long. I found I had most of the ingredients already in the pantry.

Our friend Marty declared that this was "the best fish I've ever eaten. It didn't taste fishy at all." Well, that's a double confirmation. The nurse at the school where I teach my "food appreciation" classes also announced recently that she had made the dish for a family dinner after he kids brought home the recipe and said it was the best thing yet.

For you fish lovers and low-fat followers, this is an excellent choice. It's packed with protein and few carbs. The catfish was farmed right here in the U.S. and the only fat is the extra-virgin olive oil used to saute the onions.

Try it. You'll like it.

Kids Make Guatemalan Chicken Pepian

Just when I thought our "food appreciation" classes would be leaving Guatemala to continue our virtual world food tour our friend Grace, who works at the local library, e-mailed that she had located a Guatemalan cookbook. After paging through many intriguing recipes, I decided we must extend our stay another week so we could make this traditional Mayan-influenced dish of chicken in a spicy red sauce: chicken pepian.

The high point of this dish is the sauce, made very simply by processing (in our case grinding in the molcajete) toasted seeds, cooked tomatoes, tomatillos, red peppers, all seasoned with a bit of cinnamon. Like other Mayan dishes we love, there is no cooking oil or added fat involved, yet the flavors are a revelation.

Start by cooking a whole chicken cut into pieces (we used only wing pieces--you could use just legs or thighs as well), in three cups of water seasoned with 1 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cook for about 30 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and set aside, reserving the broth.


While the chicken is cooking, chop two ripe tomatoes and one large tomatillo. Stem and seed two large, dried red peppers (such as California pepper, guajillo, New Mexico, cascabel, ancho--anything of that sort). Place the tomatoes, tomatillos and peppers in a saucepan with 1 cup water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook about 15 minutes, or until everything is very tender.

Meanwhile, in the molcajete (or food processor) grind 1/2 cup toasted sesame seeds and 1 tablespoon toasted hulled pumpkin seeds into a fine powder. Add 1/4 teaspoon annatto paste (available in Latin groceries) and continue grinding until the paste is fully incorporated.


When the tomatoes, tomatillos and peppers are cooked, remove them from the saucepan with a slotted spoon and add to the ground seeds along with 2/3 cup French bread (or other white bread, crust removed) moistened with chicken broth and 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour. Continue grinding until everything is fully incorporated and you barely recognize any pieces of food, except perhaps some pepper skin, as shown here. (If you like a spicier sauce, you may add hot red pepper flakes to taste at this point.)

Scrape the mix into a pan, add 2 cups of the broth from cooking your chicken and 1 stick cinnamon broken in half. Cook over moderate heat until it is reduced to a thick sauce.

Next, strain the sauce either by pushing it with a spatula through a sieve or using a commercial strainer as shown here. The kids loved this part, turning the big wooden pestle round and round until the liquid had been pressed into the pot and all that remained in the strainer was a dry mass of seed and pepper skins. The finished sauce is velvety smooth, yet very rustic and exotic tasting with flavors quite foreign to our American palate. I can't think of any better way to describe it than very Mayan.

Place the chicken pieces in the pan with the sauce, toss to coat thoroughly and cook slowly for about 15 minutes, or until the chicken is heated through and almost falling off the bone. As you can see, it almost looks like barbecued chicken, but without any of the cloying sweetness.

We served this to the kids just like this as their reward for all the grinding they did, saving the leftover sauce. That constituted a snack. Chicken pepian would make a cracking good dinner with brown rice and perhaps some steamed chayote squash. Ladle extra sauce over the chicken so that it oozes into the rice.

The kids begged for seconds. We've rarely tasted chicken this good.

Note: anatto is the very tough, brick red seed from the achiote tree used in cuisines around the Caribbean and also as a dye. Its smell is pungent, but the flavor fairly benign. Annatto can also be found as a commercial food coloring in processed foods such as cheese and margerine.

Lunch

Leftover lamb shoulder chop with Romesco sauce, bulgar with lemon and black olives, smothered okra with corn and diced tomatoes.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

We do love our leftovers, although this does sound like an add combo at first blush--a sort of Mediterranean-Caribbean fusion. In fact, it all went down quite nicely. The okra, of course, is from the garden. The season will soon be over for them, but we couldn't have asked for more from our sturdy band of okra plants. We've stewed them, curried them and pickled them and still they keep coming. What a great vegetable.

Dark Days: Sorrel Sauce from the Garden

In the course of researching an article on rhubarb recently I discovered that a close relation is sorrel. Oxalic acid makes rhubarb leaves toxic. It gives sorrel leaves a distinct and almost addictive tartness, although sorrel should not be eaten to excess either.

We planted sorrel from seed in the garden at my daughter's school. The plants thrived for a while, but now there's no sign of them. The kids liked the citrusy flavor so much they ate the sorrel down to the nub.

In our own garden we have two sorrel plants. They seem to be perfectly content in average soil amended with compost and fin ull sun with some shade in the afternoon. Sorrel is perenniel and holds up well to our winters here in the District of Columbia. That makes it one of the first greens available in spring when we are still waiting for the rest of the garden to germinate.

Sorrel grows wild as "sheep sorrel" (Rumex acetosella). The garden varieties, (Rumex acetosa), with long, narrow leaves growing in clumps, and "French sorrel" (Rumex scatacus), with smaller, rounder leaves growing in mats, are perhaps best known for their role in sorrel soup. Sorrel will also brighten a salad or omelet and makes a piquant sauce for fish or foul.

The sauce is a fairly simple matter of sweating shallots in butter, "melting" a couple of big handfuls of sorrel leaves, incorporating a bit of white wine and then finishing with a large dose of heavy cream.

I rarely see sorrel in stores. Perhaps one of the vendors at your farmers market will have some for sale. Otherwise, sorrel is so easy to grow, there's no reason not to have some in your herb garden or even in a pot on the deck.

Note: to use the sorrel leaves, remove the stem and tough portion of the vein by grasping the leafing part with one hand and pulling the stem backwards with the other.

Sorrel sauce:

2 medium shallots, minced
1 tablespoon butter
2 bunches sorrel, about 20 leaves each, stem and tough vein removed, leaves finely chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 2/3 cup heavy cream

In a medium sauce pan over moderately-low heat, melt the butter and sweat the shallots until soft, about 8 minutes. Add chopped sorrel leaves and "melt" (the leaves will quickly cook down and become extremely tender). Add white wine, bring to a simmer and cook until reduced by about 1/4. Add cream, bring to a simmer and cook until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.

The sauce can be made ahead and reheated. Here it's used to give the star treatment to a free-range chicken breast from Pennsylvania.

Pin Bones Plus a Bitchin' Herb Sauce

I was prepping salmon steaks for the brunch we're catering tomorrow when my wife looked over my shoulder and asked, "Have you checked for pin bones?"

Pin bones?

Yes I do check for those little pin bones when I'm making fish fillets. You have to take a needle-nosed pliers to them and they don't always come willingly. We don't want anyone gagging over our fish, do we?

But I guess I don't make salmon steaks often enough because sure enough I did begin to locate pin bones in the thick, fleshy part of the salmon steak. And not just on one side of the steak. Both sides had pin bones.

My wife was fuming.

"How much did you pay for that fish?" she asked.

"Eleven dollars sumthin'," I replied.

"Eleven dollars for salmon and they don't even take out the pin bones!" she shrieked.

Well, this was a first. Because my wife then picked up the phone and called the seafood department at Whole Foods where I'd purchased the salmon and proceeded to conduct an inquisition over pin bones with the clerk who answered the call.

"Some customers like to cook the fish with the bones in it?" I heard my wife say ing in a rather sarcastic tone, obviously repeating something the clerk had said.

It wasn't a very productive conversation. The manager of the seafood department would not be in until later in the day. But we did establish that it is policy at our local Whole Foods not to remove the pin bones from salmon steaks (or any other fish that I've purchased there) and that at least one of the clerks thinks customers like to cook fish with bones in it. For the flavor, presumably.

"I think that's obscene that they don't take out the pin bones," my wife said. "And for $11 a pound, you get to stand there and pull out the bones!"

Actually, I think it was $11.99 a pound.

That set my wife off on a rant about Whole Foods for about the next 30 minutes. "I am so glad we are getting a Harris Teeters," she said.

To tell the truth, it didn't faze me at all that they don't remove the pin bones from the salmon steaks at Whole Foods. I guess my expectations are just not very high...

But that wasn't the theme of this post. I wanted to report back on Kevin's suggestion for a sorrel sauce to serve with these salmon steaks.

I picked some sorrel this morning and ground it up with the mortar and pestle. But I also cheated a little. I already had a container of my up-to-now favorite Spring garlic and herb sauce, having made a bunch with the kids in my "food appreciation" classes to go with the asparagus we cooked this week.

I added the sorrel to that sauce, which only improved it.

This is my go-to sauce for poached asparagus, crudite, salmon--even roasted chicken--made with the first hearbs to appear in Spring. It's always an improvisation, depending on what's in the garden. So no real recipe. But you can follow this basic process:

Place a peeled garlic clove and 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt in the mortar and grind it almost to a liquid. Then add small handfulls of your favorite herbs, such as dill, tarragon, mint, sorrel. I also like anise hyssop in this sauce, but hyssop is not so easy to find if you don't grow it yourself.

Grind the herbs until they are almost a liquid as well. This is great upper-body exercise. Now add mayonnaise, probably 1/2 cup, plus a good drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, a teaspoon of rice vinegar, a healthy squeeze of lemon. When all of that is incorporated, give it a taste and adjust seasonings. If it's too strong, work in some more mayonnaise.

You will probably find more uses for this sauce than I can think of. It holds well in the refrigerator. I end up snacking on it with leftover meats and vegetables.

And thanks again, Kevin, for the tip on the sorrel.