Smoked Fish in the Southland

The Accidental Foodie goes to Calumet Fisheries.

Oh boy, I love smoked fish. It's not that hard to make, get some fish, fire up the smoker (really any type of grilling device set on lo) and wait a few hours, Hey Presto, smoky love from the sea. In fact I think it's so easy, that I would never consider buying it. I suppose I have become jaded, I see those golden smoked beauties in the cold case, and I feel like someone is trying to sell me a $20-dollar-a-pound secret that I already know. Well sometimes I'm told to put down my tongs and take a spin on the merry-go-round. And man what a ride.



When someone says "fisheries" in Chicago, the person means a place that serves fried fish of some sort in a bag with fries and hot sauce. Calumet Fisheries is a little bit different in that they also offer fish smoked on the premises. We made the trip up to 95th ST, on a bright Sunday morning. We met Carlos who was working the counter and Ray who was tending to the smoker. They weren't too busy so they happily talked to Bonne Femme and me about what they do and showed us the smoker out back.







If for no other reason you should visit just to see the brick smokehouse. Perched between the store and the river, it is truly a relic of the past, no electric stainless steel chambers, just bricks, smoke and fish. The fish is hot smoked for about five hours with a mixture of hardwoods. Ray split some wood to give me an idea of the different aromas from the different woods.



Ray brines the fish before smoking, he said he would be happy to tell me the recipe if had had one, he does it all to taste.



Back inside Carlos offers a sample of the smoked shrimp. Yum. We get to talking, he reveals that he went to culinary school at CHIC, Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. After getting his certificate he went to work at the casino down the road, but he didn't like it and came back to Calumet. All the school talk started making the boys antsy, Carlos asks me what I would like.

"I dunno what's coming out of the smoker?" Little did I know Bonne Femme was one step ahead of me, outside:







She zeroed in on a piece of trout and a piece of salmon with pepper and garlic.





We got a shrimp dinner for the boys, they ate it all. The smoked fish doesn't come as a meal, you have to take it home and make your own magic. Smoked trout rillets maybe?

When You Visit:

While this part of town is remote, it is by no means intimidating. It is more industrial than anything else, on the other side of the bridge is one of Chicago's largest boat yards, Crowley's, they have a very nice ship's store. The bridge spans the Calumet river, not the Chicago. Calumet is also the name of the geologic region that starts roughly at 95th ST and stretches around the bottom of the Lake all the way to Michigan. There's a great book by Kenneth Schoon called Calumet Beginnings, that has a history of the area.

Calumet Fisheries
3259 E 95TH ST
Chicago, IL 60617

773-933-9855

calumetfisheries.com

Parking for Calumet Fisheries is on the street, and there are no tables. They are open 7 days 10am-10pm. Check it out.

Cheers.

The Accidental Foodie in Milwaukee

Cold enough for ya? If not then try Milwaukee in the Winter. We headed up there last weekend for a change of scenery. It was actually pretty warm there when we arrived Saturday morning, around 25F, little E kept calling it Hawaii.

Our first stop was The Milwaukee Art Museum. I highly recommend parking in the museum garage, it's the coolest carpark I have ever seen. Next we tried Wicked Hop for lunch, it had a nice pub atmosphere, and a lot of wraps on the menu. I had a wrap. After a couple of Lakefront IPA's, we sashayed across the street to the Milwaukee Public Market.

Sausage in the shape of a football, what will they think of next? At the market we loaded up on snacks for the slumber party: Beer, cupcakes and cold pack. Time to check in.

We booked into the Milwaukee Hilton. The front desk was kind enough to put us up in a "Murphy Bed" room ("You mean an executive suite?"): Double sized room, wet bar, fridge, and one full sized bed. We pushed the furniture around, set up a tent for the kids, and then went to the water park.

You see, the kids don't care too much about fine art, pub food or cheese counters, they came for the waterslides. Paradise Landing is a part of the hotel, so we were set for the evening.

For dinner we had smoky bacon cold pack and a chunk of Pleasant Ridge Reserve (my favorite cheese), along with the last of the magret sec and the smoked trout. We also had a focaccia from home and six pack of pilsner from Lakefront Brewery. We fell asleep watching cable.

Sunday morning H took pictures of the Ninjas he had won playing skee ball, and then we headed for our next stop the Sprecher Brewery Tour.

It was a brief tour that ended in a beer garden like setting where we could sample the brews and the kids could drink their fill of root beer.

After draining that joint, we headed down the street for a late lunch at Solly's Grille.

For those of you that are up on your hamburger stand history (I'm not), This place is a Mecca, making claim as the originator of the butter burger (Yes, a regional specialty where they put butter on their hamburgers). Food writers from around the nation travel to the counter service spot to bow down before the butter burger. The boys each had a Solly cheeseburger (ez butter), I had a Super Glendale.

That would be a burger with Monterey Jack, mushrooms and grilled onions. Boo-ya. I liked the size of the sandwiches (small) you could enjoy it without feeling like you ate a whole cow. Everyone was very friendly and the service was great.

That's about it, We made the late afternoon drive back to the Southside and got to bed early. Milwaukee is a great place to get away for the night, two hours or less away from Chicago and it's very reasonable: The Hilton, with admission to the water park, and parking, and some voodoo drink Bonne Femme ordered, was less than $175. Fun and food without a fuss.

Cheers.

I wanna be like Bill.

The Accidental Foodie cooks from a book

Recipes

Chicken Italian Sausage with parsley and cheese stuffed into ravioli

Peposo Notturno - Beef shanks braised in Chianti

Dear Gentle Readers:

Put on your foodie hat (chinstrap extra tight), we are diving into a book for this week's adventure. Don't run away, we aren't mushroom hunting with Tolstoy or soft boiling eggs like Toni Morrison, we are looking at Heat by Bill Buford. In this book the author goes on a culinary quest that begins in Mario Batali's restaurant, Babbo, and ends up in Italy to try to find answers to such questions like when did eggs first become an ingredient to for pasta. During his search, Buford learns about rustic Italian preparations, made in home kitchens for centuries, and how they have evolved into fancy pants plates in hipster restaurants. I like the rusty preparation part, but do I have to read aloud while stirring the polenta?

Bonne Femme at the whisk.

I resisted reading Heat, for a long time. The book, for me was like lentil soup: the thought of it didn't really appeal to me but but once I got into it I realized it was really good. You should be able to find this book at the library, it also just came out in paperback. Bonne Femme had the idea of cooking out of it and what she wanted to make just happened to coincide with what I was working on at school.

Peposo Notturno - Pepper by night

Please turn to page 274 in your books. The recipe is so simple that you just have to try it. Basically it is braising beef in wine for a really long time with only pepper salt and garlic added. The hard part is getting the meat. On Page 272 Buford goes in some detail off the knife skills used to attack the beef shank. Since I had carved one up in Kitchen class a few days earlier I was raring to go. I started out with one nine pound beef shank.


After a lot of cutting (I don't recommend this for people who are short on patience or sharp knives) I came away with three pounds of beef shank cubes. As for the other six pounds, I used the bone and trimmings to make a beef stock, and I got about 8 ounces of suet from rendering the fat. But first, I loaded up the dutch oven with the meat, poured in the Chianti a bunch of ground black pepper, a head of garlic, brought it to a boil then set it for stew (about 225F in the oven). Eight hours later you'll have shredded Italian beef. There are lots of little things you could do or add that would make this dish better, but then it wouldn't be Pepposo Notturno.

While that's cooking let's make some pasta.

Making pasta is not particularly hard to do, but describing the process is, so I'm not going to try. I don't make it very often and I always have to look for a recipe to get back on track. After reading Heat I never have to look a recipe again. On page 183, Buford documents one person's pasta recipe: One etto, one egg. One egg For every hundred grams of flour. It works. For the ravioli I made, I used three etti and three eggs.



For the ravioli filling, I wanted to use the Italian Cheese and Parsley sausage that has been so popular around here. This time I made it with chicken. Here's the portions I used:


512 g Chicken
100g Parmesan cheese
10 g salt
4 g white pepper
3 g coriander
10g fresh parsley
5 g dry milk
a little vinegar and water to smooth out the binding.

For the pasta
250 g AP flour
50 g Whole wheat flour
3 large eggs

Since I was making this up, it didn't occur to me that I might have to cook the meat mixture before stuffing the pasta. So I sauteed the forcemeat then I minced it in the Cuisinart.

The listed portions made about 40 to small raviolis which isn't much for a party of seven. But I made them as a garnish for consommé. Why soup? I liked the idea of using one whole chicken to make the stock, the soup and the garnish.

Everybody had a good time at the party.

molding polenta

candid moments at the table

Peposo Notturno with polenta and spinaci alla romana

In a recent essay for class I wrote, "Fixing food should not get in the way of a good life, it should be a part of it." The instructor asked if that was original. At the time I didn't really think much about the line, I was just trying to close out an essay, however I did write it and I do believe it. Anyone can make good tasting food at home, and when you have fun making it, it tastes even better.

Cheers.

Cochinita Pibil con Aloha: The Accidental Foodie in Kauai

The third in a series of occasional articles about cooking in Kauai.

I don't go to gourmet stores. OK, I do and I love the the artisanal meats, the European cheeses, the beautifully package pastas. But, when I am in these stores, such as Dean & Delucca or Fox & Obel or Katzinger's, I am a tourist, and I hate feeling like a tourist. Over the past couple of years my cooking has been evolving to working with ingredients that I can get nearby. Now I can't say this is about "eating local," but I got tired of travelling fourteen miles to the nearest Trader Joe's, or thirty miles to the nearest Whole Foods to stock my kitchen on a weekly basis (I still go to Joe's about one a month). So my cooking and has changed to take advantage of the best of what I can get from Walt's (only a five minute walk). Now that Farmer's markets are in full swing, we are getting wonderful produce from Michigan and great poultry from downstate. It's all a matter of getting to know your surroundings; we have been living in the Southland for almost four years, and I am still finding new and interesting places to get food. In fact I am starting a new web page devoted to "Small market" shopping in the Southland. We'll see how it goes.

Finding ingredients close at hand was a little different in Kauai. An initial impression of the Hawaiian Islands may be that you get only pineapple and sugar locally and everything else is shipped in from the mainland. Adding to that impression is the fact that Hawaii still holds the top slot as the state that consumes the most Spam(who doesn't love potted meat?). However, as reported in a previous post, there is a lot of great local produce available at the Farmer's Markets (Called the Sunshine Markets). But what about the meat?



In Kauai I saw only one butcher cold case in the big supermarkets and when I saw it, it was not in use. Usually I found meat packaged in Styrofoam trays, I suspect it comes that way from the mainland. I suppose I could have asked around to find out when the would have the case open (If ever) but I was already cutting into beach time. I had discovered on the Internet that there is a hog farm on Kauai, I just couldn't find it in the market.


Then my mom found a newspaper ad touting island raised pork should on sale at the Big Save. I immediately rolled up to Hanalei to pick my pork, but they were out (**no rain checks, supply may vary by store**). Phooey. I looked in Kapaa, Lihue, and then we went to the Southside.

photo credit: Ekarhu

In Waimea, we hit the shave ice shack then onto the Big Save where I found my quarry.

At this point, gentle readers, I should be sharing with you some hooped up Hawaiian recipe for a pork filled luau, and at the time, I thought about doing that, but I didn't want to dig a hole in our gracious hosts' yard. But the yard does play an important role in what we made.

A Mexican Luau.

One of my favorite party dishes is slow roasted pork tacos. It started last year after I went on a tirade about an article by Mark Bittman where he said it was impossible to find a good taco outside of the Southwest. I had adapted a Rick Bayless recipe for pit roasted pork wrapped in banana leaves. since then I made it several times using a whole roast and omitting the banana leaves. It's not that it is hard to get banana leaves in Chicago, they can be found frozen in Asian or Latin groceries, but I didn't want to make a special trip, and I was using the smoker. In Kauai things were switched around: I didn't have the smoker, but I did have a stand of banana leaves.

So I selected a leaf and gave it a good washing. The night before I marinated the pork in citrus juice, garlic and spices.

The next day I arranged the leaves on a roasting pan placed the steaks, and poured the marinade over top.

Then on a gas grill preheated, set on low, for three hours, until the internal temp it at least 180F up to 200F if you really want the meat to shred.

While the pork was cooking I made a habanero salsa: I roasted in a dry skillet six peppers, 3 cloves of garlic then threw them in a blender with 20 grams of seeded guava and some coconut milk.

Time to eat.

The banana leaves gave the pork an anise flavoring that blended perfectly with the marinade. Serve with red onions pickled overnight in citrus juice and you have the perfect Yucatán treat in Kauai.

Aloha.