And that's a good root

Buying groceries is complicated. This should not be the case! There are only two real options for groceries in my neighborhood: Safeway and Whole Foods. Safeway is cheaper, and has standard brands (sometimes a better spice selection). Whole Foods has a more nuanced selection, and their fresh food (meat, fish, produce) is better. This seems simple, yes? I have found ways to make it not.

This past Thursday, I decided to break in the as-yet-unnamed food processor with Puréed Carrots with Currants and Spices. Why this dish? Mostly because the word "Puréed" was right in the name, which seemed suggestive of whirling blades. Also, the ingredient list is pretty short, ginger marmalade is on it, and the only real steps are 1) soften the carrots, b) mix everything up using various methods of mixing stuff up. Of course, this is a side dish, which leads to a separate problem. But I decided to fix that problem with Grilled Bass with Fennel. This was chosen because there were very few ingredients, the cooking takes all of ten minutes, and I'd get a chance to use my broiler for the first time. Flame on!

I came up with a shopping plan. Safeway would not have fennel or ginger marmalade, I decided. But it should have everything else. So I would go to Whole Foods, get the fancy stuff, and then move on to Safeway for a nice, cheap finish. The Whole Foods leg of the journey was complicated by the fact that I, ah, didn't know what fennel looked like. As it turns out, fennel is what onions would look like if you looked at an onion and decided "No, this isn't cute enough to be a Pokemon" and then fixed that shit. BAM!

That photo was actually taken later in the story, I just thought it would be educational. The whiskey is there to prove that when a friend on the internet says that it's whiskey time and I make a joke about joining in, I'm actually playing for the realest of realsies.

Anyway. There was also ginger marmalade, but we'll get there.

On to the Safeway. Lemon, parsley, carrots, butter, check. I even picked up a moro and a gedesa because I had no idea what the hell they were. The answer was "blood orange" and "plum," respectively. Plums are delicious (and in this case, yellow), and blood oranges are not. But you know what my Safeway doesn't have? Bass. They have tilapia! They have tilapia filets, and whole tilapia, and if there's a third form of fish (tilapia plasma?) they probably had that too. There was salmon. And swai. Wtf is swai? I'd never even heard of it, and not in the jokey way that I pretend to not know what leeks look like. As it turns out, swai has a way cooler alternate name: IRIDESCENT SHARK. And you know what iridescent sharks are? Shark catfish!* That's two different kinds of fish at the same time! AND ALSO CATS! What I really wanted there was a double-italic that would lean even harder, but that's not a real thing.

But I didn't know all that about swai at the time, so instead I threw my hands up in disgust and went back to the Whole Foods. Whole Foods had bass. There was Chilean sea bass, and also whole black bass. As it turns out, Chilean sea bass is ridiculously expensive. Whole black bass are apparently pretty cheap, poundwise, until it turns out that they weigh the fish before they do any requested filleting, which makes it possibly more expensive than the other kind. Standing there in front of all those fish mocking me with their dead impassive eyes, I knew hopelessness. The guy behind the counter suggested cod, mostly to keep me from crying in front of the other customers. I took the fish and ran.

So, the cooking. The Carrots are up first. The recipe calls for eight medium sized carrots. What counts as a medium sized carrot? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm thinking that these eight sort of average out into medium size.

They get cut into inch long pieces, which would have thrown me for a loop just a few months ago. But now I know that you can use your thumb to estimate an inch. So simple!

After the carrots get cut up, they go in a pot with two cups of boiling water, covered, to soften for 25 minutes.

That means it's time to prepare the remaining ingredients. The carrots get puréed with butter, cinnamon, and verjuice, so those can hang out in the food processor until the carrots are ready.

And since I have some extra time, this is a great opportunity to check the broiler. I've never used one before, and I'm already starting to wish that my oven had heating elements up top so that they functioned as an in-oven broiler with adjustable racks. Because this thing is intimidating. That's not a lot of room in there for tall things down the line. And do I cook straight on that grate? What's going on? I spend a lot of the carrot-cooking time looking at sites about how to correctly use a broiler.

I do find the time to set up the remaining carrot-related ingredients. After puréeing, you fold in the ginger marmalade preserves and currants golden raisins, so I set those aside.  I'm showing off the ginger preserves here because they are amazing and delicious, and I think they deserve attention.

Then I realized that if I show the jar and tell you about everything, there's no real reason to include the closeup photo of the preserves sitting on the raisins. I rectify this by adding a face, since it worked so well on the fennel.

The original plan was to use the time while the carrots were softening to actually make the fish. But that time is cut short when I realize that there's a burning smell in the kitchen and it's coming from the carrots. See, the cookbook never mentioned a temperature to boil the water at, or reducing heat, or stirring, or otherwise checking on the carrots, so I assumed they would just be fine. This was an incorrect assumption.

As it turned out, the carrots themselves were relatively unscathed. The pot was not so lucky.

Here are my carrots in the food processor. If asked, I'm going to lie to everyone and claim that the idea was to caramelize the carrots.

Post processing. 

And post processing with raisins and preserves folded in, which now that I think about it, looks a lot like the previous picture but in a bowl. Ah well.

Rather than a cleverly timed meal, I now have a side dish and nothing to eat it with. I decide that the Puréed Carrots with Currants and Spices will also taste good at room temperature, and advance to the fish.

TIME OUT: There are confessions I need to make regarding the lateness of this entry. The first is that I have the amazing ability to procrastinate procrastination. The second is that I thought that Community would be a good show to start watching while I typed, and that is the WORST IDEA I'VE EVER HAD (Jeff/Annie OTP). And third, I'm making carnitas tonight and that somehow involved tequila and now I'm definitely paying attention to the blog and not to this AMAZING episode of Community which is the best half-hour of television I've seen outside of Firefly and making me want to watch An Americal Tail. Also I miss having pet rats.

Ahem. So this cod walks into a bar. And there's a series of crazy events, and it winds up filleted and on my kitchen counter. And that would have been a great intro before I actually uploaded the photos and realized that the first one involves fennel, and not cod. This is what slicing up fennel is like. The end result is partway between an onion and bootleg bok choy, but it smells like cheap licorice.

The following items go into the fennel mixture. The fennel itself get softened up in oil first for a few minutes, then fennel seeds and parsley go in at the end. The remaining parsley is for garnish. 

Here's that fish I was talking about. I think the trouble here is that the whole thing originally came from one animal, which meant it wasn't exactly mirrored or parallel. What I mean by that is that cutting everything in half leaves me with a wide, flat piece, and a thick, raised piece of fish. These are going to cook at different rates, and there's not much I can do about it.

The fennel mixture. This will go on top of my fish. It is aromatic and kind of delicious, but it has a problem. Its taste does not spread. It is not a sauce so much as a collection of objects. We'll come back to this.  

The fennel mixture is keeping warm on top of the stove, and so its time to examine my preheated broiler. I imagine this is what the gates of hell look like, if entry to hell was based on successfully figuring out kitchen equipment. And now I can't tell whether success is a good thing or not. Whose idea was it that the hottest function of the oven can only be successfully operated when you are awkwardly positioned on your hands and knees on the kitchen floor?

The bass cod goes in for a few minutes per side. That's pretty simple except for two issues. The first is that I haven't oiled the broiler pan enough, which leads to awkward flipping and some random fish bits stuck and burning. The second is that I forgot what the second was. The third is that I didn't want to keep losing heat by opening the broiler and checking two separate pieces of fish to see if both were done at the same time. 

In the end, I cooked the two pieces of fish until the thicker bit was done, and wound up with this. Despite everything, it looks like real food.

The verdict: Heavily mixed. The Puréed Carrots with Currants Raisins and Spices was really nice, despite the burning. The cinnamon and ginger pair really well with the sweet taste of the carrots, and keep the verjuice from overshadowing everything else. There were some tastes I associate with baked sweet potatoes and burnt marshmallows floating around, but it was an easy dish that I would happily repeat again on lower heat. It should be very easy to scale up as well, which means I can bust it out for dinner parties. The Grilled Bass Cod with Fennel is a little more problematic. The fish itself is just peppered and salted and cooked, and that's fine. The fennel mixture that goes on top was pretty interesting. But it's very contained. This isn't even a sauce that can be spread around, it's like individual pieces of vegetable. I ate it, and enjoyed myself. And in the end, the biggest issue was that if I wanted to make fish I might as well go for the Flounder.



*Shark catfish can be found at Cave Mountain Lake National Park, home of Cave Mountain Lake String of Nouns.