One Fish, Two Fish

I'm awaiting my flight to New York in the Managua airport trying to find a comfortable way to sit that doesn't disturb my various sand burns from surfing myself straight into the ground more times than I can proudly count and debating calling work to tell them an unexpected hurricane is keeping my flight grounded.

I just spent the weekend with my whole family- a real rarity since all the kids transplanted themselves in scattered cities across the country- near the building cite of our house on the pacific coast of Nicaragua. During prep in the weeks leading up to this trip, my knife grazed my fingers a little too closely a few too many times while I day dreamed about surfing and reeling in my main course out of the pacific ocean. And I'd spent so much time watching YouTube videos of Bourdain eating armadillos and iguana and Andrew Zimmerman snackin on cheese crawling with maggots and googling Nicaraguan food that by the time I got off the plane in Managua I was practically bouncing off the airport walls and attacked my cab driver, Rommel, with questions about Indio Viejo, a typical Nicaraguan dish, and where to find it.

I actually think I scared him when I asked about the armadillo situation. He was instructed to take me straight to the hotel so this was goona be quite the battle to get him to help me find food but after a little badgering and two stops to local street vendors for strange fruits, he finally budged. Rommel was taking me to get some real "authentic" Nicaraguan food...at the mall...in the food court. Super. But I'd take what I could get.

So Rommel and I stood in front of the glass encasing a buffet of what comprises a typical Nicaraguan meal deciding what to eat. I'd point to the foreign product and he'd first give me the Spanish name followed by an English translation until I finally decided on enough food to fill two plates. The look Rommel gave me then is a look I came to learn over a few days as the "Are-you-nuts-look." But he let me buy my "one-of-everything" special and we carried our trays of authentic Nicaraguan food to a choice spot right between Pizza Hut and Quiznos. As I lapped up my delicious plantains with fried cheese and questioned him on the ingredients of each item, he explained to me why he strongly felt Pizza Hut had better pie than Pizzeria Lazarro next to it.

We were parting ways for the day but he was coming back to the hotel at night to pick me up to grab my family from the airport. When I got in the car I told him- "habla conmigo en espanol solamente por favor." Rommel agreed to only speak Spanish with me for the rest of the time and we were off. When we got to the airport and saw the plane was delayed thirty minutes, I jumped on the opportunity to yell "Vamos a comer!” He said nothing was open around here except maybe some street venders in the barrio, but I might have to "correr" a little if we went there..."run." I insisted on eating somewhere that held the potential for me to have to drop my food and sprint. But that never happened because when we got to the little gathering of people along the side of the road with pots over a grill, he deemed the food of questionable quality and forced me back in the car. He promised we'd eat armadillo the next day, but we never passed the spot where he said served some dillo, that'd feast will have to wait until the next trip.

On our drive out to the coast, we stopped at a fruit stand off the Pan-American highway where we perused fruits we’d never seen before and fruits we easily recognized like plantains and papaya’s the size of a mini-cooper.When I pointed to a fruit I didn’t recognize, Rommel split one open with a knife and stretched out his hand with a sweet, buttery “zapote.”

Someone pointed to the pile of limes and suggested we get some to accompany all the fish we’d be catching but we were corrected- the green things shaped like limes...were oranges.

Our next adventure was in the grocery store closest to where we’d be staying, a real rough 30 minute drive. I bolted into the grocery store, expecting to have a full cart within seconds, but when Steve, my stepsister’s fiancé, found me a few minutes later, my cart was empty. I was a little lost.

All the dairy was sealed in bags instead of cartons or jugs like were used to, the eggs filed like the rest of the dry goods in shelves at room temp, cheese hanging from the aisle-ends in bags that were leaking drips smelly juice, and the meat counter downright made me sick. It's not that I don't like eating testicles and heart- I had beef heart carpaccio last week- it's the weird old bloody knife stored next to them that freaked me out.

Rice held the biggest real estate in the building, covering the entire back wall of the store with burlap sacks of different varieties, and the next in line were beans, in similarly sized bags.

When I let go of all the expectations I had for what a grocery store should be, I started to fill my cart slowly but surely. I found cilantro that was identifiable only by it's smell. It looks like dandelion greens, and actually has spines at the end of the leaves, but the second you smell it- you know it’s cilantro.

I spotted garlic that must have been grown nearby because it was covered in dirt. And as I wandered around looking for lemons until I finally realized- I wasn’t going to find them. If they weren’t grown here, they probably wouldn’t be here. So everything I planned on cooking evolved as I learned to adapt to what was available… and I was excited again! Someone get me to the water- I wanted to catch and kill our dinner- I had plans for my star fruit, pineapple, and rice.

We drove over potholes and dodged livestock until we finally found where our boat captain Jeff said was the “marina where the gringos keep their boats.” Jeff is a chef of sorts. He graduated from a culinary school in Florida before working in some spots around Miami and finally landed himself in Nicaragua where he was the executive chef of our property, now caters, spear fishes and put heat to whatever sea creatures he gets on the line that day- and he knows exactly what to do with every different fish that comes on board.

It was a blast fishing with someone that thought like me- “Sooo..Once we catch it, I’m goona kill it, then what would that fish pair well with?”

We trolled the seas and positioned ourselves to catch a ton of mackerel, but not the standard mackerel you've tasted. Jeff explained that it didn’t have that musky flavor that mackerel typically have- this was sweet and pure, words I’ve never even contemplated using to describe mackerel. But I trusted him and when we were breaking them down later and he held out a sliver of flesh from the skeleton of the mackerel, I couldn’t come up with better words than sweet and pure to advertise this beautiful fish.

We coasted the coast, admiring the untouched landscape of Nicaragua and landed countless crevalle jacks. Halfway through the day, Jeff changed the jack’s name to "lobsters" since he said this fish was awful, only the locals ate it, but we could make trades in the fishing village that would score us a bunch of lobster in their place.

We trolled out in the ocean for a while, pulling in “lobsters” and mackerel from time to time. At some point, I realized, if we didn’t catch the snapper I was out for…we weren’t having snapper for dinner. I was at the mercy of the hunter and gatherer’s diet. I let the idea go, and finally gave up my fishing duties and retreated to solely butchering, which I kind of prefer anyway. We threw the live jacks into the hull of the boat, but slit the bellies of all the mackerel, cleaned them out, and packed them into an iced cooler.

The day's catch was ample enough to allow us to make some serious trades at the co-op. The fishing co-op was a shack, filled with a bunch of fishermen sitting atop a bunch of industrial sized coolers avoiding the rays outside. I finally understood what Jeff meant when he called the jacks lobsters- once we got some cordobas for our jacks, we used that money to buy us two pounds of really pretty and miniature sized spiny lobster tails. Then, Jeff flung open one of the ice chests, revealing just what I was hoping to catch the whole day- beautiful, fresh red snapper. Sold. We bartered over the largest one in there, sitting amongst some of the biggest, and most beautiful flounder I’d ever seen. In tubs around us lay hundreds of pounds of corvina, just caught in the Pacific Ocean only a few yards away.

We made our trades and hit the road. Jeff and I were pretty anxious to break down the fish we’d won at sea. At Jeff’s house, we set up a cooler, a lawn chair, and a hose- our butcher shop. I broke down one mackerel- just like my butcher from work Tony showed me last week, and then Jeff broke down another, blindingly faster than me, throwing his scraps to the stray kittens running by our feet. He went away and emerged from his house holding gifts- one was his Japanese sashimi knife, the other, a package of powdered wasabi. He must have been the only one in the country with it because he said you couldn’t pay a single soul in the area to eat raw fish and when we sampled the body of the mackerel right after the first cut, his buddy, one of the locals, got pretty squeamish.

Dinner was brewing in my mind; we had very little ingredients at our house and even less time to throw it together. When I walked into the kitchen, I surveyed our fridge and figured out the only things remaining that we needed to put all this fish on the table- butter, olive oil, cilantro, and limes. I had a crew of family members as my cooks- some were sent off to the restaurant down the hill to purchase those goods from their kitchen, and poor Steve was relinquished to the sink where I showed him how to scale our massive snapper with the back of the knife.

Soon enough, scales were flying up and over him, landing across the kitchen and I assured him it was pretty normal to find scales everywhere- in your shirt, in your hair, some would probably make it into you pants if you were lucky.

I had no idea what this mackerel was going to be like cooked, so I took a small filet to the ripping grill, laid it on there with only olive oil and salt on it, waited a minute or two and took a bite. I ran into the kitchen and made everyone try it- it was unbelievable. It had to be the best fish I’d ever tasted. I’m around fish all day long at work, some of the nicest fish money can buy, and not even the priciest, most impeccably prepared fish at work has tasted that incredible. The fish that arrives in front of you at a restaurant has been handled a fair amount- the fisherman who caught it has touched it, whoever receives the fish from fisherman and guts it, the shipper who packs it up, the delivery guy who brings it into the restaurant, the butcher who fabricates it, the line cook that puts it in a pan or on a grill, the sous chefs to check it’s seasoning, and then it finally arrives in front of you. That's at least six sets of hands. I caught the mackerel, I gutted it, fabricated it, cooked it…and then it was on our table. Just my hands touched our food tonight. Some where in between the ocean and the table, something is lost, but in this case, something preserved.

On the stove was makeshift salsa from the fruits we picked up off the Pan-American highway- a little pineapple, star fruit, and cilantro. I sliced paper-thin samples of avocado and star fruit and laid them between the just barely grilled mackerel.

Meanwhile, Steve had finished showering the kitchen with scales and was mid-stuff of the snapper. We filled our trade with limes and big cilantro leaves, rubbed it with olive oil and salt and placed it directly on the grill.

On the grill shelf above the massive fish lay all of mini spiny lobster tails split in half with just salt and oil.

Once their shells started to turn a little pink- I pulled them off and poured melted butter over the top and instructed my family to eat them with their hands. I opened the grill to reveal the charring snapper, his eyes had turned white, signaling he was somewhere near cooked. I poked at the skin a little and flipped it. Seconds later, our snapper was on the table- belly spilling burnt limes out onto the plate. Once I lifted the crispy skin off to the side and revealed the perfect meat of the snapper- the fam dug in. Paired with just a little tomato and onion jam, the snapper was gone in seconds. I picked away at the eyes, collar and head, and my family dodged the bones of the filet. Our only side was rice- dotted with tomatoes, garlic, and cilantro…and all but a few lobster tails were gone.

It had been so long since I’d looked around a table filled with food and seen my entire family. It was a sweet reminder of everything I love about food…it's ability to hold everyone at one place, passing food between each other, sharing conversations long overdue, and bringing smiles all across the table.

Anyway..the food adventure didn’t stop there. Rommel took me back to the airport and even though he was told not to let me steer the car down any dim-light barrio streets again, we found ourselves in Rivas, parked outside some buffet loading my togo box with plantains and Indio Viejo, getting the standard “are-you-nuts-look" from Rommel while I racked up the largest bill that restaurant has ever seen…with a mere two hours to make it to my flight in Managua.

And here I am…stuffed with a Nicaraguan buffet, reminiscing on the wonderful weekend reeling in fish on the Pacific Ocean, happily reminded what made me fall in love with food in the first place.

The Season Comes to an End...

Say farewell to Flavor of the Week...for now! Temperatures have started to drop in New York City and the growing season has tapered off. No one is as excited as me for the winter- that means snow and snow means skiing and the only thing I love even close to as much as I love cooking is skiing. But it's bittersweet since the snow also means I have to say goodbye to the farm for a few months. I encourage everyone in the CSA to visit the farmers market in the winter and utilize what NY farmers have to offer during the cold months and I'll still be cooking so if you stumble across something you're not sure how to cook with, shoot me an email and I'll come up with something for the both of u

Anyway- for the final week, the farm has tomatillos and we are making a spicy tomatillo and tortilla soup. Adjust the amount of chipotle chiles in the recipe to hit the heat factor you're looking for. 1 Chipotle chile is pretty tame... and 2 is more up my alley- it bites back just a little. Pick your demon and have fun with the last Flavor of the Week!

Turnip Greens

In Italian cooking- everything is used. Not just the turnips but the turnip greens will be savored. And it's pretty common to see any edible green leafy weed, overgrowth, or top of a veggie in simply sauteed off thrown into a delicious pasta. I followed in the footsteps of the Italians here and took the farms pretty turnip greens and made a tagliatelle pasta. It's incredibly simple, but maybe the best recipe yet.

As the growing season slows to a halt at the farm, Flavor of the Week has been given just one more ingredient- Tomatillos. I've had two ideas and am battling with either Tomatillo Tortilla Soup or Green Tomato Chutney paired with a spicy Indian dish- but I'm polling the people! If you'd rather see one or the other, shoot me an email and let me know which one tickles your fancy more and that will determine the final edition!

Full Circle

Last night my sous chef Ben and I worked at Little Owl in the West Village with Marc Vetri for his new book's release dinner. The book, Rustic Italian food, is scheduled to release November 1st but you can pre-order it online here. <--click.

The menu was an array of items from the book- from his dad's very own meatball recipe to durum focaccia and roasted lamb shoulder. Marc didn't bring anyone from his restaurants back in Philadelphia, so it was just us three, putting out a ridiculously pretty 6 course dinner for 25. It was amazing working side by side with a Chef that I've considered a role model for years, and strangely enough on his second book release- his first book still hasn't left my back pack since I bought it, I guess I'll have to make room for the new one.

When we arrived, Marc was hanging out on the couch and informed us not much had to be prepped, we just had to tie up a few loose ends. A lot of the prep was already done. The only big project left to do was make the pasta- beet plin, and we could all do this together. We looked around for a big open space for us to be able to roll out pasta and shape the plin and cleared off the butchers block table. Pause- Was this

really happening? Was I really looking for an outlet to plug in the Kitchen-aid to make pasta with Marc Vetri right now?...

At The Little Nell in Aspen, we used to hand make all of our pastas- each one almost every day. I started my kitchen career in the banquet kitchen, peeling cases of potatoes, molding ground beef into hundreds of mini sliders, and skewering billions of elk kabobs. It wasn't all that bad though because the pasta machine was in the banquet kitchen and that meant I got to watch the pasta cooks arrive hours earlier than their schedule actually printed and work beautiful mounds of neon orange dough through the pasta machine. I watched as they draped long sheets of pasta back and forth across their wingspan. I'd hover over their shoulder as they piped braised rabbit and mascarpone quickly across the transparent sheets and make perfect folds, followed by perfect pinches, followed by perfect cuts resulting in the prettiest agnolottis I'd ever seen. I knew I couldn't have that job- not yet.

But I could pretend it was my job at home if I learned a little about pasta. My sous chef suggested I read Il Viaggio di Vetri by Marc Vetri- a book I bought two and a half years ago and haven't gone more than a week without referencing since. I trusted Marc's writing on pasta like there was no other way to do it, and still do. His dough recipe was my recipe, still is. I'd make one or two of his actual pasta recipes, but then after awhile, I'd come up with my own ideas. When I thought about..."How would I make this flavor into a sauce, or at what stage should I add this in?" I'd immediately flip open the Vetri book and start reading one of his procedures. I eventually got my hands on a decent amount of pasta at The Little Nell. I never got to work the station but I'd buddied up with the pasta cooks and come in to help them plow through the workload for the day. We rolled spaghetti, ravioli, agnolotti, and extruded rigatoni. At home, I'd use my hand crank pasta machine to replicate smaller batches of what I'd learned that week at work. I'd run over to the pasta station and help plate when they were busy, and in the slow times, I'd ask to be taught how to pick up the sauces...and I'd absorb everything they'd say. At some point in my year at The Nell, I'd moved to the main kitchen, put on bar station, then garde manger before eventually leaving to go to culinary school- where Marc Vetri himself graduated from the bread making program.

When I moved to NY, I was closer to the restaurant Vetri where I knew they were in the kitchen still making perfect pastas every single day. Philly was super close now, I needed to actually try some of the pasta I'd been trying to replicate- but work and school swallowed all of my time. During level 3 in school, as a group we were responsible for making an amouse-bouche each day, and anythime it was up to me to formulate an idea I'd make pasta. We made spaghetti carbonara- delivered in individual bites, pre-twirled on the fork. I made gnocchi the first time we were asked to prepare our exit-dish for level 2. I've clearly been a little pasta obsessed.

So when I staged at Marea and tasted their pastas, hand rolled downstairs every day by an amazing pasta crew that Chef White has had with him for a very long time, I found where I wanted to be. I started on "oyster station." That's not even a real station. It honestly doesn't exist anymore. It was a creative way for luring a culinary student into cutting lemons, making mignotte everyday and stabbing themselves with a dull oyster knife hundreds of times a week. But I didn't care- I had my eye on the prize...I was going to be on pasta, and the oyster station has a great view of the chaos that is the pasta line every night. When school ended, I moved to garde manager where I inherited a sous chef named Ben- the same Ben that worked with me last night, and the same Ben that used to work for Marc Vetri in Philly. You see where this is going.

Ben and I chatted about Philly, the restaurant, and how I'd never even been there but somehow known all of Marc's pastas. So when Ben showed me a text from Marc that said he had a spot for me at 10:30 on Friday night- I rented a car. Adios NY, I was Philly bound. I packed a dress, pearls, and heels and I was off. I finally arrived, thirty minutes late for my reservation...after calling 3 times to profusely apologize for the traffic. I put on my tiny dress in the car and ran inside. My boyfriend at the time was still parking the car when Marc came out to my table to say hi. I'm pretty sure I told him how excited I was at least 400 times...and apologized for being late equal amounts. He was extremely kind- and said even though it's late, we'd like to pull your menu and cook for you. Like I'm goon refuse that, Chef? We ate for HOURS. I smiled for HOURS. It was everything I wanted and thought it would be. Everything was so damn perfect...I ate the spinach gnocchi I'd read about in the book...and it was the best spinach gnocchi anyone has ever eaten and anyone has ever made. I'm not willing to entrain any arguments about that- it was the best.

When dinner was over, we toured the charcuterie room downstairs and gawked at the hanging pig legs and came back up for the onslaught of desserts. I drove home the next day thinking about pasta...as usual. I still wanted that to be on that station.

When the risotto person admitted to me she was leaving the restaurant- I went straight to my sous chef and asked him to put me there. So then I was there...right next to pasta where I could watch all the sauces being made right next to me while I formed tendonitis stirring risotto five days a week.

This week- I trained on pasta. And next week- I start on pasta. And last night- I hung out with a pasta god. Not only did I hang out with him- we made plin together...he told me pasta secrets.

He even wrote one down for me. We compared stories about the line...about how to picked up 350 pastas a night where I work and how to pick up 60 pastas at his restaurant. He said that sizzling noise I'm talking about...the one that comes from blaring the flame under your pan so you can pick up a 3 minutes pasta sauce in 30 seconds... is forbidden. If he hears it- he said he turns to see what's gone wrong- Starting pasta sauce in a cold pan is the only way to do it. I agree but I also tell him I've succumbed to the realities of volume and my pans are always hot. I really liked chatting with someone that did it right- he never cut a corner- not just on the pastas, but in all of his food. Nothing was changed to outfit the amount of people eating at the restaurant, and it's not like he was ever put in the position to- the restaurant is small enough that it really just felt like eating at home.I'm not sure how to really emphasize this as much as I mean to, but I admire Marc Vetri so much and my respect for him as a chef, a cook, and an owner of a restaurant is immeasurable. When it's all said and done, I want someone to be able to say the same about me.

It's really weird how everything comes full circle right when it should. Last night was so cool and im so pumped about starting pasta station next week. What have I really learned between the time I first picked up the Vetri book and when I stood with him last night rolling pasta through the kitchen-aid? Alright...a little bit corny, but you know I always am- Everything you want to see or do or be in life can be yours- as long as you have patience, persistence, and a little bit, or a lot, of drive- it will be. It's all just a matter of how bad you want something.

Last night- in photos.

The plin.

Ben was coaching me through the whole pasta process: "This beet filling used to be my nemesis..."

"If you move from the top to the bottom, you wont get beet all over your sleeve..."

"If you move fast enough, these wont stick to the butcher's block, do one row after the other."

"Shannon...what'd I say about too much water...and you've gotta move faster."

"If you mess them up, just poke them in the middle, and then you can go back and eat them."

"Look at me...I'm Ben...mine are perfect." Ha, Ben actually admitted to me the pounds and pounds of plin he would end up eating while making the pasta, and told me about the time his station partner was blending the beet filling- and it blew up...making him, his chef coat, and the entire room pink.

Sal's Old School Meatballs

Tuna- Ricotta Fritters

Durum Foccacia

Marc- "You're going to keep looking at me and thinking, these are burnt, but keep caramelizing them...they aren't done yet." Caramelizing Cippolini onions with sage for the Rigatoni with-

Chicken livers!

Chef explaining how the eye sees when the pasta is done, there's no need to taste it... or as the boys said it last night "Se veer cuando la pasta e cotto."

Tarrgon, butter, pasta water...nothing else. That's the sauce. Chef Marc- "Let it cook....Stop shaking it, let it cook!"

The Plin in action.

Roasted Lamb shoulder and fennel gratin.

Congratulatory drinks and olive oil cakes.

Ey!

And I'm really starting to think I need to change the subtitle of my blog...I'm not really much of an outsider to the kitchen anymore- it feels like home : )