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.