Bone Appetite

Recipe: Dora Flood's Bear Flag Restaurant Seafood Pasta, aka Monterey Seafood Puttanesca

Okey dokey, this started out as an innocent pasta puttanesca but I have determined that this had sufficient correspondence with some things we get very nicely locally -- calamari, artichoke hearts, garlic -- that it would qualify as faux Monterey cuisine. (It's even vaguely cioppino-like).

So this recipe is probably prententiously knowable as Monterey Seafood Puttanesca, but in honor of the alleged origins of Puttanescas everywhere and our fabled local color, I decided to name this after the restaurant/restaranteuse in Steinbeck's Cannery Row, who was not actually the proprietor of a restaurant but a, well, purveyor of puttanesca. (I need to be subtle, I don't want this blog blocked by some overzealous piece of filtering safe-internet software.)

Ingredients with instructions are...

6 tablespoons EVO, heated on medium heat (I used a dutch oven to absorb slop spills, a skillet with a cover will do fine)

crush in 4 cloves of garlic, woosh around for a minute

add 1 tablespoon hot pepper flakes, woosh around for a minute

crush in a can of anchovies (6 ounces in this case), woosh around for a minute

add a can of San Marzano tomatoes or 8-10 fresh ones peeled and cored if you have them (OK, OK, I would never actually have the patience to peel them myself, but I think puttanesca's better without the tomato skin) chopped roughly - combine with anchovy-garlic mix and bring it to a strong simmer.

Add one bay leaf.

I added a 1/2 tsp of salt, but given the anchovies were salty this probably wasn't necessary.

After about 15 minutes, fold in:
2 tablespoons of capers,
10 diced black olives, and
a tablespoon of dried basil (or equivalent fresh basil leaves if you can get them, finely minced).

Reduce to a low simmer for five minutes or so. Fish out the bay leaf.

Now add one can of (drained) artichoke hearts (not marinated) and turn the heat up. You can slice up the artichoke hearts a little but if you mash them with a wooden spoon in the pot they should come apart on their own as well.

Add one pound of frozen seafood or fresh equivalent (see note below), preferably calamari or a mixture of calamari, bay scallops, and small shrimp. Bring to high heat and cook until the seafood is done, about five minutes or less (test constantly, the shrimp will pink, calamari will be tender but solid.)

Serve over al dente penne. Makes four healthy-sized portions or eight side pasta portions. Top with parm if you must, but I don't think it's necessary given how rich the broth turns out on this one.

Sorry, no photo once again -- I was concentratin' tonight.

OK, so, the frozen seafood. Most of the "fresh" seafood we get isn't really fresh, it's just unfrozen. If you ask an honest fish monger about a particular fish, they should normally tell you it was 'flash frozen'. It is possible to get fresh fish, of course, that you haven't caught yourself -- meaning fish that has only been on ice, not encased in it -- and boy is that great. But such is not the case with shrimp and scallops around here.

Calamari, on the other hand, you can get here nice and fresh and usually cheap when it's in season. Squidders are practically the only commercial fishing we see out here these days. So if you can get fresh calamari, use it here, and don't overcook it! (On the Cape, I might be tempted to use fresh scallops, but there are so many great ways to use fresh scallops I would think the strong background of puttanesca would not be one of my first choices.)

But, since shopping for said fresh shellfish or what have you requires some premeditation and correct timing, such is not the usual case for most cooks, I would warrant. Not for me, at least. So I resort to one of my stashed bags of frozen seafood.

I try to keep seafood in the freezer as a sort of staple, particularly the shellfish. (Shrimp scampi is incredibly easy to whip up.) It's not that I wouldn't love, say, to have some fresh steamers or mussels, but I'm realistic about the price and their availability. Frozen is underrated in this particular area.

One bag o' seafood available is what Trader Joe's sells as "Seafood Blend", which is what I used tonight. You can use a little or the whole bag at once, and it cooks straight from frozen to the pan. it's great for quick stir frying or sautes - you do have to try carefully not to overcook it -- but I find it almost indistinguishable from similar quality "fresh' fish. Of course, it's often farm-raised or lower quality stuff that goes into such mixes, hence this perception frozen isn't as good, but on the other hand it's affordable and most really good seafood these days is scarce enough as to be expensive.

And, fresh food snob that I am notwithstanding, I have to say one of the things about this dish is you can make the entire thing with food you can stock in the pantry. It's really nice to be able to whip up something semi-fancy on short notice if you have to. (I actually deliberately ignored the very nice fresh cilantro in my hydrator tonight. Shocking, I know.)

The Dirty Old Bay-stered, or, Confessions of a Crab Artist

After reading this article in the Washington Post, I've decided to come out of the closet: I'm an Old Bay user.

I associated Old Bay for a long time with my Grandmother's kitchen, where it would come out now and again out of a somewhat decrepit container of uncertain vintage -- even in the 1970s it looked like it had been in the cupboard for forty years -- to be deployed on fish. When we were setting up our own kitchen, Old Bay was not on my list of seasonings to add in. None of those pre-mixed spice combinations (Lawton's, Good Seasons, et alia) had much appeal when I first started cooking in earnest, perhaps in part because letting others do the spicing for you seemed so unadventuresome, but also perhaps subconsciously as a revolt against my parents' kitchen. That's probably a topic for another day, of course (what did Freud have to say about the use of garlic salt in place of fresh garlic...?)

At some point when we were living in Pittsburgh we finally acquired a tin of Old Bay. For those of you unacquainted with it, this is celery salt with a bunch of other spices thrown in, that was mostly a Northeast regional spice for a very long time. It was originally marketed for seafood, specifically, for crab, and despite modern multi-tiered marketing, that's what I still think of it as -- crabcake base. Taste some out of the can, the predominant flavor is still celery, but there's a backwash on your tongue from the flurry of trace spices, everything from salt and pepper to mace. The article referenced above suggests the trace spices were thrown in mostly to make the seasoning irreplicable, and that may be the case. But I've come to the conclusion the combination, or something in the ingredient list, is adding a hint of umami to the mix.

I can't remember precisely why I got the Old Bay in the first place - perhaps for some recipe out of the paper, or nostalgia, but I think it was probably for the crab cakes. My wife loves crab cakes. More than crab, per se, and mysteriously (to me) more than lobster or most other shellfish. Me, I love crabs (second to lobster) but my idea of a good time in college was when we took a road trip down to the Eastern Shore, found a crab boat coming back in, bought a bushel full of crabs, took them back with a case of beer, fired up a pot, threw the crabs in, and gorged on them cooked and plain. Crab cakes is what you make with the leftovers that are no longer in sufficiently good shape to eat with your fingers. But I love my wife and so I make crab cakes from time to time, and I have my suspicions I got the Old Bay because it's how I remember crab cakes were made at my grandparents' house when I was a tad.

Here's the simple recipe: crab, a beaten egg, breadcrumbs, lemon juice, chopped chives; Old Bay to taste. (Don't ask me about quantities, because this has always been an empirical art, but to guess, I'd say an egg, a cup of breadcrumbs, juice of one lemon, a tablespoon of chives to a pound of cooked crab meat.) Combine, form into patties, and bake @ 350 for about a half hour or until they crisp (yeah yeah, you can fry them in the pan, too, and they cook faster and all, but I like the flavors better baked.) This is not the one on the Old Bay can, and it's quite possible this is not at all how my Grandmother made them. (I note, speaking of umami, the Old Bay recipe has Worcestershire sauce in it, and, yuck, mayonnaise.)

So I think a little nostalgia is a perfectly good reason to keep a can of seasoning mix around. But the can sits, and sits, and sits there for a long time between fits of nostalgia. Or it did.

One day a few years ago, I had what I'd call one of my panic dinners. It's when for whatever reason (pick your usual one) I was running late, it was getting close to kid bedtime, and I had a piece of fresh fish that was on its last day in the fridge before I'd have to say goodbye to it. So instead of one of my usual fish rubs, I just quickly salted the thing with Old Bay and threw it in the broiler. It tasted GREAT.

Was this just a Proustian moment, or had I rediscovered something? Maybe a little bit of the former, but since then I've used Old Bay every now and then on purpose, mostly for fish, but very occasionally for something else.  It is my "New England Utility Spice". Celery, dried onion, salt, cloves, et alia -- these were spices that drifted through all the other cooking I grew up with, before I'd ever been introduced to cumin or lemon grass or even kosher salt.

I keep the following seasoning mixes on tap in my spice rack for quick-n-panicky cooking - my Utility Spice row: italian seasoning (mixed myself), curry powder (commercial mix), chile power (commercial mix, but I almost never use this these days, since I have to be careful about adjusting the really hot stuff and chile powder seems like a punchless waste of time if I am going to endure the pleasures and pains of capsicum), fake Santa Maria rub (I'll blog separately about Santa Maria and tritip another day, and include my cousin Anthony's Genuine Santa Maria recipe, which was a surprise to me), and occasionally something I've bought on a whim (like the rather disappointing Cholula spice mix). I also have kept a Fake Thai mix in the larder (white pepper, lemon grass, royal basil, etc.) but I find it hard to keep fresh and prefer adjusting spices when I'm doing thai stuff based on whatever compromises I've had to make in the ingredient list.

I won't be equivocal here: the utility spicing is mostly for when I'm lazy or hurried. I don't think the seasoning mixes are ever quite as good as trying one's own hand at spice combinations. But when the day has gotten to the point where I just need to get something on the table, the great virtue of the seasoning mix is you get something that tastes a little fancy, just a little, but which is entirely predictable. The last thing I want when everybody is hurried, probably tired, and hungry for dinner ten minutes ago, is an experiment gone wrong. And for my part, especially with Old Bay, I've got that bit of wiring for the combination that goes into good comfort food.

This will probably horrify some people (although I haven't yet posted my tomato de-seeding technique, so you'll be more horrified at some future date), but I'm still working on that first tin of Old Bay we got at least ten years ago. (See the picture above, taken from Old Bay's official website? My can doesn't have that 'same taste after 60 years' tag line, it's got a list of ingredients on it. I taste the spice mix, and it still seems fine to me. Yes, spices are supposed to be tossed after a year or two, depending on the herb, but I don't see the point. I obviously am not running through the can that fast, which makes it hard to justify keeping a 'fresh' can around. But I've considered the possibility that it's the very age of the can that makes it so like my grandmother's. She was a thrifty, thrifty person and the idea of throwing out a spice or anything in the pantry was anathema. (After she died, we found some 8-year old canned salmon on the shelf that had obviously been bought in bulk on sale. That, we threw out. And no, she did not die after eating  salmon loaf.) In an odd way, I like to think I'm honoring her by keeping that tin of Old Bay around.