Book report

Today on Serious Eats:

Kid-Friendly Cookbooks

> Lauren Bank Deen’s Kitchen Playdates is obviously written from years of experience of kids tearing through her house, prodding balls of dough, sprinkling toppings, and licking beaters. It’s full of great tips, like: “When my kids make calzones, I find that they eat the bread and ignore the filling…with a long snake of stuffed pizza, they tend to eat the whole enchilada, so to speak.” Iris and I are totally making pizza snakes soon.

Vinaigrette de porc

I made myself a nice salad for lunch today. (When you’re done reading this post, you can look back at that sentence and laugh.)

I had some leftover carnitas and green cabbage, but no tortillas, because the tortillas I bought at the supermarket had gone bad. Why I keep buying corn tortillas at the supermarket I don’t know, because even when they’re not spoiled, they’re not good.

So here’s what I did. I heated a nonstick skillet over medium-high and added the carnitas to heat and crisp them up. When they were done, I transferred them to a bowl and added shredded cabbage to the pan. I sauteed it for a couple of minutes to brown and soften it just a bit. Then I tossed the pork and cabbage together in a bowl and added hot sauce (Frank’s RedHot) and kaffir lime juice. So it was basically a lard-lime vinaigrette. I’m sure this will be sweeping the nation.

Why do I have kaffir limes in the house? Last weekend we were at [Lara Ferroni](http://www.cookandeat.com/)’s house, and she had a bunch of citrus fruits from [Rising C](http://www.ripetoyou.com/) in California. She does their photography, including the lovely yuzu and calamondin shots on the front page.

We didn’t get any yuzu, but Lara sent us home with variegated pink lemons and kaffir limes. Laurie made delightful lemon shortbread with the pink lemons, and I started in on the limes today. I’ve never used a fresh kaffir lime before–only the leaves–and I’d heard that the juice was useless. They’re grown for the leaves and the very thick, wrinkly zest, which is used most famously in Thai curry pastes.

But the limes had plenty of juice for my salad. The juice is more sour than Persian lime juice, and it’s an immediate, jolting reminder of Thailand. And the limes are one of the least expensive items from Rising C.

##### Digression

I have to note that I find the name “kaffir lime” very frustrating. It’s undisputed that “kaffir” is a racial slur in South Africa and other countries and that the name of the lime comes from the epithet, though no one knows why. There are other terms in use for the fruit, such as “wild lime” and “magrood,” the latter being an anglicization of the Thai word. (The actual Thai pronunciation uses a consonant not found in English, plus an unvoiced final consonant, so it’s not possible to borrow it precisely.) The problem with these terms is that they’re extremely poorly recognized compared to “kaffir lime.”

It’s not enough to note that “kaffir” is not a common racial slur in the US, because I have readers all over the world, or at least I’d like to believe so. Since I intend to use and discuss this ingredient in the future, maybe the best thing to do is to say “wild lime” or “magrood” and make it a link to the [Wikipedia page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_lime) to clear up what the term actually means. I don’t find this solution very satisfying, either. As Wikipedia says:

> The Oxford Companion to Food recommends that the name kaffir lime should be avoided in favor of makrut lime because Kaffir is an offensive term in some cultures, and also has no clear reason for being attached to this plant. However, kaffir lime appears to be much more common.

But I’m not sure how you’re supposed to pronounce “makrut.” MACK-rut?

Monger me up

I would like to eat more fish. Not just a greater volume of fish, but a greater variety. This is not a health initiative; it’s palate-driven. And I need help.

The fish I cook regularly are salmon, catfish, and mackerel. Occasionally I do halibut, and I’ve been meaning to do another roasted stuffed trout. That’s really about it. I’ve made sablefish a couple of times and been unhappy with the results.

It seems bizarre, since this is Seattle, but I have east coast fish envy. This is based purely on reading cookbooks. They’re always talking about inexpensive bluefish and other flavorful, oily fish. But I’m also jealous of Matt Wright, who blogs at [Wrightfood](http://www.mattikaarts.com/blog/) and seems to be able to make any fish delicious.

Here, in addition to the fish I’ve mentioned, we seem to have a variety of rockfish (“snapper”) and sole/flounder varieties. I’ve never had much looking cooking these, either. I’m not a big fan of fresh tuna, other than raw, and it’s expensive. I don’t like tilapia at all.

So here are my questions.

1. Are there any other fish common to west coast markets that I’m just not thinking of? Given my happy experience with frozen mackerel, I’m perfectly willing to consider frozen. I notice Matt made striped bass a couple months ago.

2. Any must-have recipes for the fish I’m shy with? I’m willing to try pretty much anything that isn’t too low in fat. I’d love to hear someone say, “Here’s my family’s favorite snapper recipe,” for example.

So, send me on a fishing trip and I will report back. (“I caught a recipe THIS BIG.”)

The edge

Last week my laptop broke, six days *before* the warranty expired, and I sent it in for service. Apple service is awesome. They overnighted me a box. I put the computer in the box and called DHL for a pickup. They picked up the box at 4:30pm on Monday and flew it to Memphis. The computer came back, completely fixed, on Wednesday at 10:30am. Iris was impressed not only at the quick turnaround, but that my computer took the red-eye.

To celebrate the safe return of my now out-of-warranty computer, I am typing on it while eating a plate of gooey baked eggs with ham and gruyère and drinking a cappuccino.