A story at bathtime

Tonight, it was the infamous pirate captain K. Rool’s birthday party. (It was also his birthday party on Tuesday, but one prerogative of a pirate captain is to have as many birthday parties as he desires.) Each guest gave him a present. Two of his presents were a passport and sunscreen, so he decided to go to Barbados. While drinking rum and eating sugarcane in Barbados, K. Rool noted that on the neighboring island of Aruba, all the guests at his birthday party had gathered to eat ice cream, including light switch flavor, which is made with sugarcane and coconut. Luckily, an ice cream truck pulled up on Barbados and K. Rool asked for an ice cream sandwich. They were all out, so he got ice cream bonbons instead. The end.

If anyone tells me that Aruba and Barbados aren’t neighboring islands, I’m sending K. Rool after them.

Baby granola

This week on [Serious Eats](http://www.seriouseats.com/), I get all worked up about:

Organic Baby Food

> Dr. Susanna’s is based in Seattle, and its shtick is international foods. There are currently six flavors. I tried Tokyo Tum Tum and Lullaby Thai; also available are Sweetie Tahiti, Baby Dal, and so on. They’re organic and, according to the website, “favor local farmers,” which makes no sense, since the products are sold nationwide. I guess the farmers could be local to the United States.

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

You know what night it is? Asian night again! Third time this week. I made Thai beef salad, which is something I hadn’t had in too long. And it made good use of leftovers, even: I had half a seedless cucumber in the fridge and, if you can believe this, a box of *kaiware* (daikon sprouts). Who doesn’t have some of those kicking around? So the salad consisted of sliced steak, *kaiware,* cucumbers, cilantro, shallots, scallions, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice, and roasted rice powder. On the off chance that Iris wanted some salad, I didn’t put any chiles in, but I served sliced serranos in fish sauce on the side.

My plan was to make peaches with sticky rice for dessert, but the yucky hand of fate intervened by infesting my bag of sticky rice with moths. I promised Iris we’d get a new bag soon. “What if that one’s also buggy?” she asked.

I had some fully debugged jasmine rice on hand, so I toasted it up and ground it into powder. “I don’t think I want that,” said Iris. But when she saw how unthreatening the rice powder looked, she did want some. I suggested she dip her steak into it, and she did, big-time. “I didn’t think I was going to like it, but I do like it,” she said. Generally I’m too stubborn to admit something like that. If you haven’t tried steak dipped in rice powder, please do. Iris shared a piece of hers and it was good and crunchy. A little salt in the rice powder might be even better.

Laurie whipped up some biscuits and we had a peach shortcake picnic on the balcony. Nobody missed the sticky rice.

Not Tunisian night

Sometimes my cooking gets into a Euro-American rut. When I’m feeling lazy, my thoughts turn to burgers, pasta, pan-roasted salmon. Too long without Asian food, however, I get cranky. So I’m going to try to remind myself to cook something Asian at least once a week.

Tonight, it was a recipe from Eric Gower’s cookbook The Breakaway Cook. I am not sold on the title or the cover photo of this book, but otherwise it’s great. The author lived in Japan and concocts simple recipes with flavorful, mostly Asian ingredients: matcha, pomegranate molasses, miso, and so on. I made a fantastic broiled mackerel dish, and I’ll give you the recipe in a minute, after I put in a plug for mackerel.

A few months ago I took a fish cooking class at [Culinary Communion](http://www.culinarycommunion.com/). It was fun. We were handed whole trout and had to skin and fillet them. We ate shrimp and grits. At the beginning of the class, we introduced ourselves by name and favorite fish. My favorite fish is mackerel. This turned out to be an unexpected and punk-rock choice. Not even the instructor was a big mackerel booster.

Epicurious offers 19 mackerel recipes and 411 salmon recipes. There are no Google hits for “mackerel fan club.”

One of my favorite defunct Seattle restaurants was Takohachi, best known for its salt-broiled mackerel and bacon fried rice. If there had been a mackerel fan club, this would have been its headquarters. Since it closed, I’ve been in mackerel withdrawal, mostly eating it raw at sushi places. They don’t sell mackerel at my local supermarket.

Yesterday I was doing some shopping at Uwajimaya and drifted into the frozen fish section. Uwajimaya sells at least two dozen species of vacuum-packed frozen fish, including some beautiful Norwegian mackerel fillets. (And whole mackerel, of course.) Two mackerel fillets, each enough to serve an adult, will set you back $6 total. Aren’t you glad there’s no mackerel fan club? I let them defrost overnight in the fridge. They were fantastically easy to cook and every bit as good as any mackerel I’ve eaten anywhere. I’ve struck gold–well, silver–in my grocer’s freezer case.

Curious, I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch site to find out about the sustainability of the Norwegian mackerel fishery. They don’t mention Norwegian mackerel. I guess nobody asked.

Iris loved the mackerel. We’re starting a fan club.

**BROILED MACKEREL WITH SOY, LEMON, AND BUTTER**
Adapted from The Breakaway Cook
Serves 2

1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
1 teaspoon maple syrup
2 mackerel fillets (6 to 8 ounces each), rinsed and dried
Freshly ground black pepper
Kosher salt
Lemon wedges

1. Preheat the broiler. Put the soy sauce, lemon juice, butter, and syrup in a sauce pan and heat over medium heat. Cook three minutes, stirring often, until slightly thickened. Brush the fish with the soy sauce mixture on both sides and sprinkle lightly with pepper.

2. Broil the fish until brown and crispy, about 5 minutes. Flip and broil until crispy on the other side (the skin side is easier to burn), about 3 minutes. Sprinkle with additional salt to taste and serve with lemon wedges and rice.