Help: Seattle Fish Market

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Cappuccino
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 07:37 AM

I sit here thinking that starting a thread on Mudcat is an increasingly risky business... you just don't know where it's going to go!

Oh, I wrote the story at 5am today. Thanks, everyone. - Ian B

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Deckman
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 08:57 AM

Hi Ian B, when your article is done, or published, how about getting us a website so we can read it. Thanx, Bob

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Don Firth
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 11:37 AM

Yeah, G Smolt, I sort of wondered about that—bruising the fish and otherwise damaging it. Not that the fish would care much at that point.

My father was born and raised on San Juan Island and grew up eating salmon. It was just about his favorite kind of food. He learned how to cook salmon a variety of ways (an art that, I now regret, I never learned), and he could do it to perfection. Not too moist, but not dry either. He said that there was a point in the cooking process about twelve seconds long when it was just right, and you had to take it off the fire then or it would be too dry. Restaurants and sundry other folks tend to cook it until it has the consistency and flavor of a Presto-Log (Ivar's Salmon House on the north side of Lake Union in Seattle does a pretty good job, though).

Fish-tossing at the Pike Place Market is all very humorous and it's apparently become something of a local sport, but anything that compromises the flavor of salmon is not good! There are few things in this world as delicious as a properly cooked piece of salmon.

(I gotta back off a bit. I'm drooling on my keyboard.)

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 11:51 AM

Don,

I can occasionally buy a fast-frozen salmon down here in Texas, and I take it home, marinate it in a special brine, and smoke it. On a good batch I can rival the $25 a pound stuff down at Pike Street Market. The clerks at the store here in Fort Worth are used to my request to smell the fish before I buy it.

When I lived on San Juan back in the mid-1980's (you were there!) I used to buy fish in Friday Harbor that was sooooooo fresh. The salmon would render one speechless. The halibut had this opalescent sheen, and was such a wonderful consistency. A friend gave me a recipe that involved baking it in a deep pan. Slice an onion and put a few rings on top, some herbs, several dollops of sour cream, and a nice amount of white wine. I can't eat dairy any more, but if ever anything were to tempt me to fall off of the wagon, it's that fresh fish. The slabs of something they call "halibut" that arrive frozen and desciated down here aren't worth the megabucks they charge for it. I can tell them where to throw that stuff, should they be so inclined!

Maggie

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Bill D
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 12:38 PM

Liland ..re: posting a schwa...in some pages I looked at, they use the @ sign to represent it, in others, there is reference to a multitude of characters which are not supported by standard Windows installations, but can be produced with alternate choices buried somewhere...there are a variety of fonts and languages one can specify in the major browsers, but I have done VERY little experimentation.... HTML specs can also drag out characters and placements that you don't see everyday...like the middot- a period placed in the same place as a dash - I can do this ^. , but I haven't figured out all the tricks

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 01:05 PM

Liland, I agree HTML needs some new characters for written languages. For both Hawaiian and Japanese transposed to English, a long bar atop some vowels is customary to indicate stress. I can do it in Word but there are no such characters in html. I guess the alternate is cut and paste, but to a total computer nincompoop like myself, it will mean sitting down to some hard study.
The chefs here (inland Canada) do pretty well with the fish that are shipped in, but there is nothing like coastal fish market fresh here. A visit to the coast is a real treat.

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Don Firth
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 01:15 PM

My Dad used to cook salmon a variety of ways, but I think our favorite was simply broiling. He would put several salmon steaks on a sheet of butcher paper (oiled a bit to keep it from sticking or burning) and broil it in the oven. We'd eat it naked (the fish, that is) with perhaps a little squirt of lemon juice, or maybe a dollop of tartar sauce. Yumm! (pause to wipe off keyboard)

Another thing he used to do was to go down to the waterfront and buy tuna—very fresh, right off the boat. He would bring them home and disassemble them, then he and my mother would spend a weekend canning tuna—putting it up in pint-sized Mason jars. The house would smell pretty ripe for a couple of days, but it was well worth it! Any time during the year (and often) Mom would open a jar of tuna, mix it with a little chopped celery, sweet pickle, and a dab of mayo, and bingo! Tuna sandwiches until they were coming out our ears. Chicken-of-the-Sea was nothing like this!! Lord, I loved those things! I could happily live on seafood. Of all kinds.

I've been eating fish exclusively
Since living living on my claim. . . .

. . . and he's complaining!???

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Deckman
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 01:31 PM

Don, I have to tell you that I had a LUDEFISKE (sp?) dinner the other day ... on purpose. Being a Finn, this meal is not in my family tradition, but like you, I love any and all kinds of fish. The home where it was served had several LUDEFISKE VIRGINS. This one young gal asked me what it was. I explained that it's made from a rare breed of fish called a "LUDA," and it's only found in Norway. I described the fish in detail, including the difficulty in catching them, until a stranger nearby started laughing so loud that it spoiled the joke. Oh well! CHEERS and MERRY NEW YEAR, Bob

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 01:54 PM

Lutefisk. My cousin in Everett, Charles Husby, tells the best lutefisk jokes around--I used to see them turn up in a couple of the local papers from columnists who enjoyed them. It's fish soaked in lye then soaked in water to remove the lye, from my understanding, a non-cooked form of preservation. Charles said one time that the Irish, who were colonized by the Norwegians way back in the dark ages, finally told them to take their smelly fish and go to Hell--so they moved to North Dakota.

We can get good pickled herring down here. My kids love it.

Maggie

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Don Firth
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 03:39 PM

The only time I've had ever lutefisk, it turned out to be a gelatinous foul-smelling glop. Apparently it's another of those things that has to be caught within a few seconds of being done or it simply goes to hell. My sister's husband loved it. That's the way his family had always had it. Subsequently, I learned that there are a lot of people who are under the impression that lutefisk is supposed to be glop because whoever was in charge of cooking it never caught it in time. Done right, it's supposed to be marvelous. But that's only what I've heard. No personal experience there. Fish that you pour on your plate, looks like lumpy, badly congealed Knox gelatin, and smells like something died a horrible death is one item of seafood I think I can forego. I would like to try it sometime when it comes out right, though, just to be able to say I've done it (my father was a Scot, but my mother was a full-blooded Swede).

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Don Firth
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 03:52 PM

A Lutheran pastor friend of mine describes lutefisk as "the piece of cod which passeth all understanding."

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Deckman
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 03:57 PM

"LOOKS LIKE GELATINOUS FOUL SMELLING-GLOP." You got that right! Boy, just writing this make my mouth water. Actually, and I think you'll find this funny, I ate it at the "home" where my aged parents live. They served over 100 lunches that day. I asked the cook just how many ordered this special holiday plate. She looked at me deadpan and said ... "seven!" I asked where she found the raw (?) materials. She said that she found it at her reguliar fish market. But, she explained, it was really curious this year. The place had been recently purchased by an oriental immigrant couple. She explained, "here I was, a german cook, buying Lutefisk from an oriental fish market, to serve to the Norski's here!" I then asked her if she had eaten it? She looked at me with all the humor she could muster, being German and all, and said .."NO!"

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 04:55 PM

Bob and Don,

Next time I'm in the Northwest I'll ask a friend who is now in her late 80's, but still a marvelous cook, if she can fix a good batch and we'll all sit down and try it. If anyone can make lutefisk taste right, she can. But maybe that's part of the trick, you have to *know* what it's going to taste like before you try fixing it! It's like trying to learn a new song from a sheet of music without ever having heard it. The instructions are there, but you have nothing to shoot for.

Now, how about another Norwegian tradition--lefse. Have you had a good potato pancake lately?

Maggie

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Charley Noble
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 05:04 PM

All this talk of cooking fish is making me so hungry. There is a right and wrong about such cooking and I'm reminded of the Leon Rosselson verse that I lifted and transformed into a short song (copy and paste back into Word to get the chords in place):

WHOEVER INVENTED THE FISHSTICK
(Leon Rosselson © 1981 Adapted by Charlie Ipcar - 1993 Tune: after Too-ra-li oo-ra-li oo-ra-li)

C-----------G------------C
Who-ever in-vented the fish-stick,
F----------------------C
Ought to be trans-mogri-fied –
G------------------------------C
Skinned, mashed and boxed in-to uni-form blocks,
-----D------------------------------G
Then covered with bread-crumbs from col-lar to socks,
G7----------------C----G--C
Froz-en and deep fat fried, fat fried
-----G7----------------C
Yes, froz-en and deep fat fried.

'Cause who'd do that to a fish,
Finning its way through the sea,
Making no sound, just cruising around,
A rainbow of colors, a king to be crowned,
Just riding its flying trapeze, trapeze,
Just riding its flying trapeze?

Now progress is all very fine,
But not when it chops up your dreams;
If you're still afloat, don't miss the boat,
Turn off the TV, deep-six the remote;
Life can be more than it seems, it seems;
Yes, life can be more than it seems!

Happy New Year, mates!

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: GUEST,Desdemona
Date: 31 Dec 01 - 05:05 PM

We went to a wedding in Seattle a few years ago, and in wandering around the city had the pleasure of seeing the "flying fish" at Pike Place Fish Market. While it was certainly an amusing spectacle (and one which I'm sure was reflected in the prices!), one can't help wondering what effect this might have on the fish itself, which is, after all, meant to be eaten.

That said, we ate some of the best seafood ever during that visit!

Subject: RE: Help: Seattle Fish Market
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 01 Jan 02 - 08:09 PM

refresh