Food I'm Eating: Sauce for Smoked Fish

I have a weakness for smoked fish for breakfast. I don't know if it comes from my Cornish ancestors, but a plate of fine kippers, toast, and tea has always seemed a morning treat. The last time I had truly great kippers was in 2010, visiting a friend who lives in Eastbourne, in England. Here in Northern California, while we can get excellent, local smoked salmon, kippers are hard to come by. However, I do get smoked sturgeon occasionally, which, sautéed in a touch of olive oil, can be delicious, but sturgeon tends to be dry. I recently looked up a recipe for a sauce for smoked fish that I tried today for the first time, thinking it might be a good way to counteract the dryness of the sturgeon. 

While I'd never ruin a good kipper with a sauce, and I think this recipe might be even better on an oilier fish than sturgeon (like smoked salmon), it turned out quite nicely. I finely minced equal parts of red onion and capers, and then added about half as much fresh horseradish, a few teaspoons of sherry vinegar (the recipe calls for red wine vinegar, but sherry vinegar is what I had in the house), and a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise. I was too lazy to pick a few leaves of parsley from the garden, but a little green would have been a nice touch. These ingredients all mixed together made a nice topping for my smoked sturgeon this morning. I can see this being good on almost any fish dish. Give it a try. 

Foods I'm Eating: 2019-2020 Season Homemade Olives

Just about 100 days ago (November 10, 2019) I started a batch of olives curing. Yesterday I was finally able to bottle them. These took much longer than any I've made in the past, but, by going through my own posts here about olive-making, I see that I started these much earlier than any I've done in the past. Presumably, the riper the fruit, the faster they cure. In the past, it's taken six to eight weeks for the olives to finish curing, but using olives harvested as late as mid-February—that is, harvested right about now.

Anyway, after more than three months, we have fresh homemade olives again. As in the past, I've done them up with rosemary, a bay leaf, a quarter lemon, and garlic. I like to put them in a shallow dish to soak a little in olive oil with more garlic, lemon, and rosemary before eating them, too. Delicious.

Food I'm Eating: Green Olives (March 2017)

I've been making black olives at home for the past few years now, making batches whenever able to get my hands on good olives. I'd never tried green olives before, but this year I had access to a tree that still had green fruit in January, so I thought I'd give it a go. They are now done. The process was much the same as for black olives, but I started with a plain water soak for about ten days, changing the water every day, before switching to brine with a change every three or four days. I finished them with just a little bay, lemon juice, and white wine vinegar added toward the end, mostly the vinegar. I've always brined the black olives from the start and finished them with garlic, lemon, and rosemary. Both methods have resulted in some pretty tasty olives. Green olives seem to finish more quickly than black olives, suggesting the ripe fruit has more of the bitter compounds that make unprocessed olives inedible.

Miscellaneous: Autumn Colors (November 10, 2009)

Autumn colors in Santa Rosa. Peppers at Imwalle gardens, on Dutton Ave. Imwalle is one of those old-fashioned farm fruit and vegetable stands that I remember from visits to my grandmother's house, in Dayton, Ohio when I was a boy. We lived in New York at the time, but would drive out to see her. Mumma's and Wampler's were the big ones--full of fresh produce in barn-like buildings, much of it in bushel baskets, with the fields starting right at the edge of the parking area. I especially remember glass gallon jars of honey with squares of comb floating in them and bringing home corn. My brother and I got to husk the corn. Always rainbow sherbet for desert.