I’ve been trying to get more healthy (not breaded-and-fried or fish sticks, yum) seafood in my diet, but I’m not good at the whole process of buying and then cooking the stuff you bought the same day, so a lot of times perfectly good fish I’ve purchased languishes in my fridge and then degenerates into an inedible state before I get around to attempting to prepare it, so anyway, I have a good recipe for chum.
Frozen fish is the compromise solution, and mostly it’s been salmon; farmed salmon, line-caught salmon, ranch-raised salmon, wild salmon, sockeye salmon, coho salmon, domesticated salmon, lots of salmon. I don’t think smoked salmon counts somehow, because it tastes way too good and we all know that smoking is bad for you, even if you are a fish.
I can’t tell you which kind of salmon is the best, or is kind to the Earth, or healthy, even, but for me, the best salmon is the one I can eat on the regular, so it’s the ones that look like little planks. You just drizzle some olive oil on ‘em, broil, and then drip with more olive oil or some lemon and butter and a little dill, and that’s a good entree. Does that help? I’m bored with salmon, though. I’ve tried other fishes such as the Tilapia, but it tastes like the Earth, somehow., and I heard that a Tilapia isn’t even really a real fish, it’s generic, or they ran out of Tilapia and it’s just some other random fish, I dunno, I just don’t have a good attitude toward Tilapia, I’m not having the Tilapia, thank you.
The other day at the supermarket I found an answer to my fish predicament, a five-pound box of frozen fish. Fresh Frozen Fillets. Haddock. From the family of the True Cod.
It was on sale for $35, which means it was seven bucks a pound, which is a good price, right? UPDATE: I went back a few weeks later and it was $44 and I still bought it. I got it home and opened it and it was a box of nothing but fish. Solid seafood.
Each fish-ingot is individually wrapped, which makes it pretty easy to separate them without thawing the whole agglomerated block.
There are all kinds of INSTRUCTIONS on the box for preparing the haddock. The first time I cooked up a pair of haddocks I was skeptical about broiling from the frozen state, but there were so many specific Instructions I felt compelled to trust, and it worked fine. Also, every instruction includes BUTTER, just saying.
I guess a serving of haddock here is a little bit less than half a haddock-log. I typically eat an entire plank, so that’s a pretty good calorie count for that much protein. I’m still confused about cholesterol, but I feel good in my Belief that fish is the Good kind, so that offsets some of the butter I dump on. Olive oil is good too, though.
As far as eating this stuff, it’s not interesting, it’s delicate, super mild and has zero “fishiness,” which some would contend constitutes Flavor, so be sure to season it nicely, and try hard not to overcook it. I tried pan-frying it according to the instructions, and I think I’d thaw it out if I went that way again. If you have an oven or toaster oven, I would recommend broiling from the rock-solid frozen.
As far as the Consequences of Seafood, Haddock seems to be not-so toxic? I mean, the Environmental Defense Fund says you can eat it four times a month, which is probably way more than I would eat, so that’s good.
Continuing my sail down the folly waterway, I always wonder about possible cognitive dissonance when trying to eat an animal while being good to the animal (to a point) and the animal’s family and environment. Stewardship. The company that distributes this product at least talks the talk about sustainability and things like that, so again, in this case, I choose to Believe, I want this five-pound stack of frozen-solid fish-blocks I bought out of my grocer’s freezer to be an ethical, unadulterated Whole Food. I need to be OK with my Processed Food.
