Salt baked branzino

Here's yet another recipe from the Dave Pasternak cookbook. That makes three in a row. So far, they have all been good, but I think this is my favorite. It's easy, fun to make, and tastes really good.

Start with a whole fish. I used branzino, but any white fish will do. Just get whatever is fresh. Clean the fish, make sure it's scaled, clip all the fins, and stuff the cavity with lemon slices, a sprig of rosemary, some parsley stems (reserve the leaves for garnish), a clove of garlic, and a couple olives.
For the salt crust, mix together salt in a ratio of about one egg white to a little over one cup of salt. This fish was a little over a pound, and I used 2 1/4 cups of salt and two egg whites. If you get a bigger fish, use 3 to 3 1/2 cups of salt.

Place a little of the salt mixture on a baking sheet cover this with a piece of parchment paper in the shape of the fish. This will allow you to remove the bottom side of the fish from the salt crust when you are done cooking.
Cover the fish with the remaining salt mixture and bake at 400F for about 20 minutes.
When the fish is done baking, crack the crust with the spoon and peel it away from the fish. Run your knife along the spine of the fish to separate the top fillet and remove carefully. After you plate the top fillet, you can just pull out the fish spine in one piece, leaving the bottom fillet in the salt crust. You can just lift up the bottom fillet by cutting loose the parchment paper and then sliding the fillet onto the plate. Garnish with some lemon and parsley. Since we had some egg yolks left over from the salt crust, we also made some lemon aioli to go with the fish.
Serve the fish with whatever sides work for you. I made baked brown rice and a mixture of kale and collards with garlic, red pepper flakes, and bacon braised in chicken stock.

Spaghetti with Tuna Meatballs

Here's another recipe from the Dave Pasternak cookbook. Spaghetti with Tuna Meatballs. These meatballs would actually make great tuna patties for a sandwich, so I'll probably try that sometime soon. The basics of this are like any other meatballs, you just use tuna as the protein. Start by combining the tuna and breadcrumbs in a food processor. After pulsing this mixture a few times, stir in an egg, salt, pepper, garlic and chopped parsley. You want to cook the garlic in olive oil first. For ratios, you should use about 1.5lb tuna, 3/4 cup bread, 1 egg, and 2 cloves of garlic cooked in 2 Tbsp of oil.

Form into meatballs and cook in a little bit of olive oil.

Serve with spaghetti and basic tomato sauce.

Grilled swordfish

Earlier in the summer Abby and I ate at this great restaurant in New York called Esca. We both love seafood and the food at the restaurant was really good, so we decided to get the cookbook. This week I've been going through the cookbook and making some of the recipes. This one is really simple. Its just a swordfish steak that's breaded and grilled. You can make breadcrumbs by running some stale bread through a food processor and seasoning with various herbs, or you can just buy some italian style bread crumbs from the store. Start by trimming the skin off of the sword fish steaks. Then season with salt and pepper and dredge in bread crumbs. If you have a charcoal grill, use that. If not, you can do what I did and use a grill pan. Cooking time depends on the thickness of the steak. I cooked it between 4-5 minutes on each side. The cookbook suggested serving this with a blood orange salad. I didn't have any blood oranges, and I usually stick with a protein/starch/veg. combo for my dinners, so I made brocolli with lemon, garlic, and red pepper, and a brown rice pilaf for the side dishes.

Esca

Esca was the one Batali-Bastianich restaurant that Abby and I had not eaten at yet. After a weekend of heavy eating, we were both in the mood for something a little lighter, so it was the perfect time to try out this Hell's Kitchen seafood restaurant. It was awesome. Esca is famous for popularizing crudo - basically, Italian-style sashimi - in the United States. In fact, the claim is that one of the restaurant's investors, Joe Bastianich, coined the term crudo for these raw fish preparations when he, Mario Batali, and Chef Dave Pasternak were traveling around Italy doing research before opening Esca. If you go here, you absolutely have to order the crudo tasting.

The crudo tasting comes in two flights of three. Each flight is served in a tri-sectioned plate on a bed of crushed ice. This keeps everything cool and makes for a great presentation. The first flight we received had a distinct Pacific Northwest feel, which, of course, I really liked. Going from top to bottom, we had an oyster - I don't know the origin, but it would make sense if it was from somewhere in the Puget Sound/Olympic Peninsula region - followed by geoduck with cherries, and wild salmon with pink peppercorns. These were all very good, but I liked the geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck, also referred to as giant clam) the most. Geoducks are native to Western Washington, and you'll see people digging them up almost anytime you go to a beach around the Puget sound. Cherries are another local fruit, and the combination evokes summer in the Pacific Northwest, which is about as good as it gets.


The next flight of crudo included seared yellowtail tuna
Kingfish with caviar (This was also awesome. I'm not sure which one I liked more, this or the geoduck), and razor clam with some hot chiles.
After the crudo, we ordered an appetizer that was lightly scrambled eggs loaded with sweet corn and lump crab meat. This is something that I'll have to make at home. The sweetness of the corn and crab are ideal complements, and the still runny scrambled egg perfectly tied them together.

Next, we split an order of hand cut spaghetti with crab and sea urchin roe. Sea urchin in pasta is something I never would have thought of, but it worked really well. This was a very unique and surprisingly good dish.
Finally, we had pan roasted red snapper with arugula, olives and hearts of palm. The snapper was perfectly cooked. A great dish.
After trying all the Batali-Bastianich restaurants, this one ranks right near the top. Esca lacks the fame and formality of Babbo and Del Posto, but I think I actually enjoyed the food here more. More than anything, this probably has more to do with the fact that they were serving seafood than any other factor. With seafood, you can really tell when someone uses high quality ingredients and treats it just right. This clearly comes through at Esca. It was worth every penny.