Ethical Seafood Reading (or Why to Learn to Love Sardines)

I've been reading a pretty fascinating book lately. It's called Bottomfeeder and is written by Taras Grescoe, an author I have come to esteem both for his thorough coverage of his subject as well as his wildly entertaining stories. Bottomfeeder reminds me of Fast Food Nation, which I loved years ago, but this time the book is a sweeping survey of our oceans, their bounty, and how we have been systematically destroying them. It's entirely gripping, containing within the fascinating stories an arsenal of startling and convincing facts that will leave you convinced that the management of our seas is a situation in dire need of urgent help - unless you don't mind eating jellyfish for dinner, which is all we'll be left with before long if things proceed as they've been.

Grescoe focuses each chapter around a different subject. He writes the stories of how the wormy and hideous monkfish came to be hip and trendy in fancy New York restaurant, the loss of the Chesapeake Bay's original keystone species, the Amercian oyster, and the subsequent toxic algae blooms that have stifled its once-teeming waters, and the loss of the North Atlantic cod fishery and how the enormous market for fish and chips contributed to it, supplied by corporations that see the ocean as a source of income and not a way of life for millions of fishermen. He goes to Marseille to search for the real recipe for Bouillabaise and finds it close to impossible to replicate with today's measly catch from the Mediterranean.

Then he's off to Portugal, where he feasts on grilled sardines, my new personal favorite for their affordability and their bottomfeeder status. (Grescoe says we ought to be eating these healthful bottomfeeders ourselves, instead of grinding them up for feed in fish farms, and I agree.) But by far the most fascinating chapter I've read thus far has been the one on aquaculture and shrimp farms. I hope you get a chance to read this book yourself, but if you don't, at least heed this advice: Never, ever do you want to eat farmed shrimp. His myriad stories will surely convince you, but I'll just tell you that farmed shrimp are pretty much poison in every way - for you the consumer, for the villages they exist in, and the waters they invade with their toxic effluence.

Ignorant indifference on the part of the seafood consumer is one of the biggest reasons the oceans have become so compromised, and it really takes more than toting around the Monterey Bay's Watch Card to make yourself an informed consumer. If you eat seafood at all, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Let's understand a little better the crises that are going on out in the oceans, and learn what we are buying, where it came from, and how it was caught. Demanding this information from fish sellers is the first step on the road to our oceans' recovery, so please start asking. And check out Bottomfeeder, it truly is a great read!

(Grescoe also wrote a stellar article on salmon in the New York Times in June.)

Quality of life, measured in melons

It's high summer in Northern California, and the abundance of produce is mind-boggling. A couple of weeks ago, it felt like I was drowning in apricots; I'd eaten so many already, and given bags of them away, but everywhere I turned, it seemed someone offered me more. An entire box of Frog Hollow jewels showed up on my front porch, and I took up a bag through my kitchen window one day, locally grown in the sunshine across the street. I shamefully ignored emails offering me ten pounds more. Eventually, the apricots begat so many fruit flies, I pureed the rest for a disappointingly unimaginative sorbet (It tastes just like baby food, everyone I fed it to declared, and it did. Oh well.) and froze the rest. I have bags of home-dried apricots now, and I'm going to have to make a special date to eat them, mid-winter, when finally, the barrage of fresh fruit is over.

At the farmer's markets lately, I have to hold back from buying too much fruit, fearing a barrage of more fruit flies. There are at least a dozen different types of melons for sale, and the fragrant ones I can't resist preclude the purchase of strawberries, peaches, or the delicate raspberries from Lucero Farms that I've been eyeing for what feels like months now, their bursts of dense winey flavor passed over once again. To avoid taking any home with me, I ask Carl, my favorite peach man, for two in a row, "Ready to eat now, please," take a few drippy bites, free the pit, then shove the rest in my mouth, savoring the sweet, unable to talk. Who needs expensive restaurant meals when you can have a simple piece of exquisite fruit? And the atmosphere couldn't be better, save for lying on my back in the grass under the fruit tree itself. I sit there in a coveted patch of shade under the trees, in the middle of Shattuck Avenue, surrounded by friends. It's the closest thing I have to a modern-day town square, the Berkeley farmer's market, and all who shop there eat like kings. We nod and smile knowingly at the shoppers around us, each one of us in on the secret. Talk about quality of life; to me, it's these sorts of simple pleasures that add up to make it high.

After the peaches, I savor a nectarine, and I wish my mother was next to me eating one of her own. She used to buy nectarines in the dead of winter, in New Jersey, in the Eighties, and though her kitchen would look naked without a bowl of nectarines on the shiny white table, I still don't think she's had a nectarine this good. At last Saturday night's party, I ate the most luscious white one standing over a kitchen sink. It wasn't organic, I admit, which I declared a shame, but it was entirely shocking, that piece of fruit, its honeyed perfume waking up every cell in my body when I was so sleepy at three in the morning. Some people remember restaurant meals, but I remember perfect fruit.

So I didn't bring home any peaches. Or anything other than a simple red watermelon, which I'll swiftly turn into my new favorite addiction. Next week, I'll bring home some little red berries, but for now, it's all about melon.

Watermelon Agua Fresca, Sorbet, or Slush

This is already a cinch to make, since it's little more than fruit, but certainly, if you see one, buy a watermelon that's free of seeds; it'll make the task a whole lot easier. I prefer red melon for this--seriously, is there a prettier color?-- but yellow would work too, or any other melon, come to think of it.

Making this into a slushy frozen treat is my new favorite thing. It's especially good to help cool you down on a sweltering afternoon, but really it's good any time of summer, whether chilled for a refreshing drink, or frozen into slush or sorbet. The acidity of the lime and the flowery aroma of the orange blossom water combine with the melon to make something really special. Enjoy!

red watermelon
fresh limes, juiced (use 1 or more 1 per quart of juice)
orange blossom water (about 1 or 2 teaspoons per quart of juice)
agave syrup or sugar to taste

First, wash the melon. Then, cut a thin slice from both ends. Stand the melon up on one of its flattened ends on a cutting board (I use this one, and love its lipped edges, which contain the juices of tomatoes, melon, and citrus, making for easy clean up). Using a sharp, thin-bladed knife, slice off the skin in strips from top to bottom. Rotate the melon (or the cutting board) until all skin has been removed. Cut the flesh into big chunks, and remove the seeds if there are any. The white seeds are fine to leave in there, but the black ones need to go.

Put the chunks of melon flesh in a blender and process for a while until it is uniformly blended and pretty much completely liquified. If you want, you can strain out any small pieces that your blender just won't eat up. Pour the liquid into a big glass jar or pitcher. Add a bit of fresh lime juice and orange blossom water, and stir well. taste it and if it's not sweet enough to you, add a few squirts of agave syrup, or add a bit of sugar and stir until it's dissolved. Taste the mixture and add more of these things to taste if you'd like.

You can serve the juice as is, like a traditional agua fresca. Make sure to chill it well, which will take at least an hour if not longer, or serve it over ice. Or you can chill it and churn it in an ice cream maker until the consistency pleases you. My favorite thing to do is churn it just until it's slushy and enjoy it that way--pure summertime heaven! If you do freeze it in an ice cream maker, but don't eat it all up right away and stick it in your freezer, it will likely get extremely hard in there. You can defrost it by leaving it in the fridge for 30 or 40 minutes. It will then be more scoopable, if not a little slushy, which is not a bad thing at all.

Yield: Depends on how big your melon is. One pound of melon usually equals in the vicinity of 2 cups of flesh, which in turn yields slightly less liquid once blended.

I cook, and I write.

Ooooh-eeeee, here I am. This has been a long time in the coming, but I can hold out no longer. It is time to begin this blog. People have been asking, and here I am, finally. How far these words will travel throughout the blogosphere, I do not know, yet, but I'm willing to risk sharing my writing here with anyone who cares to read it. After at least a year and a half of daily reading of food blogs that at times has bordered on obsessive, it has become clear that I can't wait any longer; I want in on the party too. Letting friends as well as strangers in on some of what swirls around inside this pretty little head, it's new for me, that's a fact, and it's risky. But I have plenty of history as an intrepid risk-taker in life, so I'm pretty sure I'll be fine. Hopefully, there will be at least a few folks out there who will find value in my posts. A few readers will be all right, and any more will be a gift.

What will I share here at The Sage Table's blog? Well, what am I into? If you knew me, the answer would be easy: I'll share about food. What else could I possibly want to write about? I am obsessed, not only with cooking, but with everything to do with it.

I love plants and herbs, farming and farmer's markets. I love knowing where my food came from and the care with which it was grown, who grew it, and when. I love recipes and culinary history and finding the perfect classic recipes from which to begin a stint in the kitchen. I love jazz and cooking like I'm John Coltrane, making it all up, starting with a phrase, an idea from which to riff, taking it from there to create a whole masterpiece, a meal which is a symphony of flavors, colors, tastes, and textures. I love simple food just as much as fancy, if not more.

I love the idea of food as medicine. I love experimenting with different ways of eating and watching how subtle changes in my diet make a difference, when they do, which isn't always. Nutrition, I admit, is a quandary to me, even though I have studied it for years; it's an issue that never quite escapes coloring my decisions in the kitchen, and it will play a role in what I share here, for sure.

At heart, I am a sensualist with a fixation on creating delicious tastes. I love the pleasure wonderful food brings to me and the communities and people around me, and I find nothing more gratifying than sharing food with my circles of friends and communities. I live in the Bay Area, where most people I know are incomprehensibly busy. I'm the only one I know who has time for most of what I do, plus some people pay me to do it, so I have time to experiment and create, spending entire days in the kitchen with just myself, learning, experimenting, tasting. I love sharing the fruits of my labors with my clients, whose appreciation and accolades drive me forward from day to day. This work I do, cooking, it feels like a luxury, and my gratitude for that fact permeates my soul of late. To do work we love, that others love us for, that is the biggest gift we can give ourselves, and I've done that, so gladly. Oh YES.

I am a teacher too, with two decades of experience in the kitchen and a brain full of knowledge and technique that I adore sharing in the classes I teach. When they set foot in my kitchen, my students invariably open wide to the inspiration I set out to give them. I figure that without inspiration, nothing else I teach them will matter. I'll teach here too, and inspire, so get ready for it.

So I will share what I know and what I'm thinking about, and even if it doesn't seem like it will at first, invariably it will take us back to food and cooking, every time. If you love those things, come back here and visit often, and partake, please, of my so-called wisdom. Within no time at all, there ought to be plenty to read here. I often call myself a procrastinator extraordinaire (I am so very good at it!), but once I get started on something, I've been know to become unflaggingly focused. I'll be back soon with more thoughts, I hope, and likely some recipes.