How Do You Mess Up A Lemon-Butter Sauce?

There are really only two primary ingredients in a lemon-butter sauce. You'd think I could do it properly...

Mais non, with me, the easy things become hard and the "any idiot can do it" things become disasters.
I bought fish at St. Lawrence Market in Toronto at 4pm. That means everything goes on special. I bargained and asked if the fish guy would give me an extra discount on the black cod if I bought some smoked salmon. Sure, $3 off per pound. What that meant was I could afford the black cod. I bought one fillet. Just one. Enough fish for 2 people. It only cost about $8. This is still ridiculous but if you've had black cod you will understand. Really you don't need a sauce for this fish. The flesh itself already tastes like butter. Just add a little salt and pepper and grill, bake, roast or broil this fish to perfection. The only thing you can even do wrong is over-cook it. It should fall apart at the touch of your fork. To me, this is heaven.

So by adding a lemon butter sauce I was probably asking for trouble. Why mess with a good thing, right? I figured adding a tiny bit of butter would enhance the natural buttery-ness, and as long as I didn't add too much lemon, it would contrast the sweetness. I searched long and hard for a good lemon-butter sauce recipe, which is stupid because it's so simple, but I had vermouth, see, and I wanted a sauce that would use that as well. I also didn't want to add any cream because a little butter is all my poor lactose-intolerant belly can handle. Oh, and I had no chicken stock, the recipe had to be just lemon, butter, oil, salt, pepper, vermouth and capers (I bought some capers because those go with fish and lemon sauces, right?

I can't even find the recipe I used but it had way too much lemon juice (1/2 a lemon's worth I think), too many capers (my fault, I think. It only called for 1/2 a teaspoon or something way too small, so I doubled it and probably didn't drain them very well. So it was pretty brine-y), and just a dab of butter at the end. I should have dabbed more, probably. I deglazed with a splash of vermouth, as called for, but it evaporated in about 1 second even though my temperature was at the right level. So I added another splash to create some actual liquid. Probably there should have been more to balance the lemon juice.

Worst thing was I still managed to under-cook the fish, only slightly better than over-cooking it. I wasn't too worried about under-cooking it because of all the lemon and the anti-microbial properties thereof.

Still, it wasn't great. It was way too lemony to taste the exquisite black cod. Less is more, Amie. Skip the sauce entirely next time and let the fish flavour shine.

Or follow a proper recipe, one that's published...in a book...or on a blog or website I trust. No more taking chances with black cod. It is far too delicious. At least the anise flavour from the top of the fennel was subtle enough.

I roasted some fennel and tomatillos. The fennel was perfect. The tomatillos made me cry a little, they were so bitter. I missed my Quebec tomatillos. No wonder no one buys them...they're often so disgusting...but my perfect ones from the market in Montreal...heaven.

Hits and misses, this meal. Maybe I'll get it right next time.

Zucchini and Tomatillos Cooked In Chilies

I'm a big believer in using what you have. What I had was a pot in which I'd just made the most delicious chile sauce. The pot still held the remnants of the sauce and I hate wasting a delicious thing. I wanted every last bit of heat. So I quickly chopped some zucchini and diced some tomatillos. I figured the zucchini might be weird but the tangy sweetness of the tomatillos would be amazing. In general I think spicy fruit is highly underrated. Think Thai mango and papaya salads. They are heavenly. Sweet and spicy go together. If you can add sour and salty to that then all the better, and there was a little salt in the chili sauce and a little natural sourness in the tomatillos. Perfect.

So I deglazed the pot with a half cup of water and lightly boiled the tomatillos and zucchini. Then they became both a hamburger condiment and a salad ingredient. The salad needed a little more sour from some vinegar, as well as some oil to mute the heat, but it worked. It worked better on the hamburger though, because it was pretty pungent...

What's wrong with Toronto? Do they not believe in good tomatoes? I went to St. Lawrence market, my mecca of beautiful food, and bought a very inexpensive container of tomatillos. I figured they'd be just as good as the ones I'd been having in Quebec. Nope. They were junk. They were sour and either too soft or too hard, picked too early from the branches. I roasted them and they never got sweeter. The complexity of taste I'd come to expect was lacking. I wasted $2.00 that I'll never get back, but more importantly my respect for this little shop in St. Lawrence market that carries my favourite Pinehedge yogurt and kefirs, Niagara Foods, is much less.

Anyway, if you don't want to make the chile sauce recipe you can still recreate this effect for the purposes of creating a great hamburger condiment (much better than ketchup and pickles) by boiling a little water with a sprinkle of salt, sugar, a dash of vinegar and some crushed chilies or cayenne or other chile powder to taste. If it doesn't work out, though, don't blame me. Blame the chile powder. Then add some sliced zucchini and diced tomatillos (they can even be a little under-ripe since they're getting cooked). Cook about 5 minutes at a simmer and then drain the pot or remove them with a slotted spoon. Done.

Another great hamburger seasoning is grilled or broiled or baked tomatillo. Stick the whole tomatillo (or 3) in the oven or toaster oven at 400 Fahrenheit and let it cook until it's a little soft of the skin breaks. This generally gets rid of some of the tang and you'll end up with a very sweet hamburger topping. That is, unless you buy your tomatillos in Toronto. I challenge you to find a good tomatillo there. Maybe from an organic market? The roasted tomatillos (when ripe) are also great with rice, kind of like Middle Eastern traditions squeeze a regular grilled tomato over their cooked basmati for flavour.

What I Didn't Know About Tomatillos: Balsamic Braised Fennel Salad

So I said last post that I didn't know if my tomatillos were the best ever because I hadn't had a lot of other tomatillos, but if these aren't the best I don't know how I'll react to even better ones. When I made the grilled salsa I figured there was soemthing special about the grilling that made my probably under-ripe tomatillos amazing, but no, they're just amazing on their own.

I added them raw to a braised fennel salad I made. There are three tomatillo pieces in the picture above, to the right of the cucumbers. The fennel is amazing on its own and the balsamic and honey reduction makes my teeth hurt from delicious licorice sweetness, but I was completely blown away by the tomatillos. They really are a fruit, not a vegetable. They're a bit sweeter than tomatoes, but still with a bit of acidity...I really don't know how to describe them. They're not juicy like most tomatoes, but the flesh has a lot of flavour...maybe somewhere between a plum and an bakeapple. Hmm...yes, that's not a bad comparison. You need to try an organic tomatillo. If you live in Montreal this means you go to the Plateau, Mile End or Outremont farmers' market and buy them from the one stall that has them (it's the same woman and the plateau and mile end markets but it's a different place, whose quality I cannot guarantee, at the Outremont market). They weren't great in the sweet balsamic, but they were amazing with sweet onions and garlic in the grilled salsa. They were a nice surprise in this salad, though, because they were a break in the heady sweetness. I'll give the fennel recipe next post because it's good, but this is about tomatillos. I think they would be wonderful with meats, but really they should be used in a dessert. I actually think that a tomatillo crisp would be amazing. I'm going to talk to Chef Jean-Paul Giroux about it on Tuesday. He's the Chef at Cuisine et Dépendence on boul. St-Laurent. I doubt he's ever cooked with them before but we shall see. I'm going to bring him one as a gift. How cute is that?

Tomatillo ("Hog Plum") Salsa: Beyond the Great Wall

I once made a tomatillo chicken dish with canned tomatillos...in Newfoundland, home of bland food. There was no way I could possibly find them fresh, and if by some miracle they popped up in a grocery store near me I'd have to be stupid to buy them. I think maybe once I did and I remember biting into skinned water. That was approximately the flavour. The inside wasn't that liquidy but it was nothing worth writing home about.

I assumed that this was not the true flavour of a tomatillo. Kind of like having an unripe fruit. If something doesn't grow here there's almost no way it can possibly taste as good as it would when it's fresh from a farm or the wild of a place where it actually does grow. Ah, mangoes and dates...I can only imagine. Passion fruit...I dream about these things. Thank goodness cake doesn't grow on trees or only in tropical rain forests. I'd have to buy a cake tree and hit up my brother for the money to start a cake greenhouse in Montreal. It could also serve as a sauna. It'd be next to a boutique hotel. I'd make millions.

Unfortunately, no, this is not to be my destiny. What was I talking about? Oh right, tomatillos. Not a big money-making operation, tomatillos.

When I found them once again at a Montreal farmers' market I got very excited. Do you know what this means? It means they might actually taste like tomatillos are supposed to taste!!! They were organic, even! I could have thrown a party then and there but I forgot to bring a cake from my pretend cake tree (my cake tree would not allow beet buttercream frosting, and would probably just follow all the recipes of Joy the Baker. It would also make cakes according to season - strawberry angel food cakes in summer, chocolate pudding cakes and molasses cakes in winter, and mousse year-round, of course. Cake trees are always in bloom, miracle of nature that they are).

So I don't know if my tomatillos are the best ever, but they are actually flavourful and made possibly my most amazing salsa ever.

These guys look like under-ripe tomatoes, but there's a bit of an addictive tartness to them that makes them go perfectly with a little bit of meaty flavour. I have two tomatillo recipes - one for a sauce for chicken with a little jalapeno from my Southwest Slow-Cooking cookbook, and one from "Beyond The Great Wall" for a Chinese tomatillo salsa for meat or sticky rice that's supposed to be made with a bit of ground pork and cilantro. I'd actually bought a bit of ground cerf (deer) meat on a whim from the same market, completely coincidentally, and igured the stars would never align for me in this way again. So I made the Chinese salsa and I'm so happy I did.

Traditionally, this dish would be made with makawk (or a "hog plum" in English) and is traditional in the south of China near Burma, Thailand and Laos, hence why it's traditionally eaten with Thai sticky rice. According to the cookbook's authors, Jeremy Alford and Naomi Duguid, it's "jaew" a kind of dish made from grilled and then pounded ingredients, so the grilling gives a nice charred, cooked flavour and then the pounding gives a rough, thick texture. It won't be watery like a Mexican salsa.


Ingredients:
3/4lbs tomatillos, unpeeled. this is a bit confusing since tomatillos have skins and peels. I think you want to take off the leafy peel and leave on the tomato skin since it's hard to remove the peel itself if it's not charred, and I'm pretty sure you want the skin off for the pounding step later (don't make this with canned tomatillos because you can't grill them with the peels on and then peel them. It will be a big mess)
1 cup shallots of red onion, unpeeled, halved if large, quartered if red onions
1 head garlic, unpeeled, but separated into individual cloves
1/4 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
2 oz (1/4 cup) ground meat [pork has the most flavour, and is what's called for, but I liked the richer taste of game. So whatever you have that's organic or at least antibiotic-free, such as beef, bison, goat, ox or even venison (deer)]
1/2 cup fresh coriander (cilantro)

If you don't have a gas stove this is not going to be as amazing and it's going to take a lot more time. I don't have a gas stove, but I do have a small grill. It's not super, but it has a grill on the bottom and on top and is named after George Foreman, so it's not bad. Unfortunately it meant that although my tomatillos grilled faster, some got squished, and since they weren't all the same height, some got less charred than others. In the end it probably would have been faster to use a skillet.

You're supposed to put the tomatillos, garlic and shallots on a grill screen or fine-mesh surface on the grill or put them in a cast-iron skillet on medium-high heat. Cook, turning frequently, until splotched with black on all sides and softened. It's supposed to take 10-15 minutes. About 25 minutes later I was almost satisfied with my tomatillos. My grill was pretty charred from the burnt juices of the charred, busted tomatillos, but I love that flavour...maybe that's why my salsa wasn't as watery. I'll have to do it the same way next time.

While that's all grilling and you're forgetting to turn the contents of the grill, you're supposed to put the water in a large skillet and bring it to a boil, then add the meat and salt. Cook until t changes colour and break it up so it doesn't get lumpy. Now who really just cooks a quarter cup of ground meat? No butcher will sell it to you in that quantity. So you either cook the whole pound you bought or you cook the quarter cup and freeze the rest. I just cooked the whole thing and 1/2 a teaspoon of salt was STILL enough! So don't go overboard on it. You can add more to the salsa in the end if it's not salty enough...wait, I DID do that, so maybe I should have just added more in the first place...no, I like the flavour of salt directly on tomatillos...I stick with my original measurements.

The browning of the meat should just take a minute, but I think it'll take a bit longer if you cook a whole pound. If you stir constantly, maybe 3 minutes.

When your grilled things are fully grilled let them cool before removing the charred skins of the onions, garlic and tomatillos. If you left the leafy bits on the tomatillos it might be interesting to just peel that off and leave the uncharred tomato skin on. I don't know what this would taste like. Grilled tomatoes are pretty common in a lot of other food traditions, though (British and Iranian, for example), so it can't be bad either way, just maybe not as sweet? Then put all the grilled and peeled things in the blender of food processor and pulse to chop roughly. you don't want a purée. You want some chunk. Pour it out into a bowl and add the meat (or 1/4 cup of your cooked pound) including a little of its juice. the nice thing about deer is it's a very lean meat (so a steak of it is often very dry if over-cooked or not properly marinated) so when ground there's actually a fair bit of flavour (since this is fattier than most butcher cuts of it) but not a whole lot of excess fat like pork would have.

Just before you serve the salsa stir in the chopped coriander. I had organic stuff that was ridiculously aromatic and not bitter at all. So it went really nicely with the slight tartness of the tomatillos and sweetness of the grilled shallots.

Serving suggestion: Yes, I said serve it as an accompaniment to grilled meat or sticky rice, but I would also serve this as a main dish since it's so high in protein. Blasphemer that I am, I ate it with baked potatoes one night and another with thick sourdough bread. It would also be great with a flatbread too, which I'm sure is what would be used in Northern China if tomatillos (hog plums) grew there.