(As read by birthday girl Alex Tuller on the September 1 podcast – her special day was August 29)
Wild Trout. Interesting that would be this week’s recipe given our recent return from a two-week fishing trip to western trout streams. It should be noted that all of our fish, wild and stocked, were released, and this particular catch came from Adams’ in Poughkeepsie.
Our decision with this fish was to dress it up just a tad, for fun, and to combine our fish and vegetables into one dish. Out ingredients were red and yellow bell pepper, half of each, one quarter of a fennel bulb, one stalk of celery, two cloves of garlic, three small pods of star anise well ground, a pecan sized piece of ginger, grated, a little soy, and about a half a cup of champagne and a third a cup of fish stock.
We poured olive oil into a saute pan and tossed in the garlic chopped, cooking to fragrant. At that point the vegetables, julienned, went in to saute to softness. When they began to have a little give, in went the star anise, the soy and the ginger, again to the point of nicely fragrant. Then the champagne and the fish stock, cooking down to a sauce just covering the bottom of the pan.
Now, this sauce has the potential to be overly acidic, as ours was – even more so because we included lemon zest, something we are excluding in retrospect. The way to counter that is…butter. Butter is almost always the answer.
In fact, butter is what we used to pan fry our fish. Our trout filet, about 3/4 pound for the two of us, was nice and thick like salmon on one side, and thin like a sand dab on the other. What to do? Cut it in half and cook the pieces separately.
At this point, you really have to cook to your preference. We cooked to just shy of medium rare. And then on with your vegetables. Should you like a starch, we found that thyme-roasted new potatoes – from our local farmer’s market, of course, went absolutely beautifully.