It's the final night of "The Pheast" and we're going out in style. This dish was pretty awesome and is very fitting for my favorite night of the year. It's a very balloon drop worthy dish.

The parsnip, bacon and sprouts all play off of each other really well. And the halibut, being the "steak of fish" stands up to the other strong flavors.

I made the consome by cooking down bacon, onions and garlic in chicken stock and then clarifying it with egg whites and straining it through cheese cloth a couple of times. 

The parsnips were boiled and pureed with butter and heavy cream. And some thinly sliced parsnips were fried to make chips.

I halved and fried the sprouts and baked a thick cut of bacon.  

So that's it, "The Pheast" is coming to an end. Hope everyone has a great New Years! I know I will.

It's night 3 of the Pheast and I thought I would post a fish that was pulled from local waters, off of Montauk in Long Island. This is Hake, a firm meaty fish that is very similar to cod. I used some Japanese elements in this dish just to shake things up a little bit. 

I made the puree by tossing diced sweet potatoes in sesame oil and roasting them until tender. Then I ran them through a food mill and whipped them with some more of the oil.

The red cabbage was pickled in rice wine vinegar with a healthy amount of fresh garlic and ginger. It looked and tasted like the pickled ginger you get with sushi and was a nice counter-balance to the rich sauce.

The sauce was made by cooking the fish bones and trimmings down with water, vinegar, white miso paste, garlic and onions. Then it was strained and blended to get a nice smooth consistency. White miso has a soy sauce-like savoriness with a hint of almost caramel sweetness to it. It's very versatile, sometimes even seen in desserts.

And the fish was cooked as I cook most fish, dusted in Wondra flour and seared in hot oil.

To keep with my theme and incorporate some Phish with my fish, I'll end with some  Phish lyrics, which, aside from them being in Japanese,  are completely irrelevant to this post...
ミトスティック時間 (Mitosutikku Jikan)
ミトスティック隠して (Mitosutikku Kakushite)
ミトスティック取り出した, 時間 (Mitosutikku Toridashita, Jikan)
ドド頭がShock (Do Do atama ga shock)
ドド頭がShock (Do Do atama ga shock) 

 

Night 2 of the Pheast. And much like last night's "Tube" encore, this post will be short and sweet. 

Pan seared tile fish
Steamed littleneck clams
Sauteed fingerling potatoes, onions and bacon lardons
Chowder sauce
Parsley 

This dish has all of the classic flavors of a New England clam chowder. I've just broken them down for a nicer presentation and to save myself from boredom. I think that classic soups make really good sauces. They are familiar and battle tested. 

The Pheast of the 4 Nights of Phish begins with the cover tune of dishes. If you've eaten at The French Laundry or Per Se, or if you're familiar with the work of Thomas Keller you should immediately recognize this dish. It's a reinterpretation of the famous "Oysters and Pearls" that is the first course at TK's 2 flagships. His dish is a sabayon of pearl tapioca with oysters and caviar and it is absolutely amazing. It's always on the menu and for good reason.


In going along with the idea that imitation is the best form of flattery I riffed on TK's dish and came up with "Angels and Oysters". I simply replaced the tapioca with handmade cappellini or angel-hair pasta. After cooking the pasta I tossed it in a beurre monte (emulsified butter sauce) made with the juice from the oysters and some fenugreek.

Pasta is placed neatly in the dish like a little bird's nest. The oysters, which were poached very lightly in the sauce, are placed on top along with a spoonful of American hackleback  caviar. The plate is garnished with some chopped chives.

Phish covers the bands that have influenced them in adopting their own unique sound over the years. I've always seen their cover tunes as a way of honoring the greats. So in that same respect, if Chef Keller is reading, Thank You.

Many people may be familiar with the Feast of the Seven Fishes. It is a traditional Christmas Eve feast, celebrated by Italian and Italian American families, consisting of seven seafood dishes. As I was not raised in an Italian American household, this was not something my family did. So in lieu of honoring this traditional that has never been one of my own, I give you instead, "The Pheast of the Four Nights of Phish".

This feast will honor my favorite band, who I will be seeing for 4 consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden December 28th - 31st. I'll post a new fish dish each night before the show. So until next week, please enjoy a preview of Fish and Phish...

Fried Smelts, malt vinegar, red onion & caper remoulade.

Phish - "Dinner and a Movie" 12-4-09 MSG

I buy almost all of my seafood from Ippolito's in South Philly (check them out on my links page) . I buy from them not only because their stuff is always fresh and priced well, but also because they get in some really interesting fish. Stuff I've never cooked, eaten or even seen before. I like the challenge of cooking something new and I think it keeps the blog interesting. It would be pretty boring if I was posting a red snapper dish every week.

With that being said, I present to you one of the weirdest sea creatures I have ever eaten, the Mantis Shrimp. As you can see from their Wikipedia Link, these are actually neither shrimp nor mantis. And they are real bad asses with the nicknames "prawn killer" and "thumb splitters" because of their powerful claws. Like most interesting foods, these are pretty common in a lot of other Countries. But not seen here often because Americans tend to be unadventurous eaters. Our current love affair with Tilapia is a good example.

I did a little research on these things and realized that at this size they were not going to have very much meat in them. So I couldn't treat them like shrimp or lobster. Instead, I chose to make a stew to extract as much flavor as possible. I served a couple of the tails with the stew because they were really pretty.

I made the broth by first "confiting" a head of peeled garlic in olive oil. I sauteed the tails to get some color on them and then cooked them down in some clam and chicken stock. After straining the stock I blended it with the garlic and oil to make a nice thick broth. The mussels and clams were then cooked in the broth. The dish was garnished with some croutons and cilantro.

Insects or Sea Creatures?

In Italian Osso Bucco means "bone with a hole" as it is a cross-cut veal shank with an open marrow-filled hole. I've always roughly translated it as "holy shit!". I think it works either way because if you give this tough cut a little love and some time it will reward you with it's awesomeness and you will freak out at how good it is.

I started out by making a thin sauce out of my own canned San Marzanos, red wine, stock, onions, garlic, celery, bay leaf and rosemary. I seasoned and seared the shanks for a few minutes on each side and braised them in the sauce for 3 hours at 300 degrees. I allowed the shanks to hang out for a couple of days in the fridge before eating.

Osso Bucco is traditionally served with Risotto but I chose to go with farro instead. Farro is a rich nutty grain that I am guessing is incredibly good for you. You can find it at Wegman's and Whole Foods. I cooked the Farro til it was al dente, roasted some brussels sprouts and combined the two in a ripping hot skillet to toast them for a few minutes. The dish is sauced with the braising liquid.

I don't usually make and eat lobster the way that most people do. Steaming or boiling them until they are completely cooked through, cracking open the claws and tail and dunking the meat in butter. It's hard to make lobster well this way. By the time the flesh is cooked through, it is left chewy and bland.

Instead, I've adopted the method that some of my favorite chefs use. You steam the lobsters just until the shell turns red, throw them in ice water to stop them from cooking and then remove the meat from the shell. At this point you can use many different methods to finish the par-cooked lobster. You can butter poach it, cook it sous vide, quickly sear it or finish it in a sauce.

I butter poached my lobster here and then chilled it until I was ready to use it. I tossed it in a white truffle mayo and stuffed it into a homemade hotdog roll. For the bread, I used the dinner roll recipe from the Joe Beef cookbook and formed the dough into tubes. The lobster is topped with thinly sliced red onion.

I served the roll with some fingerling potato chips dusted with a saffron salt and a lite slaw made from sliced apples, red onion and sunchokes.

I'm not going to go into the history of Scrapple here because this dish is more about the Caviar. I'll save it for a more "scrapplely" Scrapple dish. But for those of you who aren't familiar with Scrapple, it is a pate of sorts made by cooking down all of the leftovers from butchering a pig and combining them with flour, cornmeal and some spices. As I just mentioned, I will go into more detail in a later post but I will say that the stuff seen here and any other Scrapple you will see on this blog was made "from scratch".

This dish was inspired by a recent meal at Jean Georges in New York where we were served two Caviar dishes that both also had egg in them. The creaminess of the yolk really played nicely with the briny bite of Caviar. I used that combo here and added a little PA Dutch flare to it.

So starting from the bottom to the top you have...
- Organic maple syrup from Spring Hills Farm in Northeastern PA
-Cornmeal griddle cake made with equal parts stone ground organic cornmeal and flour
-Pan-seared homemade pork scrapple
- Sunny side up Quail egg
- American Paddlefish Caviar
- Chives

I imagine that this is what my German relatives would have made for breakfast had any Russian fur traders been passing through and shacked up for the night.