Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Oh, speaking of recipes

Remember when I told you all that the lives of men as they grow up are punctuated by encounters with other men who teach them how to do manyly things? Well our fathers are chief among those. I've described my dad before as a real-life Burt Reynolds, both the happy go lucky Hooper Burt Reynolds and the scary manly Deliverance Burt Reynolds.

Well one of the things my dad taught me was to fish (actually, at various times my dad, my step dad, and my grandfather all taught me to fish. Fishing is an ongoing learning process). When my dad came to visit last month I took him fishing. It was great. We went out on a party boat out of Sheepshead Bay for Fluke. (I blogged about this on my livejournal, but it deserves mention here). Nobody ont he boat caught a keeper fluke, but we did pull in a few other thigns, like sea robins. One thing we pulled up were muscles. Well my dad after awhile took one of those muscles and put it ont he end of the hook and BANG! he hooked a really nice bluefish, probably the biggest fish of the day. I did the same thing with a muscle I pulled up and BANG! I pulled in a nice sea bass. We took them home and dad cooked them. He's really good at that.This is what he taught me:

DAD'S PAN FIRED FISH
Two cloves fresh garlic
1/8 cup unsalted butter
four fresh fish fliets
half cup flour (optional)
One cup red wine (optional)

*If you wnat to bread the fish do so, but it doeasn't need it
*Crush the garlic
*Melt the butter with the garlic in a frying pan over medium heat
*Place the fish in the pan and sear one side
*Turn and add the wine (this is my addition--dad didn't do this the day we went fishing) IT WILL FLAME
*When the fish is seared on both sides, serve

GREENS
*Buy some fresh greens: collard greens, spinich, turnip, chard, anything.
*Also get fresh mushooms, red bell peppers, white onion
*In a frying pan coock 1/4 pound of bacon. Do not drain. Break the bacon up
*To the grease in the frying pan add the greens, sliced mushrooms, bell pepper and red onion. Saute until greens are soft but not too limp. Serve forth.

Recipe

Martha publishes recipes. So should I:

This was published in a snarky article on tailgating in Smart Money magazine. Waht Smart Money was doing covering tailgating I'm not sure. Apparently it is an old tailgating standard, but I've never heard of it. Since it was announced as "traditional" I doubt it's under copywrite:

Beer Can Chicken:
*fire up the webber grill.
*Take one whole chicken, cleaned.
*Pop a beer
*Drink about half the beer
*Stick the beer can up the chicken's ass (the authro used Fosters, which obviously caused a problem at this stage)
*Set the chicken top end up in the barbecue: if the lid won't close, remove the grill and set the chicken in the bottom of the grill with the coals spread round it but not touching it.
*Cook until juices flow clear when punctured. It comes out juicy and tasting of beer.

As an apetizer (fromt he same aticle) Take raw fresh shrimp. dip them in vinegar until they turn grey. Eat them.

And don't forget the beer.