Walking Fish Delivery 1

Two years ago, graduate students at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment partnered with fishermen on the North Carolina coast to develop a way to bring fresh seafood to Durham residents. The result: Walking Fish, a community-supported fishery and quite possibly the coolest thing to hit Durham since Crash Davis.

Every other Thursday, leaders of the cooperative drive to the coast and pick up shares of the fresh catch from local fishermen and fisheries, then drive back to Durham to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens parking lot and deliver the seafood to shareholders from all over town.

Shefali heard about the program last fall. She also learned that it has become so popular that the shares sell out within a few hours. Tired of listening to me complain about living two hours from the beach but having to buy seafood flown in from Ecuador and Indonesia in our local grocery stores, she signed us up to receive two pounds per delivery the moment winter shares became available.

I picked up our first share last Thursday. A graduate student sitting behind a collapsible table in the parking lot looked up my name, then turned to another student wearing rubber gloves and standing in the bed of a pickup truck. He opened a huge cooler and pulled out one Southern Flounder in a clear plastic bag.

While I was waiting in line to pick up my catch, I listened to other members complain about flounder's bland taste and lack of versatility. I'd cooked flounder fillets in a simple tomato broth once before, but this fish was only headed and gutted. I did a lot of fishing growing up, but never learned how to fillet. This summer in Minnesota my dad gave me a crash course on a walleye, but I wasn't about to try it on such a thin, bony fish.

I decided to cook it whole, the same way I prepare Red Snapper on the beach. I scaled the fish with a butter knife, then scored both sides by making quarter-inch incisions about six inches apart on each side, dusted both sides with salt and pepper and let it rest for a few hours. That night, I lit my grill, wiped the grates with a paper towel soaked in vegetable oil (to prevent sticking), and rubbed olive oil all over the fish. I grilled each side on medium heat for about eight minutes each, carefully using two spatulas to flip it.

After I took it off the grill I let it rest for a few minutes, then cut an incision across the top and bottom of each side. These incisions, coupled with the scores I cut before grilling, made it possible to scoop out fillets with a spatula. It's a very delicate procedure - one I messed up a couple times and ended up picking pieces of flesh with my hands and transferring to a plate - but it removed the bones far better than I could have with a fillet knife. (For more info about grilling whole fish, check out Cooks Illustrated.)

We topped the fish with a simple salmoriglio sauce (lemon, garlic, parsley or basil, salt, pepper and olive oil) or a tomato and parsley relish, and ate it with sauteed zucchini and roasted potatoes.

Legislation and The Foodiest Small Town in America

Shefali and I live in Durham, North Carolina, a small town with an surprisingly great food scene. The scene garnered national attention two years ago, when Bon Appetit named it "The Foodiest Small Town in America."

One of the reasons why food flourishes here is the extensive network of local farms that drive the year-round farmer's markets and farm-to-fork restaurants. Much like the national media has kept an eye on Durham foodies of late, Durham foodies have recently paid special attention to the national media.

Earlier this month, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act into law. The legislation should provide much needed, albeit controversial, renovations to how the Food and Drug Administration controls and inspects food safety.

Food and Drugs commissioner Margaret Hamburg, in a piece cross-posted on foodsafety.gov and whitehouse.gov, writes that the legislation is a major step in the right direction because recognizes that supervising food safety requires an inspection of the entire food system:

The idea of prevention is not new. FDA has established prevention-oriented standards and rules for seafood, juice, and eggs, as has the U.S. Department of Agriculture for meat and poultry, and many in the food industry have pioneered “best practices” for prevention. What’s new is the recognition that, for all the strengths of the American food system, a breakdown at any point on the farm-to-table spectrum can cause catastrophic harm to the health of consumers and great disruption and economic loss to the food industry.

So, we need to look at the food system as a whole, be clear about the food safety responsibility of all of its participants, and strengthen accountability for prevention throughout the entire food system – domestically and internationally. The new law meets these needs in numerous ways.

Lisa Sorg, editor of Durham's Independent Weekly, covered the story from a local angle. Her story opens with a conversation with Richard Holcomb on his farm (15 miles from our house). The new legislation would cripple small family farmers were it not for the Tester-Hagan Amendment, a "hard-fought addition to the bill," Sorg writes, "that exempts small farms from some of the law's most expensive regulations."

She goes on to explain the law's significant improvements to antiquated policies that date back as early as the 1930s (for example, the new law requires large farms to be inspected every 5 years and eventually every three; previously the farms needed an inspection once every ten). She also, with the help of Roland McReynolds, brings attention to the legislation's limited scope.

"It's important to remember that the bill does not address everything you and I might consider food safety issues: pesticides, allergens, hormones, genetically modified organisms," says Roland McReynolds, executive director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which advocates on behalf of farmers and consumers to promote local and organic agriculture.

"We have to go back to the beginning," Holcomb told Sorg, "to the way we grew food for thousands of years."

Because family farmers grow, transport and sell their foods themselves, they control quality of their product. For example, Holcomb harvested close to 5,000 heads of cabbage this weekend. He sold them at local farmer's markets and distributed them to area restaurants. The people who eat them shook his hand after purchasing, listened to his invitation to visit the farm, and will likely visit his stand next weekend.

To a consumer like me, it's all a matter of trust, and I feel Holcomb's model builds consumer trust more effectively than any federal regulation, and costs taxpayers nothing. Ultimately, small farms earned exemption from the new laws because they hold themselves to higher standards than the government's. They are part of the solution, not the problem. In a perfect world, such a model would be the norm.

A Sicilian Resolution

NY Times food writer Martha Rose Shulman recently wrote about an easy way to eat more fish in 2011. Shulman writes about the health benefits, as well as the hefty price tag that seafood carries throughout most of the country. Looking overseas, she writes, might provide an answer.

"While researching the cooking of Sicily some years ago," she writes, "I spent an afternoon with a chef who had a small restaurant in Palermo, where I watched him take a single piece of tuna and turn it into a pasta sauce that fed four of us. "

My dad remembers Friday meals with his grandmother that featured a similar main course. Keeping with the Catholic tradition, she would add fish - usually tuna - to the family sauce and serve it with spaghetti.

Shulman also shares a fish ragu recipe that's "a sort of fish ragù common throughout Sicily and Southern Italy:"
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 pound swordfish or tuna steaks, skinned and cut in approximately 1/2-inch dice

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/2 cup dry white wine (optional)

1 small onion, finely chopped

2 to 4 garlic cloves (to taste), minced

1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes (optional)

2 anchovy fillets, finely chopped

1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes, with juice, or 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and diced or grated

1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 pound penne or fusilli

I followed the recipe yesterday, but substituted Christopher Sauce for the canned tomatoes and omitted the white wine (my great grandmother's aversion to wine is a story for another day). Cooking with two kinds of fish (anchovies and tuna) upholds my family's belief that a ragu is best when it includes at least two (and sometimes three) different proteins. Plus, the anchovies give the sauce a richness that compliments the winter weather.

The Sauce

My family treats its traditional red sauce like others practice religion - we all believe in it, that it's sacred and essential for life, but each of us celebrates it by making it our own way.

I grew up eating it at least once a week, oblivious to its greatness in a world full of watery, bland, sugar-laden impostors. I realized how fortunate I was while studying abroad in Ireland, living on a tight budget in an apartment with a small kitchen and limited cooking tools. There was so much to see and do in Galway that my friends and I didn't take the time to cook often, so while scrambling to come up with dinner one night I picked up a jar of Prego, threw a can of tuna in it and boiled half a box of penne.

Assembled on the plate, it looked decent enough. The meal had cost only a couple of bucks, and there was enough leftover to cover the next day's lunch. But it didn't smell the same. I took my first bite and suddenly felt very alone, in a world far from home.

This, I thought, can NEVER happen again.

Later that night, I called home. I needed to hear familiar voices, but I didn't mention the meal. I'd learned my lesson, and news of the incident would not go over well.

A few years later, while visiting my girlfriend (now wife), Shefali, I learned another lesson in sauce tradition. She was in the middle of a clinical rotation in Boston, and I was there for several days between Christmas and New Year's. The day I arrived, I opened her fridge and saw a half-eaten jar of Ragu Old World Style. It was as if I was back in Ireland, cold, alone and confused again. I quickly scanned the room to see what else had deceived me. Was I really planning to marry a girl who eats sauce from a plastic jar?

I took a few deep breaths, regrouped and found some much needed perspective. Shefali's from India, not Italy. At the time, she didn't know puttanesca from arrabiata. Pasta in India was like most Indian food here in the US - a shell of what it's supposed to be

What I didn't see in her fridge were jars of curry and tikka masala. She knew good food, but I hadn't shown her good sauce.

The next day she had to work, so I canceled my plans to explore Cambridge and instead walked to the nearest grocery store, carried several pounds of canned tomatoes back to her house and over the course of the afternoon filled her roommate's largest pot with my family's sauce. When she got home, I opened her freezer and showed her the stacked plastic bins as well as the meats she would cook and add to each. I also asked her to please never buy sauce again.

Memorable as my family's recipe may be, I've had a hard time pinpointing the exact recipe. It appears every cook in the family follows a slightly different recipe. For example, my dad includes green peppers, but Aunt Mary uses only onions. Grandma Jean slow cooks it all day, often in a Crock Pot, while others let it simmer for only an hour. I add a lot of crushed red pepper for spice.

Regardless of the disagreement and countless variations, several important universals exist:

- garlic and onions are essential
- cans of peeled, whole tomatoes are best, but other varieties (crushed, diced) work as well.
- add tomato paste in addition to the canned tomatoes
- season with oregano
- adjust the seasonings (salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, etc.) after the sauce simmers for an hour
- let the sauce simmer for at least one hour (the longer the better).

Here is the recipe in its entirety, as my father taught it to me:

1. In a large pot, simmer a few cloves of garlic (diced) in olive oil.

2. Add 1 big can (28 oz) of tomatoes, 2 cans of tomato paste, and 4 cans of water (2 cans water for every can of tomato paste)

3. Add 1/2 of 1 large onion, chopped

4. Add 4 cloves of garlic, cut into large pieces

5. Add 1 bell pepper, diced

6. Cover the top of the sauce with dried oregano. Stir in the oregano and add 2 bay leaves.

7. Let the sauce simmer for at least one hour.

8 After the sauce has simmered, season with salt, pepper, garlic, oregano, etc. to taste.

Welcome

Perhaps this blog began twenty years ago, when I was seven. My family lived in Iowa, and each summer my mom planted a garden in the backyard. She grew many different vegetables, but I only remember the tomatoes - two rows, standing tall along the fence line, soaking up the sweltering Iowa humidity that made the corn grow beyond my shoulders by the fourth of July. While she crawled around on the ground, I would stand behind her and wait until her eyes left the fence. Then I'd pluck the ripest one I could find, plunge it into my mouth and chew the piece like an apple.

"It's officially summer," she said, catching me in the act. Smiling, she stood, up, picked a tomato of her own and joined me.

Or perhaps the story began the summer I was sixteen and traveling the country on a baseball team. Lonely for home, I ordered "home style" spaghetti and meatballs from more than a dozen restaurants in Tennessee, West Virginia, Kansas City and Florida.

People pay to eat this meal, I thought. But it's not as good as what I get at home.

Or when I was twenty-two, living in my own apartment and cooking for the first time in my life. My roommate showed his recipe for a quick pasta sauce (threw oil, garlic, two tomatoes and dried oregano in the blender). I watched it form a puddle underneath my noodles, and felt emptier after eating than I did before.

Then again, this blog probably started around the turn of the century, when my great grandmother sailed to New York, settled in Philadelphia, raised more than a dozen children on a vegetable and chicken farm and fed them the only food she knew. Four generations later, I want to know it, too.

In any case, I invite you to join me as I research, experiment with and eat memorable food. Together we'll cook (probably incorrectly at first) meals like pasta fazole, the family ragu, baccala salad and oi oi, just to name a few.