Fish Wednesday: Blue Bayou Edition

I know nothing about the food of the south. Nothing. Less than nothing, perhaps, other than sometimes, I like to eat it and man, does it taste good. I love greens and blackened fish is a thing of wonder. Plus, at my local supermarket, you can get catfish fillets that have been marinating in Cajun spices for longer than I can ever remember to marinate my fish.

First, I made the collards. If you make collards my way, you have to eat all the celery you’d intended to use in them with almond butter during the week in which you were supposed to cook the damn collards, already. Then, you saute an onion in a lot of olive oil while you boil the daylights out of the greens. Smarter cooks than I will start the greens long before they start the grill because they know that collards take forever to cook. But if, like me, you are nursing an epic headache and are only cooking dinner because it’s been too long since you’ve made a home meal and you hope to god it will make you feel better, you will not start them soon enough.

Boil the greens until they are good and done, which I did not do. Meanwhile, saute that onion and when the greens are done (or not, if you insist on doing it wrong), drain them, chop them, and toss them in with the onion, a diced red pepper, and a generous dose of Tabasco sauce. While the greens are simmering away, grill the fish for about 10 minutes on each side on a hot BBQ.

In the meantime, drink a cold frosty beer with a lot of lemon squeezed into it so you can pretend you’re drinking lemonade or shandy, which I love, I really do. A frosty cold lemony beer sits nicely on top of an 800 mil Ibuprofen, though if your headache is caused by stress, as mine is, it will not make it go away. Rather, it will make you feel as though you are experiencing someone else’s headache, watching it on TV, perhaps, thinking, damn, this is rather painful but that was a nice plate of food, I tell you what.

US farmed catfish gets a mighty thumbs up from the Seafood Watch folks. There’s a crazy video of some swell babes catfish noodling on You Tube, of course, where else? And there’s a wacky documentary called Okie Noodling that you may have been lucky enough to catch on your local public television station. It’s certainly a sustainable method of catching fish, with no by-catch or, you know, boats, though I’m pretty sure that catfish farms don’t harvest by noodling.

I do feel a little better after eating such a fine feast, though that could just be the beer lemonade talking.

Ingredients

• Celery
• One bunch collard greens
• One red pepper
• One sweet onion
• Tabasco sauce
• Olive oil
• Marinated catfish fillets from the fish case at your supermarket
• Lemons
• Beer
• Almond butter
• Ibuprofen – the store brand is fine

Cooking time: One week to eat the celery filled with almond butter, three days for a stress headache to build up to extremes, two hours for the greens, one hour to prep the coals for the grill, 15-20 minutes for the fish.

[tags]Fish Wednesday, catfish, headache[/tags]