Fish Wednesday: Cod Master Edition

Here’s the thing about Fish Wednesday. It’s not just a meal. There’s cleaning and shopping and reading and planning. There’s pondering guests and sides and what goes on the table with the fish. There’s messing with the camera and wondering if it’s going to work. And there’s eating, most times, a fine meal. Sure, there’s the occasional failure, it’s okay, it happens to everyone. But there’s a fine meditation in preparing and then sitting down to a good meal, especially if you are dining alone. It’s nice to have company fawning over the food, but you know and I know that when a meal is good, you feel it in your mouth and your belly and you don’t really need the kudos from your friends at the table.

Frustrated by last week’s cod failure, I was determined to get the better of my finny adversary. I was equally committed to eating my way out of fish despair, so in addition to buying cod, I picked up a small package of white prawns. They were there as a consolation prize, should the cod again go wrong. I also did a little homework and turned up a recipe for a Brazilian style salmon stew.

Any eater of Pacific Northwest salmon knows you’re wasting it by putting it in stew, but I liked the idea of the recipe. The original is here – I modified it slightly to make it with two kinds of seafood and to simplify the assembly.

Here are the ingredients:

• 2 big tomatoes
• 1 bell pepper
• cilantro
• 1/2 lime
• coconut milk (it’s okay to use the light kind)
• 1/2 pound cod
• 1/2 pound white prawns
• spices, as you like: garlic, cumin, paprika, black pepper, chili oil, salt
• brown rice

I started by sauteeing a large sweet onion for a very long time. While that was happening, I cut the fish into large chunks and marinated them with the prawns in lime juice, cumin, garlic, and paprika. When the onion started to brown, I added two large ripe tomatoes to the pan and ground a generous amount of black pepper over everything. That simmered for a bit until the tomatoes started to give up their juices. I poured the marinated fish and prawns over the veggies, tossed in a big handful of cilantro and a sliced bell pepper, and poured a can of light coconut milk over the whole thing. That cooked until the prawns turned bright pink. I love cooking prawns because it’s so easy to know when they’re done. I dished the stew up over brown rice and splashed just a little bit of chili oil on to add more bite.

This is a delicious stew, a real treat. The fish was moist and tender, the prawns sweet, and the stewy part? A nice combination of sweet, sour, spicy. Yum yum yum yum yum. It took about 1/2 an hour to make and now there’s a big pot of fish stew sitting on my stove. I didn’t over do the lime juice – a mistake I often make – and I didn’t overcook the cod. It was just about perfect. You can make this with any kind of firm fish – snapper would be fine, the cod worked beautifully, it might be nice to throw in some little clams. Don’t use sole, it’s too soft and will just fall apart. But also, don’t go all crazy and get halibut cheeks or King salmon – you want to save that for a less feisty sauce so you can just focus on the fish. Oh, and for you vegetarian types, I think this would work beautifully with extra firm tofu.

A first rate Fish Wednesday. Try this at home, kids!

Related

• Fish Wednesday Archive
• Prawn farming on Wikipedia
• Pictures of prawns on Flickr

[tags]Fish Wednesday, cod, prawns, seafood, seafood stew[/tags]