Secret Ingredient Improv III: A Man Named Gorton

After my rather lackluster performance last week, it was Mariam's turn this week to cook for Secret Ingredient Improv, and my turn to shop. It's tempting, when purchasing the secret ingredients, to be mean. It's tempting to buy crazy things that are impossible to cook together - cheez whiz and caramel apples, for instance. It's tempting to pick these things up from the supermarket shelves and laugh, laugh like a maniac thinking about how she could possibly make dinner from just four different kinds of non-dairy milk, or Reese's pieces and whitefish caviar. Yes, the shopping is fun.

But I also remember, of course, that whatever I buy for her to cook with, I will be eating for dinner. This is the restraint. This keeps Secret Ingredient Improv interesting, but sane. It must be possible, in some strange way, perhaps, but still possible, for the ingredients I get to be combined into something resembling a decent meal. Last time Mariam cooked, in our first Secret Ingredient Improv, I thought I did a good job getting her interesting ingredients that didn't look like they went together, and I think she did a good job proving that intuition wrong.

The hardest part, for me, when shopping, has been the selection of an interesting and unorthodox protein for the meal. One doesn't just want to buy chicken thighs - there are simply too many "standard" things to do in that case. We have too much familiarity with that ingredient - it's no longer much of a challenge. Of course, last week I thought initially that Mariam was being kind to me by giving me beef, but the challenge came from the way the beef had been pre-prepped into thin strips. This week, I thought about that - about how the preparation of an otherwise ordinary ingredient might make it interesting or difficult to work with.

So this week, I got her:
Frozen fish sticks
Branston pickle
Kale
Green acorn squash

My idea, had I been asked to cook with these, was to make some kind of fritter batter from fish stick chunks and mashed squash, and pan fry fritters or patties. The pickle, I thought, could be pureed with some pepper and olive oil to form a thick, sweet vinaigrette for a small under salad made from wilted kale and raw red onion and tomato.

Mariam did something quite different. She'll talk you through how she dealt with these ingredients:

So it all started with cursing and swearing. Fish sticks? Really? Is that what you want for dinner dear?

I started by tasting the Branston pickle. At first I was not really happy with the taste but the more I tasted it the more I liked it. It looks like a dark thick sauce with minced vegetables in it and it sort of tastes like old ketchup. I look at the fish sticks. The ratio of fish meat to breading is practically zero for all culinary purposes. So Ian basically didn't get me any meat. I washed the kale leaves and made Ian cut and peel the squash. I was angry so I had to take revenge by making him do the work.

I turned the fish sticks into bread crumbs using the food processor.

I sauteed some red onions and some bell peppers and added it to the crumbs and mixed in a generous amount of the Branston pickle. I chopped some kale and sauteed it with a bit of lime juice, then added it to the mixture to give it a fresh taste.

I wanted to make fish balls but the mixture I made wasn't sticky and I was afraid it wouldn't hold together. At that moment for some reason I forgot that eggs existed.

Plan B was a fish-loaf. I started preheating the oven and put the mixture in a greased dish and smeared some of the Branston pickle on the top. It baked in the oven for 30 minutes at 350 F.

In the meantime I cut the squash into really thin pieces. I sauteed some onions and bell peppers together with the thin squash.

There was still a lot of kale left over so I decided to make something like cream spinach with it. But we usually don't have cream in our kitchen, and for that matter, even our milk is always skim, so instead I used labneh. Labneh is like a very thick Greek yogurt. It might be even closer to cheese than yogurt. It is rather tart but I really like using it in cooking. Usually it loses its tart flavor and becomes more creamy than cheesy when it's cooked. We really like using it to make saag paneer. I started with some sauteed onions, added chopped kale and added a large spoonful of labneh. I realized I added too much labneh for the the amount of kale I had so I added some spinach.

I took the fish loaf out of the oven.

And this is how I plated everything together. Yummy.

Now back to Ian.

As Mariam was making this, I kept thinking that I knew what she was doing, and where she was going with everything - and then she'd take some step I didn't understand, and I would be lost again. That happened about four times before I just gave up guessing what was happening, until the loaf went in the oven, at which point, well - it's a fish loaf, I can't mistake it.

Anyway, to critique this dish, let's begin with presentation - it actually looked rather splendid, considering it's literally ground up fish sticks and sandwich spread, with some veggies. There was a nice mix of colors, a pleasant garnish, and the fish loaf itself had a nice caramelized crust that was pleasing and appetizing. Now, something to criticize here which is not really a criticism, but which Mariam and I have talked about and noticed before - gourmet dishes never have this much food on them, and there is a reason for that. Anybody who knows something about design will tell you about the importance of negative space, and a plate of food is no different. A gourmet plate has a small portion because it's easier to compose a beautiful picture that way, not because they actually just want to serve you less food. Piles of food and giant steaks are difficult to arrange in a pleasing way. I think that Mariam's portion size here was, eh, "larger than gourmet"? If that makes sense? It's not a complaint, really - I like to eat. Small portions aggravate me as much as they please me visually.

The fish loaf didn't taste like fish sticks, which was a relief, because I didn't actually want fish sticks for dinner. Mariam did a good job of "transforming" these fish sticks in a creative way, and making a wholly different flavor. It still definitely had a fishy flavor, in a good way, but it wasn't fish sticks anymore. I think she went too heavy, however, on the Branston pickle - though it certainly belonged with the fish, it was the strongest flavor in this fish loaf, and I think if she hadn't used it as the topping when baking it, in addition to mixing it into the batter, the flavor would have been better balanced. Overall, though, the fish loaf was a winner.

The kale and spinach mix was good as well, though it could have used some more salt. It definitely reminded me, in a distant sort of way, of saag - the texture, the tartness, but of course, without the coriander and fenugreek that I'm accustomed to in that dish. (I do not believe, by the way, that trying to actually make an Indian saag with those spices would have worked here, so that's fine that they're missing.) Overall, I think this was a good treatment of the kale, if a bit underseasoned, though I'm not sure if its flavors were really unified with fish loaf. I think it could have used more of a citrus punch to balance the bitters and savories in the loaf.

The squash was probably the most surprising part of this meal - on any other day, if I had been cooking the squash in this way, I think I would have tested it with a fork or something, and declared it underdone, and in need of further cooking - and it wouldn't have been as good. The pieces of squash were firmer than I'm accustomed to, but they were not underdone. In fact, the firmness of the squash lent them the look and feel of potatoes, though of course they tasted like acorn squash because - well, yeah. The peppers and onions were a great pairing with the squash, and together they provided a comforting, potato-like experience that provided a great foundational flavor to go with either the fish loaf or the kale.

Overall, I'd say the meal was a success - certainly better than I did last time, and I think better than Mariam did her first time, despite the, eh, somewhat more aggravating ingredients. Next week, I get to try again, to redeem myself after overcooking basically everything!