Love your Food and it will Love you back

My wife and I went out to a Mexican restaurant in town the other night and I thought I'd try one of their "traditional" entrees instead of playing it safe with an enchilada or burrito. I ordered the Pollo Chipotle, a chicken dish made with peppers and onions and these really amazing smoked peppers. I was all excited about it because I really love chipotle but when the food reached the table I thought I was staring into a steaming plate of dog vomit. Over in the corner of the plate were a smattering of pale milky looking beans and some rice that looked like it was some kind of revenge for the Alamo. I could see my wife looking over the table at the viscera on my plate and shaking her head. "You're not going to eat that are you?" Honestly I didn't think I should. But being as I was a little buzzed and hate wasting food I made a good show of it and tried a few bites. I won't lie, it wasn't half bad, but it wasn't half good either. It was obvious to me that this entree had not been put together with any sort of love. Now I realize that 12.95 is not going to get you very far in the love department, but come on people, how long are we gonna stand for this? We're not hogs. At least I don't feature myself a hog and don't expect to be fed like one. Not at any price.

Don't accept it. There's no reason to eat soulless food. I promise you, you can do better. Even if what you cook lacks flavor, or gets burnt, or borders on repulsive it will at least have something that no McDonald's hamburger, or shitty Mexican entree is ever going to have. And that something is love. I know that sounds a little gay, but I can assure you this idea is not the result of some new vaginal growth. I really believe that you have to sort of make love to your food for it to give you any health benefit. Now I'm not saying you should go around raping your morning fruit or sticking your dick in the mash potatoes. And I'm not suggesting that the love you put in to your food is necessarily going to turn your can of Chef-boy-ardee into something fundamentally nutritious. For that you'll have to buy better ingredients. But what it will do is change your psychological relationship to your food.

Fishermen are notoriously bad eaters. I think I've touched on the "it'll make a turd" paradigm in other posts, but I want to point out that this mind-set is more the result of cultural influence than the restraints that we face as a niche community. A lot of times we don't have adequate refrigeration, or the time necessary to prepare a good meal, or access to fresh foods like fruit and vegetables. On a Bay Boat you may not see a green vegetable for two or three weeks. Everything you eat may come out of a can or over the gunnel. Which is fine if necessity requires it. But here on land there really is no excuse. And you kind of gain an appreciation for that when you can't get a clove of garlic or a head of broccoli to save your life. You also gain an appreciation for the advantages of counter space and for the equipment you find in a normal kitchen. Small boats don't generally have the kind of storage capacity that allows for double boilers and crepe pans or any other "specialized equipment". A lot of them rely entirely on two pans and a diesel stove to do all of their cooking, if they cook at all. I've heard stories of so called "sandwich boats" where all they ate for the entire season (four to five weeks) were peanut butter and jelly or bologna sandwiches. That kind of diet could drive anyone into the arms of McDonald's. I don't care who you are.

What I'm about to present may not exactly be the antidote for anyone suffering from four weeks of sandwich boat, but it is an example of how the Norwegian fishermen of old used to put love into something as simple and disgusting sounding as "salt cod". I learned this dish from my old crab boat captain Leif, who would wax so passionately about this particular meal that you'd have thought he'd stolen the recipe from the gods.

Before I begin I have to disclose that when I first prepared this meal I had the advantage of an expansive galley with all the pots and pans I could possibly desire. You can however make this same concoction with one frying pan and a stock pot.

Salt Cod

16oz. salted cod (rinsed and cut into two inch sections)

one rutabaga (skinned and cut into two inch pieces)

two turnips (washed and cut into two inch piece)

one parsnip (washed and cut into one inch pieces)

two carrots (washed and cut into one inch pieces)

four red potatoes (washed and halved)

one onion (sliced)
two cloves garlic (coarsely chopped)

one salt pork or four pieces of thick bacon (cut into small chunks)

butter

salt and pepper

Your very first step will be to salt some cod. This can be done in as little as a couple of hours or up to a year or more. All you need is cod (previously frozen or fresh) and some course salt, preferably rock salt like you use for making ice cream or pickling. I've done some rush jobs on salting before but personally I think the only way to get the true texture and firmness in your cod is to salt it for at least forty-eight hours. I think I had this salting on my counter for about five days. Don't worry this is not going to go bad people. Trust me, before refrigeration this was how they kept food from spoiling.

Next you will need to rinse your cod to remove the excess salt. I run it under the sink and then put it in a bowl of water. Look closely at my watch. That's 7am. During the course of the day I changed the water twice. This long of a soak is not necessary if you've only salted the fish for a couple hours, but anything over two days you should prepare yourself for a few rinses.

There's really not much else to it from there. Peel your onions, garlic, turnips and rutabaga. Chop everything according to size preferences. I like the rooty vegetables to be approximately the same size as the potatoes so that things cook evenly.

Once you get a couple of pots of water boiling you can start to drop your potatoes and veggies in to start cooking. I usually put the potatoes in first, cook them for a couple minutes, then add the rutabaga and carrots. Turnips and parsnips don't take nearly as long to cook so you want to save them to near the end. Contrary to some opinions you can cook the potatoes and the other root veggies together. Some salt cod snobs may disagree but don't listen to them, odds are they aren't doing the dishes.

In your second pot of water you will want to drop in your salt cod. These should be fairly big chucks and they should be started shortly after the potatoes. Salt cod should cook for about 35 to 45 minutes depending on how long you've salted it. There is a danger that on a short salt the cod will start to disintegrate slightly in the boiling water. The only thing I can recommend is not cooking the cod at such a rolling boil and also not cooking it quite as long.

Once the cod and the potatoes have been cooking for about twenty to twenty-five minutes you can go ahead and throw in the turnips and parsnips, and get the salt pork (or bacon) and sauteed onions going. It's important when cooking the bacon that it be cut in small chunks and that it produces a good amount of grease.

This may gross some people out but it is an integral part of the meal and should not be omitted no matter how bad your cholesterol.

In a second skillet add a little of the bacon grease or use butter, at this point it won't matter, and begin to saute the garlic and onions. My wife complained that I turned them to mush by over caramelizing them, but this is not a stir fry people. I can assure you this is how it is done. Really, do it however you want. But don't sit there and criticize how I did it if you expect me to cook for you again. You be the judge (but a silent one), doesn't that look delicious?!

O.k. now that that's settled here's the most important part of this entire meal, the assembly. You don't have to do it this way but I think for the sake of argument I'm going to say this is by far the best way. I'm missing one piece of the puzzle here and if you can find it you're a better man than me, but I've given myself fits trying to locate Norwegian flat bread. At first I thought the guys on the boat were just giving me shit, sending me out on a snipe hunt because everyone I talked to had never heard of it. They even tried to convince me that I could make the stuff by cutting the crusts off of white bread and rolling it flat with a rolling pin. To my credit I wasn't dumb enough to fall for that one but I'll be damned if I've ever come across the real thing.

As a substitute I just use plain old rye bread. No butter, no toasting, just plain and pure. On the plate you put a healthy portion of root vegetables, a nice pile of sauteed onions, a few pieces of salt cod and over the top of everything you sprinkle the salt pork (or bacon pieces) and drizzle grease over the whole thing. Salt and pepper to taste and enjoy.

If that's not love then I don't know what is.

Take that Mexican Restaurant.