Halibut, Salmon, even Steak onna plate

I read a food piece by Olivia Wu in the Chronicle where she thinly sliced halibut, arranged the slices on an oiled plate and cooked it in a 500-degree oven for two minutes.

I can do that!

She described it as an “utterly simple and almost instant dish” and then confounded it by pairing it with a baked tomato confit that is labor intensive and takes about two hours to prepare. I thought the tomato sauce was a bit heavy for the delicate fish.

The halibut was so good and easy that I tried the same technique with a salmon fillet (mind the bones). That, too, turned out moist and tasty and good and easy.

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Poached Striped Bass
with Vodka Sauce

We own an actual fish poacher. It sits on top of our dining room armoire and I can’t recall having it down since we moved to San Francisco in 1992. Don’t look for it on my essentials page.

When I was surfing the New York Times Dining and Wine section the other day, I spied Poached Salmon with Vodka Sauce. That looked interesting, so I downloaded it to my “to cook” folder. There are over thirty recipes in that folder and more coming every week, so I don’t have a prayer of cooking them all. As time goes by, I delete the ones that no longer look interesting. This recipe will just be in the back of my head when I go to market. I didn’t really think about cooking a whole salmon, but I figured I could do it with a fillet.

We bought the fish poacher in Boston to poach a four-pound salmon for a party. In James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking there is more than one recipe for poached fish and in my cooking-for-parties phase I poached a few salmon, as well as other fish and shellfish. I especially liked the Poached Fish with White Wine Sauce and Shellfish a la Nage, “,a la nage is the French term for a style of preparation in which shellfish are both cooked and served ‘swimming’ in a white wine court bouillon and eaten hot, tepid or cold.” Shrimp, crayfish or small lobsters are excellent prepared in this manner.
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I had a recipe already picked out when I bought the Halibut at the Farmers Market on Saturday, but then when I went back and re-read it, Halibut with a Vegetable Nage, it sounded a lot like the New England Boiled Dinner I did last week. A nage is a broth, generally vegetable, which is made by cooking vegetables and herbs in water. Then you strain and discard the vegetables and use the nage to poach additional vegetables. A purist would poach the vegetables and the Halibut in the nage, but in that recipe the halibut is marinated and then grilled and served with the vegetables au jus.

Meanwhile, I made my “lunch soup” with Savoy cabbage. As is often the case, I had half a head of cabbage left over. Maybe I can do my Halibut with braised cabbage.
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