Food Magazine.

The New York Times magazine this week has an entire issue devoted to food.

I'm into watching videos today:

My favorite one is an excellent video with a recipe for making mac 'n cheese pancakes that is worth watching more for the chef's philosophy on cooking, than for the recipe. (Although let me know if you make the pancakes!)

others:

I would love to have an induction cooktop, which is a stove that cooks with magnetic fields. They heat almost immediately.

Then there's Alice Waters working a farmers market.

Mark Bittman shopping for cookware.

Homemade caviar.

Yep. Damn salty. Explodes in your mouth.
I found instructions at a web site called the Homebrew Chef.

He has a lot of good pictures. Its quite easy, really, all you have to do is soak the egg-packet in salty water for about 30 minutes to kill anything in there, then you remove the membranes.

Two seafoods is the secret.

At left: The shrimp and red snapper (~2.25lbs) for tonight's meal, and some salmon roe for making caviar (stay tuned for the caviar entry).

Recently we've been trying to cook more seafood. I've grown especially enamored with recipes which use 2 different seafoods, an infatuation which began last week when I made broiled halibut with steamed mussels on a bed of sauteed potatoes and chorizo. With two seafoods and chorizo, we couldn't eat fast enough! So I was excited to find a recipe for sautéed red snapper fillets with shrimp. Red Snapper is a lot more photogenic before you fillet it, so this is the only picture I ended up taking. (OK, actually I forgot to take a picture of the finished product)

The flash on the camera seemed to have made his eye look cloudy, which is dissappointing because I was going to hold this fish up as an example of the perfect fish. It passed the three most crucial tests for fresh fish:

1) The most important test is the smell test. A fresh fish should have no smell, or a smell you find appealing.
2) The next most important test is the gill test: look at the gills, they should be bright red and engorged with blood. And I mean bright red. You may have never seen well-oxygenated blood because when you cut yourself and bleed you have almost always cut a vein, which is on its way back to the heart in order to travel to the lungs and pick up some more oxygen. Your arteries are much more well protected, and usually lie fairly deep in your body. The blood returning to the heart travels closer to the skin because temperature regulation, etc, isn't as important. Bright red gills mean that the fish was breathing recently!
3) The eye test. A fresh fish has a glassy eye. A cloudy-eyed fish is still pretty good, really, but that fish has probably been dead at least a week.

When I bought this snapper the fishmonger tried to sell me headless snapper! He said that they were cheaper because you don't have to pay for the weight of the head. I examined these headless fish, but there was no way for me to ensure their freshness. I mean, the only reason that a fishmonger removes the head and gills on a fish is because they don't want you to see how old the thing is!

I guess my new rule is to buy only from a fishmonger that I trust.

All right, lets talk about tonight's recipe. Its from my favorite seafood cookbook, the long out of print The Seafood Cookbook, by Pierre Franey.

You will need (serves 2):
red snapper fillets (or striped bass, or sea trout, or any white fish),
1/2 lb shrimp,
a couple of shallots,
a large tomato,
some fresh parsley,
and a few other things that you probably already have: (red wine vinegar, milk, flour, butter, corn oil, salt, pepper)

You might want to read ahead, so you know what to prepare ahead of time.

1) Fillet your fish.
2) Sprinkle the fillets with salt & pepper. Dip the fillets into a bowl of milk, then dredge in flour to coat them.
3) Heat 1 tablespoon of corn oil in a nonstick skillet over high heat. Sauté on one side for 4 minutes, then reduce the heat to medium-low, flip the fillet and sauté for another 4-10 minutes, until it is done.
4) Place the fillets on a plate in a 180F preheated oven to keep them warm.
5) Clean the shrimp, and slice them in half the long way.
6) prepare the following: 1/4C minced shallots, 1C peeled, seeded and diced tomatoes, and 1 T red wine vinegar. (I seeded mine, but didn't peel them)
7) Melt 3 T unsalted butter in a skillet (I drained the first skillet, and just reused it) over medium-high heat and add the shrimp, sauté for 1 minute, add the shallots, tomatoes and vinegar and sauté for 1 minute more.
8) Scatter the shrimp and sauce over the over the fish fillets. Garnish with fresh parsley. (I put the bulk of the sauce next to the fish in order to keep them crisp)

Serve with a baguette. This is a very easy meal. only about 30 minutes in the kitchen. My favorite part, again, is the two seafood theme. The snapper is essentially garnished with the thinly cut shrimp, which makes this meal look especially impressive.