Recipe: Steamed Salmon with Honey Sauce
Salmon is a great fish. Cheap and plentiful if farm-raised, it doesn’t have a very strong “fishy” flavor. In fact, it’s very good at absorbing flavors, which is what makes steaming it so much fun. You can experiment with all sorts of liquids. I find that sherry gives the salmon a pleasant sweetness. I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so this recipe is a bit like candy. If you want to eat more like an adult, there are simple modifications that you can make to this recipe that suggest themselves.
Ingredients:
1 lbs of Salmon fillets
1 and 3/4 cups Sherry
3 tablespoons Pecans
1 tablespoon of butter
1/4 cup of Honey
Dash of Paprika
1. Slice the salmon filets into strips that are no thicker than 1 and 1/2 inch. Brush the scaly bottom of the filets with olive oil. This won’t necessarily prevent the fish from sticking to your steamer tray, but it will make it easier to clean. Lightly sprinkle the fillets with paprika and place on steamer tray.
2. Pour 1 and 1/2 cups of sherry in steamer pot. Place steamer tray, with fish, in the pot and cover. Put on high heat and cook for 14 minutes. Note: you can’t really “oversteam” the fish; it will merely get softer. However, after about 14 minutes, the fish will be steamed all the way through and the wine will begin to evaporate.
3. Chop the pecans into quarters and place on a cookie tray. Toast them in the oven for 10 minutes on 300 degree heat.
4. To make the sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat. Mix in the honey and a little bit of sherry. When the sauce starts to bubble up, add the toasted pecans. Don’t keep the sauce on the burner for more than four or five minutes, or it will carmelize.
5. Spoon the honey sauce over the salmon fillets. I would also recommend cooking up some greens as a side (asparagus is good, but I prefer string beans). You can spoon the honey sauce over the greens, too, if you are a big kid like me and won’t eat your veggies unless they taste like candy.
6. Enjoy! Tell me what you think.
Trainspotting
I don’t know when or how I became a trainspotter. I just find myself walking through the older neighborhood to my south, Richmond Hill, to clear my head and wait for the odd train to pass by.
Richmond Hill was established in the late-19th century to be “country homes” for New York commuters. Eventually, the rest of the city grew out around the neighborhood, which simply became a part of New York City, although a distinctive part. The neighborhood has grand architecture, including its own Carnegie Library, a landmark RKO movie palace and lots of faded glory Victorian mansions. In the heart of the neighborhood is a dead train station.
The LIRR’s Montauk train line snakes through the neighborhood. It’s an overpass at Lefferts Blvd. that ducks under the elevated J train. It’s a dead end of many residential blocks. It’s two lonely non-electrified tracks that wind through a valley in Forest Park.
The train line’s western terminus is Hunter Point Avenue in Long Island City, where commuters ride ferries to Wall Street or Midtown. It’s not the most convenient commute. When the MTA closed the Richmond Hill station in 1998, only seven commuters rode it daily. Still, those seven people must have found it to be a quicker way to get to work than the Kew Gardens station eight blocks to the north, which zips passengers to Penn Station in under 20 minutes. Or else they just found it to be a more scenic route.
The official justification for the closing was that the behemoth double decker diesel trains that the MTA introduced that year were too high for the station’s antique platforms. The LIRR scaled back service on the line to just four trains every week day; two head towards Hunters Point Avenue in the morning rush, and two head back to Montauk in the pm.
The rarity of these trains is what makes them so interesting. Watching the train go by at a quarter after five is like being comforted by some ancient ritual. You don’t really know who rides that train or why, but you know that it will glide by again tomorrow at the same time. Sometimes I forget what time it is and I’m delighted to watch the train pass below me in the park, a modern marvel of a train chugging along on tracks that use centuries-old technology, zipping through a forest that’s been here longer than humanity.
A lot of people in the community want the whole train line shut down. They feel it’s too exposed, too dangerous for their kids. It is curious that the MTA would keep a train line in functional operation for just four commuter trains a day. Some people think they keep it running for the handful of factories and warehouses that still use the tracks to ship via freight. (I saw one such freight train today, and it was a special treat, coming, as it did, with no announced schedule.) Other people think they keep it around “just in case.”
Train infrastructure is expensive and difficult to set up; preservation of what’s already been set up just seems wise. Indeed, one of the many projects that the MTA has on its wish list is a new main line for the LIRR. Most trains that go to Penn Station pass through the same congested section of track in New York City (you know, the station stops that make Long Islanders grumble about slowing their commute: “…making stops at Woodside, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens and Jamaica; change at Jamaica for the train to…”). The congestion will just get worse when the LIRR finally begins service to the east side’s Grand Central Station.
That being the case, the old Montauk line makes a likely candidate for a new main line. One of the most expensive elements of creating a new train line is the cost of right of way, but here in the Montauk line the LIRR has miles and miles of scenic right of way, owned in full.
If modernized, electrified and expanded, the train tracks will lose some of their charm and I doubt I would remain a trainspotter for trains that zip through every 15 minutes. But faded glory is only interesting for imagining what was. I’d rather see rejuvenation through a return to full-service commuter transportation and new affordable housing and commercial development.
Valentine’s Day Blunder
Mike Bloomberg’s missing a real opportunity. On Friday, a New York State judge ruled that the state constitution, which places a much heavier emphasis on equal protection and civil rights than the United States Constitution, should be read as to allow same-sex marriage. Licenses for such same sex marriages could have been issued as early as tomorrow, if Mayor Bloomberg hadn’t announced that the city intends to appeal the decision to the state’s Court of Appeals. Bloomberg, who made a point of announcing his personal support for gay marriage, said he wanted to make sure that the decision was supported by the state’s highest court as soon as possible.
In fact, he is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to be pro-gay marriage for New York’s generally liberal general election voters, and anti-gay marriage for voters in the Republican primary, where he faces a real challenge from an actual Republican, former City Council Minority Leader Thomas Ognibene.
This is a shame, because Bloomberg could have done something so much bigger. This is February, which means not only are we on the heels of Bush’s State of the Union address, in which he reiterated his support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, but we are just one week away from Valentine’s Day. I can’t think of a more grand, romantic gesture than the defense of equal rights and progress in the face of bigotry and reaction. Bloomberg should have opened City Hall’s steps to all couples, gay and straight, who want to get married on Valentine’s Day. It would be a potent symbol to the rest of the country that, while Bush won, his victory was narrow and regional and that, in New York at least, we’re not going to roll over for his agenda.
It also would have scored a lot of votes in the general election for Mike Bloomberg. But, he needs to win his primary before he can take his campaign to all of the city’s voters. The Republican party in New York City is tiny. There are more independents than Republicans and Democrats outnumber the Republicans by five to one. The tinyness is what appealed to Bloomberg in 2001. A socially liberal Democrat, with a huge personal fortune and media empire, he bought the Republican ballot line in 2001. Now he faces a real rebellion from this tiny collection of Archie Bunkers. Expect to see Bloomberg take two sides on a lot of issues in between now and September.
Ironically, if the Liberal party still had a ballot line, I think there would have been same-sex weddings on Valentine’s Day. It’s important to note that by the time of its demise the Liberal party was neither liberal nor a party, but a corrupt patronage mill with a name that appealed to enough voters as to allow the only two Republican mayors that New York elected in the last half of the 20th century to eke out wins. If Bloomberg could count on being on the Liberal ballot line in November, like Rudy Giuliani and John Lindsay before him, then even if he lost the Republican primary, he could still compete in the general election and maybe win (like Lindsay did in 1969).
Of course, one would expect someone who bought his way in to high office in order to do something good and leave his mark, to stake out the right position on same-sex marriage anyway, because it is the noble thing to do.
Recipe: Crab-stuffed Mushrooms
I had a taste of this dish at a restaurant in Washington’s Dupont Circle. I’ve ordered it at a few other restaurants, but found the quality to vary wildly (One diner in the West Village, which shall remain nameless, served up a hash of white button mushrooms and imitation crabmeat). I decided to take a crack at the dish myself. I thought it was promising enough to memorialize the recipe here for future experimentation.
Ingredients:
8 ounces of lump crabmeat (I found a can of Phillips brand crabmeat for $6; usually this will cost upwards of $10)
4 Portobello caps (No more than 3 inches in diameter)
1 small green pepper (I only used about 2 tablespoons of chopped pepper)
1 celery stalk
2 slices of bread
3 cloves of garlic
1 shallot
Olive oil
Small jar of alfredo sauce (Do yourself a favor and use light alfredo sauce)
1. Place the portobello caps, bottom side down, on a cookie sheet or tray and place in the oven at 350 degrees. Be sure to brush the mushrooms with olive oil so they don’t stick to the tray. Bake them for ten minutes, or until they begin to wilt.
2. Finely chop the garlic, shallot, celery and pepper. Toast the slices of bread and break them up into itty bitty little bits.
3. Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan or skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and shallot. Allow a minute or two to blend, then add the pepper and celery. Allow five minutes for vegetables to reduce.
4. Slowly mix in the crabmeat. Wait three minutes and then fold in the bread crumbs and alfedo sauce. Cook the whole mixture for an additional five minutes.
5. Flip the wilted mushrooms over so that they are upside down. Again, make sure to brush the caps with olive oil. Spoon the stuffing onto the mushrooms. Place back into the oven for five minutes, until the stuffing turns slightly brown.
6. Enjoy! Tell me what you think.