On a less stellar note, some pleasing recent tastes here ...
Whisky: Roslind bought me a bottle of Canadian Club Premium Original
1858 whisky thinking it would be a special treat. It turns out to be
just regular Canadian club with a fancy new label! Still it's a

Is it a rebranding or a "limited edition"? I
think I saw it at Costco but didn't feel any
particular interest in checking it out.

reasonable 6 year old sip. I'm enjoying it on the rocks with a
single drop of bitters and a small splash of soda.

The Canadians are all middle of the road okay,
even Black Velvet. There was one I recall having
an imbalance in the direction of neutral spirit,
sort of like a cheap blended Bourbon, but even it
wasn't offensive offensive. I forget which one it
was, not a Canadian Club or a Seagram's, nor a
Fleischmann's. Schenley, maybe?

Char steaks: In the far north, typically winter caught fish are laid
out whole on the ice to flash freeze (and splashed with water to
glaze them). So when it comes time to prepare them they have to be
thawed first and then cleaned and skinned before cooking them. Last
week I baked a small whitefish that way.

Makes all kinds of sense.

It is also common to use a band saw to cut larger fish into steaks
while frozen solid. When the steaks are almost but not completely
thawed it's easy to push out the plug of slushy guts before the meat
is tainted. (Young Inuit women tell me to leave them in for a couple
of hours to flavour the flesh, while their grandmothers suggest a
whole day!)

Entrails aren't as horrid as people think,
especially toward the front of the fish. But
as you say it's easy to pop out the frozen
plug from a body, and even if you screw it up
and get bile all over the place (some fish
don't have bile) there's always the faucet.

This make for a very pretty fish steak as it has a circle in the
middle perfect for holding a poached egg or a spoonful of creamed
spinach instead of two loose belly "tails" flopping around.

The good thing about two loose belly tails
is that they cook faster, so more oil renders
out, if you like your fish leaner (I don't).
The really bad thing about them is that most
commercial product is gutted first and scaled
after, and scaling those flaps is next to
impossible, which means the fishermen and
fishmongers don't do much of it if at all.

One of the fish Roslind brought home from a recent trip up north was
a huge arctic char weighing about 10 pounds. We had our BIL Matthew
steak it for us and we gave him half for his efforts. I have
two steaks, each 1 1/2 inches thick thawing out for supper tonight.
I'm not sure yet what the filling will be.

Onions and rice? Pork sausage?

Matthew also kept the head and tail for chowder. He said I was Too
White to make fishhead soup. [g]

Title: Crispy Fish Skin Chicharrons

A few things to say about this. One, the Japanese
have been doing this for hundreds of years, and I've
been doing it for forty. Two, you want to do it only
in the summertime, when you can open the windows.
Three, if you have a kettle of old fried food oil,
you don't have to do any prep - with a thick skin,
you cut it into julienne; for a thin skin, you don't
need to do much of anything. If you must, a bit of a
nuke will soften the skins up nicely. You definitely
don't have to scrape the meat and fat off the skin
of a fish any more than off a pigskin or chicken.
It is possible that you'll get a slightly cleaner
product or a more consistent texture if you do all
the funny stuff, but as with so many of the Serious
Eats and similar foodies, the author clearly has
never cooked under time pressure or for a crowd.

... Fruitcake is illegal to gift due to its extreme lack of popularity.

You can build igloos with them, though.

Flammekueche
categories: Alsatian, French, New England, starter, main, pork, dairy
servings: 2 or 4

h - Dough
2 1/2 c flour
1 c cold water
1/4 ts salt
1 Tb instant dry yeast
h - Topping
1 c fromage blanc
1/2 c sour cream
1/3 c heavy cream
1 pn nutmeg
1 pn white pepper
1 pn salt
1 Tb oil
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 c thinly sliced caramelized onions
12 sl hickory smoked bacon

Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

For the dough
In the bowl of a large mixer, combine all
dough ingredients. Mix with a dough hook
for 5 to 7 min, scraping the bowl
occasionally, until the dough forms a
sticky ball on the end of the hook.
Transfer the dough into a greased bowl
and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in
a warm place until doubled, 1 hr. Punch
down and divide into six equal pieces.
[This recipe apparently makes 4 extra
dough balls, which can be frozen.]

Place one piece of dough on a floured
board and coat with flour. With a floured
rolling pin, roll out the dough into a
rough rectangle 10" - 12" across and
1/8" thick making sure there is flour
on both sides of the dough at all times.
Place dough on a parchment-lined cookie
sheet. Repeat with remaining dough. Cover
and refrigerate any rolled out dough while
you prepare the topping. Dough can be
prepared one day in advance, wrapped
and refrigerated, until ready to roll.

For the topping
In a large bowl whisk the first 8 ingredients
together. Reserve the onions and bacon in
separate bowls.

Assembly
You can cook two pans at once depending on
your oven size, but adjust racks so that they
are close to the bottom of the oven. Preheat
oven to 500F.

Spread 1/2 c topping mixture on one piece of
rolled-out dough. Sprinkle with the onions
and then the bacon. Repeat with another sheet
of dough. Slide the cookie sheets onto the
lowered racks in the preheated oven. Bake
10 min or until brown and crisp, reversing the
sheets midway through baking to make sure they
brown evenly. Repeat with remaining dough and
topping.

Cut into squares and serve immediately. Recipe
makes two individual flammekueche; each serves
two as an appetizer or one as a main course.

Raymond Ost, Sandrine's Bistro (now defunct)
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