Dining In
A Fine Kettle Of Fish
Gulf Coast seafood is good eating even when you’re watching the scales.
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How often should you eat fish? As often as you can. Fish and shellfish provide the highest quality protein which is easily digested. Heart specialists and obesity doctors both recommend frequent inclusions of seafood in the diet. A four-ounce serving of fish provides 100 calories and all the protein your body needs for one day. A four-ounce serving of beef provides 300 calories, and although it too provides the protein it lacks valuable trace minerals and the polyunsaturated fatty acids present in fish which help to control cholesterol.
If you’d like good, basic how-to recipes for fish, write Texas Parks & Wildlife, John H. Reagan State Office Building, Austin 78701, and they’ll send you a packet of recipes for all fish indigenous to the Texas Gulf.
Dinner Party
If you lean toward intimate dinner parties for four, this ought to turn you on. Most of the work can be done ahead so that you aren’t slaving over a hot stove while everyone else is whooping it up in the living room. It provides a taste subtle enough to titillate the gourmet, and it can be downright cheap. How long since the meat for a dinner party cost $1.19?
MENU:
Crabmeat Quiche
(optional)
Eggplant Austere
(sounds better than oyster and eggplant)
Remnants Green Salad
Hot French Bread with Real Butter
Fresh Strawberries and Cheese
Beaujolais Blanc
Good Hot Coffee
One word here about the before-dinner libations. This meal is really delicate and would be lost on the fellow who’s enjoyed four martinis. A couple of glasses of chilled Beaujolais Blanc before dinner will whet appetites instead of dulling them. If your timing coincides with your guests’ metabolism rates, the aroma from the kitchen combined with the glow of the wine should cause a stampede when you announce that dinner is served.
Here’s the shopping list:
1 pint raw, fresh oysters
½ lb. real butter
1 loaf of the best French bread you can buy, unsliced
1 loaf whole wheat bread (preferably with no preservatives)
½ lb. fresh mushrooms
1 large fresh eggplant
1 rib celery
1 vine-ripened tomato
1 head romaine lettuce
1 medium white onion
2 eggs
1 2-oz. jar pimientos
handful fresh parsley
smallest bottle of fresh olive oil you can find
salad vinegar
salt
2 bottles of white young Beaujolais, French. If you can’t find this, a dry white table wine, domestic if necessary.
1 pint fresh strawberries
confectioner’s sugar
¼ lb. pale, firm dessert cheese—like grape cheese, which is a Wisconsin (or French if you can afford it) white processed cheese with grape seeds coating.
If you elect to go whole hog and serve the crabmeat quiche in the living room with the wine and hang the expense, add these to your shopping list:
3 eggs
1 c. Swiss cheese
1 onion
flour
1 c. sour cream
½ lb. fresh crab, white lump
Worcestershire sauce
shortening
This hors d’oeuvre will put a dent in your pocketbook unless you’ve been crabbing, but tastes so good it’s worth it.
Crabmeat Quiche
3 eggs, slightly beaten
1 c. sour cream
½ tsp. Worcestershire
¾ tsp. salt
1 9" baked pastry shell
1 c. coarsely shredded Swiss cheese
½ lb. fresh, white lump crab (can use 1 can if desperate)
1 white onion, sliced paper thin
3 T. butter
Heat oven to 300 degrees. Combine eggs, sour cream, Worcestershire, and salt. Sauté onion in butter. Stir in cheese, crabmeat, and egg mixture. Pour into baked pastry shell. Bake 55 to 60 minutes or until custard is set and a silver knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Serve hot. Can be eaten by hand.
If your pastry seems best suited to shoe soles or slingshots, try this recipe. I could never make a decent pie crust, no matter how broadly Betty Crocker smiled at me, until I found it.
Dropout’s Pastry
3 c. sifted flour
1 ¼ c. shortening
1 tsp. salt
Makes two 9 or 10 inch shells
Work together until consistency of meal. Sounds just like your old recipe, right? Here comes the secret . . .
Beat together slightly: 1 egg, 5 ½ T. water and 1 tsp. vinegar.
Make a well in the flour mixture and add liquid mix. Work well, roll out with light strokes from the center to the size desired. Easy to handle and flaky. Good.
The rest of this dinner is so easy that once you get the marketing, cutting and chopping done it slides together so smoothly you’ll say aw shucks.
Eggplant Austere
1 large eggplant
1 pint fresh, raw oysters
½ medium white onion, chopped
¼ lb. fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 2-oz. jar pimientos
2 eggs
salt
¼ lb. real butter
1 rib celery, chopped
2 slices whole wheat bread
handful fresh parsley
First: slice top off eggplant lengthwise (that means laying it on its side—not the stem). Scoop out pulp from large piece and set pulp aside for use later. Sprinkle inside of eggplant with salt, replace its hat and refrigerate in a pyrex baking dish until time to stuff.
Second: preheat oven to 300 degrees. Place two slices of whole wheat bread in oven to dry out while it is heating.
Third: melt one-fourth pound butter in heavy skillet over medium heat. Braise with the lid on the following chopped items until soft: cubed eggplant pulp, sliced fresh mushrooms, chopped celery, and onion. You know already to wash it all well in cold water to avoid grit in the food.
Fourth: add drained oysters, pimientos, dried-out bread which you have pulled into small pieces, and parsley to the above. Have you discovered how much easier it is to cut parsley with kitchen shears than with a knife? Stir.
Fifth: beat eggs until lemon-colored and add to the above. Turn fire to low and continue cooking for five minutes by the clock, stirring constantly. Remove from fire and salt to taste.
Sixth: stuff eggplant. At this point, you can put the whole business in the refrigerator, covered of course, and wait until an hour before serving time to take it out.
Seventh: pour one-quarter inch water into the bottom of the baking dish. Make a foil tent which will seal the eggplant in the dish but not mash on the top of it. Place in preheated 300* oven and bake 45 minutes. Don’t overcook this one. The eggplant will collapse. I learned this through bitter experience: I once served something that looked more like a prune than a shiny balloon.
During the last five minutes the eggplant is in the oven, stick the French bread in to heat. Forget about wrapping it in foil. The French baking oven emits steam over the loaves to make the crust harder than anything you’ll ever find at the Handy Andy, so five minutes in your hot oven uncovered might come close to simulating a real French loaf. (In a later issue, we’ll take up the art of making French bread.)
If you’re a frugal soul, this salad should appeal to you. If you just plain like to eat, it tastes good, too, and has some surprises from the usual here-it-comes-again green salad. I guess if you fix filet mignon with this you couldn’t honestly call it Remnants, but it will take up the slack in all that stuff you had to buy for the Eggplant Austere.
Remnants Green Salad
About an hour and a half before you plan to serve this meal, wash, pat dry, and tear up six romaine leaves. Not too small, please. Did you ever eat a salad that looked like it had come from a disposal? Add one medium vine-ripened tomato, chopped, one-half medium white onion, chopped, four ounces sliced raw mushrooms and the top of the eggplant, diced. There, you see you used up all those halves: the half pint of mushrooms, the half onion and even the hat off the eggplant.
Toss the salad in a wooden bowl you’ve rubbed with a garlic bud, then dress lightly with a dressing made from olive oil and vinegar. Refrigerate. Don’t salt and pepper until time to serve or it will wilt the romaine. The black shiny eggplant and sliced, raw mushrooms give this salad a great look and some textural difference you’ll like.
Uncork the wine, remove the salad from the fridge, the eggplant and bread from the oven, and dinner is served. If you serve hearty eaters you might want to fix two eggplants and double the makings, but for average appetites, one eggplant should serve four.
For dessert, give them freshly made coffee, strawberries with confectioner’s sugar for dipping, and a mild dessert cheese.
If you’ll notice, you just cooked a dinner using natural foods, with as few preservatives as possible. You didn’t make one trip to the health food store, nor is your pocketbook bent out of shape. Bon appétit.
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