let me start off by saying i have no clue what a pistou is. i thought maybe it was something you make with a pestle (pistou, pestle, get it?), but FINE FINE i just looked it up in wikipedia. oh. a pistou is basically a pesto without a pine nuts. hrmph. (which is a yay since imho that’s the worst part of a pesto!)
ah HA! i knew it! “Traditionally, the ingredients are crushed and mixed together in a mortar with a pestle, (pistou means pounded in the Provençal language).” i’m willing to bet there’s a common word ancestor there.
anyways, this is a blog about food, not about linguistics (unfortunately).
i’d been craving something salmon-y and found this recipe. i was a bit sketch on it because i don’t particularly enjoy dill (the bf does, perhaps a bit too much, but he’s not here so that fact is kind of irrelevant lol), and i don’t really enjoy pistachios, either (suffice it to say, i didn’t bother hunting for or using pistachio oil). OTOH, the combination sounded too good to pass up.
i’m also really unlucky with fish. either i seem to overcook it or undercook it; it never comes out just right, so i really was taking chances with this recipe!
link to recipe on epicurious.
the first thing the recipe called for was pistachios. do you know how hard it is to find them in my local slightly-ghetto supermarket? i had to get a pistachio snack pack! you’d think they’d sell pistachios with the shells removed, but i guess not. :\ “Art’s Good For You California Pistachios” LOL
i haven’t eaten pistachios since i was a kid, let alone cooked with them, so i didn’t know what to do with the little husks that kind of flake off. i tried putting them into a ziploc back and mushing them around to get the husks to fall off, but all i did was make a hole in the bag :\. some husks did pulverize into into a coarse powder, though, so it was slightly effective. i’m thinking i would have been fine if i left them there.
the recipe said to use a “heavy large skillet” so i brought out the ol’ cast iron. which i hate. it’s not only heavy but you can’t wash it and because of that it LOOKS gross. bah. well, i figure, i never use the damn thing anyways so i might as well, if only to say i got some use out of it.
toasting the nuts: (uhh, how do you know when they’re toasted? i just left them on until i smelled them roasting.)
that chopper i bought when i made the lobster mac and cheese came in very handy during this recipe! nut and herb chopping by hand = bull crap. lol so much better when you can just pound it out, literally!
it was at this time that i started making the spätzle, which i got at dittmer’s when i went there yesterday with dave (i don’t know why i’m regaling you with this; it’s irrelevant as well). suffice it to say, i’ve been wanting to go there for a long time and i stocked up on all sorts of german goodies! there were several brands of spätzle there but i trust knorr. even if the packaging is in english. and even if it’s owned by unilever. (p.s. no leberkäse at dittmer’s? boo!)
here’s the completed pistou (*snort*). it was all very very approximate since i halved the recipe but didn’t really measure anything out. “eh, this looks like the right amount of dill.” “eh, maybe a bit more oil.” you get the picture.
(i was worried it wasn’t going to be enough, but spoiler: it was!)
i used one yellow bell pepper. seriously this sad specimen was the best one they had. i’mma have to start going to the safeway instead of the lucky, even though it’s 5 minutes further away. :\
popped the sliced bell pepper into the skillet and started getting the sugar snap peas ready. psych! (or however you spell it.) thanks to modern technology all’s i needed was a pre-prepared bag! open, dump. easy. yayyy for my lazy ass.
by now the spätzle was all done. i just found the way some bits got stuck in the colander to be a cool picture. so here you go.
i grated up the last of the cheese (a whole block of cheddar, i think) from the mac and cheese adventure and added it in. s&p and voila, easy käsespätzle. if i had some bacon, i’d have tossed that in, too, but alas, no.
here are the cooked vegetables. let it be known i normally dislike stir-fry everything, too, but another spoiler: it was good! (i find stir-fry vegetables to be really bland; for some reason i prefer boiled!)
ok, the fish. eek! i didn’t like the fact that there was color added and that it was raised on a farm, but at least it was fresh. (maybe i should just buy my seafood from the chinese supermarket. i’m always under the impression it’s better quality there? i dunno. i mean, how often do you see people buying anything at the butcher/seafood counter in a uhh, white supermarket? rarely, if ever. how often do you see people buying stuff at the butcher/seafood counters at a chinese supermarket? all the time! so much so that you have to take numbers!)
the fillets, with s&p, in the skillet:
i flipped:
and then the tricky part – when to stop cooking! ugh. i thought it was done, but then i cut open the thickest part of one of the fillets and nope. i’m not making sushi here!
i put them back in the skillet, but i think i put them in for slightly too long. the picture in the recipe had some raw meat showing, but i took mine off too late. i remembered from watching cooking shows that meat will still continue to cook for a while after you take it off, so it’s best to remove early, but i didn’t know exactly when or how much it’d keep cooking. oh well.
here it is, though, all assembled! i don’t know why i even bothered to put it in anything fancy, since a) i’m not serving it, and b) it was a b!tch to scoop back out with the high sides :\
all plated up, with the käsespätzle:
so, how did it taste? i was very pleasantly surprised! the dill and green onion in the pistou (*snort* again) made it light and refreshing, perfect for a(n early) summer-ish day here in the bay area. i couldn’t really tell there were pistachios (other than the texture), which was totally fine by me. i was worried that since the pistachios were pre-salted, it would make the pistou too salty, but that definitely wasn’t the case (i didn’t add any extra). to my surprise, the fish and the vegetables were cooked very well. the fish wasn’t too overdone and the vegetables were not too crisp (i don’t like them too crunchy) or too mushy.
hooray me! totally easy recipe, and really yummy! seriously the hardest part was cracking open all those pistachios. i’m still a bit wary of cooking fish, but i think with practice i’ll be ok.
i don’t think i’ll ever be ok with using a cast-iron skillet, tho. bah!
