The Dinner Files

It was so good that Ernest asked why, exactly, it was so delicious.

I explained how the salmon came from a place that is very good for salmon, that the people who caught it took such good care of it. He looked over at me like I was a complete fool.

“I don’t think that’s why it tastes good, Mama. I think it’s because you took it off the grill at the right time.” Snap.

If that’s your point-of-view too, here you go – I grilled it using this super-simple method: I heat the grill to a medium heat (you can hold your hand about an inch over the grill grate for 3 to 4 seconds), I sprinkle the fish with salt, I brush vegetable oil on the grill grate and the fish skin, put the fish skin-down on the grill, I cover the grill, and I cook it undisturbed until the fish is done to my liking (I go by 10 minutes minimum, and figure about 10 minutes per inch if it’s thicker than an inch). If the fish has no skin or you’re worried about sticking, simply do the same thing but put the fish on a piece of tin foil with plenty of small holes poked in it. With salmon I always buy skin-on and cook it directly on the grill to crisp it up because if there is anything my dashing husband and inquisitive son love more than crispy crunchy salmon skin I don’t know what it is.

You can add marinades or rubs or whatever you dig, but did you notice that the fish does not get flipped? That, I think, is the key to happy fish grilling. And those fish-grilling baskets? I don’t have a place to put one, but when I tried them in the Sunset test kitchen I was not impressed. Sure, the fish didn’t stick to the grill, but it always made a bit of a mess in the basket itself.

So I grilled this Copper River sockeye salmon using the above method and it turned out perfectly – we all agreed (partly because I took my dashing husband’s fillet off the grill way before mine or Ernest’s because he likes his salmon pretty much not cooked). And next to it? It’s this fattoush salad minus the feta and olives. The lemony dressing and cumin seeds were fab with the plain grilled salmon.

Just a quick post because this okra-tomato thing turned out so delicious. Browning, not caramelizing but browning, the onions first is key because it brings out some sweetness in the onions but not too much and that makes the okra seem sweet too, in a good way.

I served it with rice and dal. Instead of jasmine or basmati rice that may be more appropriate, I cooked up some sweet rice because it’s Ernest’s favorite and this is the first week of school and he’s so tired at the end of the day I just want to give him treats and make him smile. He loves school, but all that learning (or is it the crazy running around on and social dynamics of the school yard?) wears him out.

For the dal I made the one I always make – this recipe for brown butter dal but I used red lentils instead of chana dal. It cooks up in about 10- 15 minutes.

For the record, yes Ernest ate the okra. After he scraped it clean of any trace of tomato or onion. Then he went to the kitchen, got down a bowl, fetched the ice cream from the freezer, found the ice cream scoop, scooped his ice cream, returned the carton to the freezer and put the scoop in the sink before bringing his treat back to the table all while my dashing husband and I continued our conversation. Then he ate his ice cream and engaged us in a discussion of the ideal size of chocolate chips. I love 6. It’s an awesome age.

Of course this morning he spilled an entire box of cereal on the kitchen floor and proceeded to step on and crush it as he spread it all around the kitchen as he tried to sweep it up. So there’s that too, but I still love 6. I love the effort that sometimes results in me not having to do anything at all even if at other times it means I have to stop with my coffee drinking to simultaneously sweep and comfort. There really isn’t any reason at all to cry over spilled cereal.

Sure, the potatoes I threw on the grill got a bit, shall we say, dark. They really weren’t burnt though, I swear. Well, maybe a tiny bit – but that was just on the skin! The outside got a nice thick layer of crisped and crusty potato chip and the inside became a soft, fluffy mass of mashed potato.

As much as I left them on the grill a bit too long, I also put them on the grill a bit too early.

I know – what was I thinking, right? Whole chicken and little potatoes on the grill at the same time? I was distracted by other parents who stopped by to pick up their child and we got to talking… when I went to check, the potatoes were done. So I took them off and let the chicken sit there, over its pan of water to catch the drippings, next to a pan of wood chips to make it smoky, coated with plenty of butter and salt, until it turned the most perfect crispy brown as if it had spent the summer in St. Tropez in the 70s with a bottle of baby oil improved with drops of iodine.

Of course, I forgot to take a picture. You’re going to have to take my word for it: it was glorious.

There were, however, a solid 4o minutes between when I removed the potatoes from the grill and when the chicken was ready to eat. Did I keep them warm by tenting them with foil? Put them in a low oven? No. Instead of these sensible, grown-up options, my dashing husband and I stood around our tiny Ikea kitchen cart “island” sprinkling salt and stuffing the hot potatoes into our pie holes.

Want to make them yourself? Toss small potatoes (these were russian reds – yellow finns would be awfully good too) with a bit of olive oil and salt. Throw them on a hot grill until they are cooked through. How long that takes depends on your grill, how much cool Pacific wind is whipping towards your house, and how engaged you are in a discussion of cricket, summer camps, and home renovation. If you think to turn them, that would be cool, but my experience demonstrates that’s an optional move.

I’ve been playing around with salmon. Lots of salmon. I returned from Cordova, Alaska with smoked salmon in jars and smoked salmon in vacuum-sealed bags. I was, for a brief moment in time, smoked salmon rich. We ate some straight-up, flaked some and put it on bagels as if it were gravlax. Then I made pizza. Salmon pizza. Two of them.

The top one is a crust cooked by itself (just a brush of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt), allowed to cool just a bit, slathered with cream cheese (I used that crazy delicious Sierra Nevada cream cheese – I wear a blindfold when I buy it to avoid the sticker shock), and covered with bits of flaked hot-smoked sockeye Copper River salmon, sliced ultra-ripe tomatoes, and minced green onion. I imagined it would be a lot like a bagel and it was.

The bottom one. Oh, that pizza. It was inspired by one I had in Cordova at Harborside Pizza that had smoked salmon and onion and bacon. The problem with that one – despite their awesome wood-burning oven in the back of a trailer – is that the crust was pretty thick and chewy in not a fabulous way and it had a lot of that very American tomato sauce that is, to my palate, quite sweet and then it also had a butt-load of melty cheese that isn’t quite stringy and stretchy but instead just greasy. In the world of typical American-style pizza, theirs was dandy. The problem is that I don’t really like those kind of pizzas. In fact, I thought I hated pizza until I was a teenager and had a different kind of pizza.

So I made a thinner crust, crumbled cooked bacon on it, spread around some onions that I had slivered and then cooked in the bacon fat from the just-mentioned cooked bacon, some flaked smoked salmon, and a grating of mozzarella to coat the whole thing and hold it together with a bit of parmesan grated over that for more salty flavor.

OMG. There is nothing else to say. Make this pizza! That would be something else to say, I suppose. This pizza, it was like crack. That’s another thing to say. Make your favorite pizza dough recipe (mine is below), buy your favorite pizza dough, or buy a Boboli and top it with the stuff I mentioned above.

A few tips for a good result:

1. Use good bacon – a meaty, porky bacon and cook it almost crisp before draining ti thoroughly.
2. Save the bacon fat and cook the onions in it. Don’t caramelize them, however. Cook them over medium-high heat until they wilt and look soft and yummy with a bit of browning just starting to happen along the edges (remember, they are going back in the oven). If you caramelize them the whole pizza will become too sweet – you need that tiny sulfuric kick cooked but not caramelized onions still have at their core.
3. Use good hot-smoked salmon – the kind that seems cooked. No lox or gravlax here (although, quite frankly, they would probably be delicious, but they’re not what I used).
4. Best case, scenario, you make your own pizza dough and then stretch it (don’t pull it, don’t roll it) into a thin, beautiful crust.

You may well have a pizza dough recipe you like. Please, use that! I bet it’s great. (To quote Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitting Without Tears, “Mittens. Aha! Many people’s sole activity in the realm of knitting. To them I say skip this section. You are making the very best mittens, keep right on.” Of course, I’m talking about cooking and pizza, not knitting and mittens, but I’m pretty sure my clever readers figured that out all by themselves.) If, however, you don’t have a pizza dough recipe you love, you could use this one.

Pizza Dough

In a large bowl, combine 3 1/2 cups flour (bread is great, but all purpose works fine; also you can substitute up to 1/2 cup of the flour with whole wheat or rye flour for texture and flavor), 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon yeast, 2 tablespoons olive oil, and 1 1/2 cups warm water. Stir together, cover, and let sit overnight in the fridge. (Don’t have that kind of time? Use 2 teaspoons yeast and let sit 1 1/2 to 2 hours at room temperature.)

Divide into 3 balls and let them sit about 30 minutes while you heat your oven to 500. A pizza stone in your oven will help ensure a crispy crust.

Work with one ball of dough at a time. With lightly floured hands on a lightly floured surface, stretch the dough into a very thin disk anywhere from 9 to 12 inches across. Put on a pan or a well-floured peel or back of a baking sheet if you’re using a pizza stone.

Quickly put the toppings on and slide into the oven/onto the pizza stone. Cook until bubbly and crispy and melted and how you like your pizza, anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on your oven, equipment, and taste.

“Why do we have to have soup every night?” Ernest asked last night as he spooned minted pea soup into his pie hole and my dashing husband and I discussed the fact that I’d roasted the chiles to make a cream of green chile soup just like the one we’d had Sunday night at Duarte’s Tavern* while we crunched on tomato bruschetta I’d made to go alongside the soup.

“Because I haven’t had soup all summer,” I explained with a bit of a laugh as I realized that I was eating – and serving – soup for the fourth time in five days with plans to make it five out of six, ” and I’m trying to recover from the daily allotment of grilled meat we had all summer.”

It’s true. We ate a lot of meat during our sejour in Minnesota. My parents eat very well. No stereotypical Midwestern casseroles or canned veggies. Fresh, crisp salads and homemade guacamole are served almost daily. But so is meat. Or at least some bit of animal be it beef or pork or chicken or fish. This is almost especially true in the summer, when the grill tempts us all with its siren song of delicious carcinogenic charred bits.

So I’m in a bit of recovery but Ernest is in a bit of withdrawal. He’s gone from getting his grandmother to serve him chicken wings for breakfast to a diet with more varied protein sources.

* Duarte’s is in Pescadero, about an hour drive south along the coast from San Francisco. They have great fresh fish dishes, awesome pies with super flakey crusts (the olallieberry is a favorite in our family), soul-soothing sourdough bread, and the best cream of artichoke and cream of green chile soups imaginable. And for people like me, who hate to have to choose, they’ll serve two soups side-by-side in a bowl (the similar textures keep them from running into each other – it’s brilliant).

I had a cucumber martini last year in Tofino and vowed to recreate one someday. I don’t tend to drink a lot of martinis at home, so that cucumber martini has been hanging out in the back of my mind, sitting around and waiting to be brought to life. A cascade of cucumbers in our CSA box finally pushed this particular cocktail daydream into the light.

I have a bit of a quandry over this cocktail. I prefer a gin martini. Vastly prefer, in fact, since gin has, you know, actual flavor. And yet… I made some cucumber-infused vodka. So… I tried them both. One just a gin martini with cucumber slices shaken in the mix of gin and dry vermouth and fresh ones added in lieu of olives and the other with cucumber vodka, same process. Both very good. The cucumber vodka one was, as you might guess, more cucumbery. If you just feel like making a summery martini and don’t feel like messing around with infusing vodka, however, the gin version is mighty tasty.

If you need more of a recipe to make a martini than the hints I’ve given above, I wrote up Cucumber Martinis with you in mind.

A grind or two of black pepper is also an option (and was how the Tofino martini was served). I’m on the fence about it though. It’s good, definitely tasty, but it does distract from the cool, subtle flavor of cucumber. Give them both (all?) a try and let me know what you think.

I finally saw it. I was downtown anyway (serving time on a tasting panel during which I am always surprised at how interesting it can be to taste, say, 12 kinds of canned tomatoes), the afternoon spread before me, and I had started to find myself unable to participate in food-world conversations because I hadn’t seen it. I popped into a matinee all by my lonesome and had a delightful time. I laughed, I cried, and the contrast I felt reading the two books on which the movie is based – Julie & Julia and My Life in France – sure showed up on-screen.

Here’s the thing: If a person is a food writer and didn’t like, nay *LUV*,  Julie & Julia, the book, people will very quickly shout “sour grapes.” I assure everyone that this particular food writer has absolutely no sour grapes vis-a-vis Julie Powell. A food writer publishes a book, it sells well, and she gets a movie deal?!? To me this is extremely good news.

On top of that, I love the whole idea of teaching oneself to cook by cooking one’s way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Genius. To write about it? Brilliant. Doing so in a year? Maybe a bit gimmicky, but gimmicks often work and lord knows I respond very well to a set deadline myself. To then whine and and have “melt downs” through most of it? Not so appealing to me. I read her blog sporadically and found it sometimes funny but more often almost aggressive in its need to regurgitate frustrations. Reading the book bummed me out as – dish after dish, page after page – Powell sucked all the life out of cooking. The joy, the pleasure, the contentment I find in the kitchen seemed to play such a small role in her project, especially for someone who started off loving cooking for so many of the same reasons I do: the predictability, the sense of accomplishment, the feeding and bringing pleasure to others. Those comforting, satisfying elements of cooking seemed to slip through her fingers with each dish and I felt sorry for her. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, give her a good shake, and tell her stop crying over un-set aspic.

(That said, I think I’d like Powell in person. If I knew her I’d be able to say “stop whining” or “these ‘melt-downs’ of yours sure have all the markings of toddler-esque temper tantrums” and then we could laugh it off and enjoy our cocktails and boeuf bourguignon.)

Compare that to Julia Child, who meets disappointment and even failure with a “tant pis” and a sigh before she gets back to work. It is probably the Midwesterner in me, but I like that in a person. I found My Life in France inspirational. Child didn’t even really start to learn to cook until she was 37, which is how old I was when I read the book two years ago.  She then worked like a dog on her first book for nine years. She recounts those years of her life with love, with humor, with joy even as her husband was shuttled between diplomatic assignments and they faced the disappointment of not having children and she faced endless professional roadblocks, back-tracks, and frustrations.

Child’s can-do, plucky nature, her true joie de vivre that grows out of taking pleasure in small, quotidian things, her sentimentality about people rather than places or things, her ability to laugh at herself and soldier on are, quite frankly, the things about myself I like the most. They may not be, as they are in Child, my dominant traits, but I sure wish they were.*

That is, perhaps, why I didn’t love reading Powell’s book: I whine, and fret, and take my frustrations out on those around me, too. The problem is that I abhor that in myself. Reading about someone else doing it doesn’t help. For the same reason I’ve never found support groups helpful, I don’t find comfort or even much humor in reading about someone else behaving in ways I don’t particularly like in myself. It doesn’t help me to know I’m not alone. In fact, it depresses me further. It makes my problems seem larger, not smaller.

Powell’s and Child’s characters were highlighted – one might even say caricatured -  in the movie even more than in their books. Would I have preferred a Meryl Streep-as-Julia Child bioepic as so many others have asserted? Sure. But I also found that being the archetype of someone trying to find her way had the interesting effect of making Powell more sympathetic. The editing necessary to turn a book into half of a movie did her a favor. Isn’t the criticism of blogs (and books based on blogs), after all, that they ramble, that they navel-gaze, that they need editors?

I would love an editor. For my blog, for my closet, for my life. In the meantime I’ll re-read My Life in France. I picked it up last night, just hours after seeing the movie, needing another hit of pluck and verve and stick-to-it-ive-ness.

* I should also note that I sometimes also share Child’s less-impressive pride and her impatience with those not as “serious” as herself. On top of that my dashing husband, much like Paul Child, seems to think his wife can do anything she puts her mind to. To stack matters in his favor, he also looks a fair amount like Stanley Tucci (with a bit of Al Pacino and Andy Garcia thrown in for good measure), which directly contributed to his Dinner Files moniker.

Before we left the cabin in Minnesota we had what may have been the champion of leftover dinners. Fridge and freezer and cabinets were raided to create the semblance of a meal. Want to hear the truly crazy part? We invited guests.

My mom defrosted the smoked whitefish she put in the freezer after we couldn’t eat the entire fish my mother-in-law hand-carried from Zabar’s last Christmas. It was a little tough. So I scraped it and mixed in some mayonnaise, some mustard, a spring onion a neighbor had dropped off from their garden the day before, and the two mini sprigs of dill my mom managed to scrounge from her own garden. Plenty of freshly ground black pepper later and we had a pretty tasty dish.

While I was doing that, my mom put the last bits of cheese on what was left in an open box of lavosh crackers for a little appetizer:

As you can see, they got a wee bit burnt. We used some nasturtiums from the garden to distract people from the burnt sections and put them out anyway. Guess what? They were pretty good. Good enough so I had to swipe them off the table to get a picture. Good enough so we had to stop Ernest from snarfing down all of them himself.

Along with these delights were some beet greens, a warmed-up baguette, a salad with an avocado vinaigrette (thus using both the remaining lettuce and the half avocado in the fridge) and some ears of corn that hadn’t made their way into the pot the night before (or perhaps the night before that?) or the sweet corn pancakes. It wasn’t at it’s best. It was tough instead of tender, starchy instead of sweet, and the Minnesotans, who know from corn, just let it be:

Was the whitefish salad actually good? Were the crackers really edible? The uneaten corn is an argument in their favor, but as a whole we were a hungry crowd who were likely to eat most anything put in front of us. We’d had a big day. You see, my mom, aunt, uncle, and I took Ernest to Paul Bunyan Land. It’s a rite of passage for youngsters in the Brainerd Lakes area. I have an intensely clear memory of the giant talking statue welcoming “Molly and David Watson from Minneapolis” when my brother and I went as kids and wondering how on earth he could possibly know our names. I continued to think this even as I turned around to ask my mom how he knew our names and she was lagging behind us, having obviously whispered our names to the ticket-taker as we went ahead. But I had an impressive ability to allow myself to believe what I wanted to believe as a child (Santa Claus? I was fully on board with that in the third grade. The third grade people!), so I ran ahead to the first ride instead of connecting the dots.

Paul Bunyan Land has a new owner and a new location since I was a kid. It is less grand than I remember, has fewer rides, and is on a pasture between a corn field and a junk yard a few miles outside of town instead of on a concrete-slabbed brightly lit lot in Brainerd proper. It is bleak yet charming, a tricky combination that is partially achieved by staffing the place with a carefully maintained balance of surly teens and cheery retired guys. The whole thing was, to quote my aunt, “a hoot.”

Ernest liked the rides –

And my uncle liked the various Paul Bunyan-inspired sculptures –

But Ernest did not like the creepy giant statue saying his name. In fact, he didn’t like the creepy giant lumberjack statue sitting in a tree at the entrance at all. He didn’t like it so much that he refused to eat at a table near it. So we sat to the side while Ernest ate a hot dog, the grown-ups picked at a shared order of nachos, and everyone sipped a soda. I mean a pop. We were in Minnesota, after all.

“You’ll never believe what they served at Commons this morning,” my best friend my freshman year of college said as I took the seat next to her at our Humanities 110 lecture to which I stumbled recently awoken with a cup of coffee in hand, and to which she arrived worked out, showered, groomed, dressed, and breakfasted.

“What?” I asked, waiting for another horror story. We were both vegetarians and considered ourselves connoisseurs of good food. We found the college cafeteria predictably yet disappointingly lacking on both fronts. I had become disenchanted to the point where I was living on a steady diet of coffee and bagels from the coffee shop where I could spend un-used meal credits for a fraction of their cafeteria value.

“Corn pancakes,” she said, “made with leftover corn from last night. The corn was just thrown in the pancakes. It was horrible.”

I sighed. I shrugged. “But that’s what corn pancakes are,” I explained.

She looked at me incredulously. “I thought they’d have cornmeal in them or something, not leftover corn.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “you’d think, but corn pancakes are just pancakes with leftover corn in them.”

That, after all, was what life had taught me. Sometimes on a summer weekend morning when the whole family was up at the cabin at the lake from which I write this, my grandmother would announce that she was making corn pancakes. The first few times I heard this I’d get excited. I liked corn. I liked pancakes. Sounded like a sweet combination.

Then the platter would come out. My grandmother – maker of excellent pot roast, chef of Brie souffle, baker of “death bars” (so sweet and good they almost killed you), a lover of great good and tasty food – used to scrape the kernels off any leftover boiled corn-on-the-cob, mix up a batch of Bisquick pancake batter, stir the kernels into the batter, cook the pancakes, and act like we were supposed to be grateful. The kernels were tough by then, somewhat flavorless after a night in the fridge. They stood out like watery little nuggets in the fluffy cakes. There wasn’t even any cornmeal to serve as a conceptual bridge between the cake and the corn.

Then I went to camp and was served corn pancakes the morning after we’d had corn-on-the-cob for dinner. Corn pancakes, I learned, were nasty, horrid things.

I’ve since made more batches of cornmeal pancakes – crispy on the edges with a bit of body to fight the texture-destroying properties of maple syrup – than I can count.

And I’ve made dozens upon dozens of sweet corn cakes, in which I purée sweet corn kernels into the batter to great effect.

So when my dad and my son returned from a run to get the morning paper the other day with “a dozen ears of Minnesota corn” and my mom rolled her eyes and showed him the dozen ears she’d already bought, I decided to get busy and fix the corn pancake problem that had haunted me for so long.

It worked. If you find yourself buying a bit more corn than you really needed at the market this weekend, set aside a few ears to make sweet corn pancakes.

Sweet corn pancakes

Like all sweet, corn-y things, these pancakes have a particular affinity for blueberries – fresh on the side, as a syrup poured on top – but maple syrup works too.

About 4 medium ears of sweet corn

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

4 tablespoons butter, melted – plus more for cooking the pancakes

Shuck the corn and cut off kernels. You should have about 2 cups of corn kernels – a bit more or less won’t matter too much, but if you find yourself going over 2 1/2 cups, either stop cutting off kernels or reserve the extra for a salad or other use.

Heat a griddle or large frying pan to medium-high heat. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.

In a blender or food processor, whirl the milk and 1 – 2 cups of the corn kernels until fully pureed (purée all the corn kernels for smooth, corn-flavored pancakes; purée half the corn kernels if you want to reserve some to add whole to the pancakes).

Add the eggs and oil to the milk-corn mixture and whirl until blended. Add flour mixture, 1/3 at a time, and whirl until smooth after each addition. Add the butter and pulse a few times to incorporate it into the batter. Stir in the reserved corn kernels if you chose kernel-laden cakes.

Coat the griddle or pan with a bit of butter or spray oil. Pour the  batter in about 3-tablespoon amounts to make 3- to 4-inch pancakes. Cook until bubbles appear over the entire surface, about 2 minutes. Flip the pancakes and cook them until they’re golden brown on the second side and cooked through, about 1 minute. Repeat with the remaining batter.

Like all pancakes, serve these hot with butter and berries or maple syrup.

“Well that won’t do us any good,” I overheard my dad saying last week into his phone, “Molly won’t be here then to cook it for us!”

That comment may make him sound like an opportunistic slave-driver, but it really was very sweet. He and a friend were making plans to hire a guide to take them fishing for walleye pike on a neighboring lake that actually has more then two or three of the coveted lake fish. They are experienced and avid fishermen who were looking to mix things up a bit from the bass and northern pikes they catch-and-release on our lake all the time. Plus, walleyes are known for being awfully tasty.

They came back with plenty of walleye. We invited seven people to dinner. Beforehand, my dad and I took a swim while Ernest fished off the dock. We were quite aways away when we heard a shriek. We saw my mom helping Ernest hold up the line with a really rather large fish on the end. We clapped our hands as we tred water and then headed back to see the prize.

It was a three-pound bass. It had pretty completely swallowed the lure. My dad removed the fish from the line as gently as he could. He moved the fish forward through a water a few times to give it a chance. He let it go and it tilted to its side. He grabbed it and coaxed it forward again. He let go and the fish started to float. No chance. He pulled it from the water and, luckily, I had been planning to take pictures of Ernest fishing and my camera was on the dock:

He and Ernest headed to the other dock and my dad showed my son how to clean a fish:

He gutted it and filleted it and rinsed it in clear lake water and handed me the fillets to add to our dinner.

And I was there to cook it and so I did the best thing I know of to do with delicate lake fish fillets: I pan-fried them. Sure, deep-frying works too, but the control and bit of moisture and cracker-crumb or cornmeal crust you can add so effectively – not to mention the lack of a giant vat of hot oil – makes pan-frying ever-so-much-more appealing.

Before you pan-fry, however, you must coat the fish with something to protect its delicate flesh from the heat. I did a triple-dip of flour, and then egg, and then cornmeal.

I worked up a guide to How to Pan-Fry Fish, with step-by-step photos taken on the cabin kitchen counter with my tri-pod set up quite precariously in the sink. Most people would then pan-fry on the stove, or, if camping, over a fire. We took a large cast iron pan and put it on a hot charcoal grill because who wants to wipe down the entire kitchen? We had everyone get their plates, grab a chair on the deck near the grill, and take the fillets as they came out of the pan.

I kept the bass separate so Ernest would be able to taste the fish he caught. We each had at least a bite and agreed: Walleye may be venerated state-wide, but the bass was tastier.