From time immemorial, the cultures of the Mediterranean have been eating small, oily fish: sardines, smelts, anchovies, and mackerel. These have been out of favor for a long time in the US, and they are seriously underfished.  As such, you can eat all you want, and since they’re not predatory species they don’t have the concerns of pollutants concentrating in the flesh.  They’re also pretty cheap – a couple bucks a pound – and universally wild-caught.

What you need:
Vegetable or peanut oil – enough to fill a large skillet about ¾” to 1″ deep
A large cast iron skillet with high, straight sides
All-purpose flour
Old Bay or similar crab boil seasoning
Spring-loaded tongs
Several dozen smelts, heads on or off (about a pound)

What you do:
Liberally season about ½ cup of AP flour with the crab boil seasoning.
Heat the oil in the skillet over high heat to 375°F.
Coat the smelts, 8-10 at a time, in the seasoned flour.
Fry in the oil for 1½-2 minutes until lightly golden, then remove to a draining rack or paper towels to drain.
Season with additional crab boil, and serve hot.

Serving Suggestions:
Shake on a little rice wine or malt vinegar, or squeeze on a touch of fresh lemon or lime juice.
Serve over a salad of bitter greens (mustard, arugula, dandeloin, etc.) dressed with a light vinaigrette.
Eat with a hoppy beer like an IPA.

Just eat the whole fish – little bones and all, though I admit I usually break off the tailfin and discard. Acid and bitter accompaniments are best, as the fish itself is oily and rich and acid/bitter flavors help cut through. If you’re hungry, you can go through more than a dozen of these in a sitting. Give small fish a try – they’ll help your heart, the environment, and your budget.

The second page includes a chart of scoop/disher sizes. Ice cream scoops come in many sizes for a variety of applications. Who knew? Alton Brown recommends using a #20 disher to scoop his cookie dough onto the cookie sheets. I researched what that meant and gathered the info to share with you all.

Theresa’s Decadent Chocolate Cookies

I bought these colorful carrots at the Farmers Market few weeks ago.  I served them with cheese ravioli.
The second photo shows them cut up so you can see the color was different on the inside.

I Google-d “chick pea salad” and found a great recipe over at Smitten Kitchen.  I had all of the ingredients in the house.  Unfortunately, for the second time in a row, the dog ate the whole grain farmers market bread, so I had to scrounge crusts from the store bought.

I served the chick pea salad on the toasted crusts and over fresh local lettuce, garnished with diced fresh, local bright red and yellow peppers and more black olives.  It was very tasty and DH was still hungry afterwards.  We finished up by eating local cranberry-walnut bread and some fresh, delicious summer peaches.

You can find the recipe and photos here:

Smitten Kitchen’s “Smashed Chickpea Salad”

Case in point – we love the folks at Springfield Farm. They’re a bio-conscious operation in northern Baltimore County that raises laying hens, roaster chickens, turkeys, hogs, and lambs on natural pasture.  You can see their laying hens in the photo above.  That little red building all the way in the background is the hen-house, and the food & water’s as far away from it as possible, so that the hens spend most of their time outside.  They’re exercised, in the open air, and free to forage for bugs and tasty plants.  They’ll strip most of the green vegetation off this section of pasture, and will be rotated onto pasture vacated by the sheep.

Springfield’s eggs are very reasonably priced – $3.75 for a dozen large, which compares well against the $3.49/dozen for “organic, cage-free” at the supermarket.  Here, though, you get to visit the hens laying your eggs, and can buy them before they ever hit a refrigerator.  They’re fresh, the pasturing produces eggs with brilliant orange-yellow yolks, and they’ve got a great rich flavor.  Win for everyone.  Springfield has almost 2500 layers in their flocks, and the operation has scaled well to offer an outstanding product at a reasonable price.

Now, we get into the pasture-raised meats.  Our cheap meat supply, based on subsidized soy and corn feed, is under scrutiny as a potential contributor to our unhealthy eating habits. We eat too much animal protein,  too few fresh vegetables and very few legumes, because we can afford to.  We spend approximately half of what people in the early part of the 20^th century did for our food, and we eat probably twice as much meat as we should.

So, is it reasonable to pay premium prices for what we have taken for granted as a cheap everyday consumable?  If chicken parts are selling for $1.49 a pound at the local megamart, is it sane to pay three times that for a hormone- and antibiotic-free version, raised on pasture and eating a well-rounded diet?

Being that Springfield is a poultry farm that you can actually tour without a gas mask, and that the roaster flocks spend most of their time wandering about in the open air, there’s a case to be made that premium prices are worth it if only for reducing the amount of agri-industry we depend on for our daily sustenance.  However, these truly free-range birds have an extra benefit – they actually taste good.

Whereas the average supermarket bird is bland, with a mushy, cottony consistency to the cooked meat, a real free-range bird actually uses its muscles.  The result is firmer flesh that is simultaneously tender and juicy and provides some resistance to the tooth.  It has a coarser… meatier… texture that’s a pleasant surprise.  The flavor is more pronounced as well, in that while not being gamy, it actually tastes like something. While a standard bird generally needs an overnight brining to taste of anything, the free range chickens don’t need anything other than some basic seasoning.

Try this for a month, and see how it works for you.  Spend the same amount you would normally spend on meat, but buy better quality, non-industrially produced meats.  You’ll have less of it.  This affords you the second, fun part of the exercise where you supplement this smaller quantity of animal protein with legumes, pulses, and fresh in-season vegetables.  You may find that you’re enjoying more flavorful, but smaller portions of meats combined with a healthier proportion of vegetables and spending nearly the same amount on groceries.

“Oven-Grilled” Organic Free-Range Chicken Thighs

4 Free-Range Chicken Thighs
Kosher Salt
Pepper
Caribbean or Southwestern spice rub
Olive Oil

Free range roaster thighs tend to be larger than what you’re used to, because free-range birds actually spend a lot of time walking around.  An average free-range thigh is 6-8 oz. with bone.

Preheat your oven’s broiler on high for at least five minutes.

Rinse your chicken under cold water, rubbing lightly, and blot dry with clean paper toweling.  Rub or brush lightly with olive oil.  Sprinkle with salt and fresh-ground pepper, and rub lightly with spice mixture.

Space evenly on broiler pan and place under direct heat 6-7″ from broiler.  Broil for 20 minutes, turning every five, or until a thermometer in the thickest part of the meat (but not touching the bone) reads 170°F (77°C).  Remove from broiler and let rest uncovered for 3-5 minutes before serving.

Serves 4.  360-480 kcal/serving.

All of which presents a dilemma.  I want to have a good glass of wine with dinner.  But the quantity of food and the flavors makes choosing an appropriate drink a bit of a challenge.  With candied sweet potatoes, oyster stuffing, and turkey legs waiting to send you into carbo-overload and tryptophan nappy-time, this is not an opportunity to whip out the best vintages.  That being said, Thanksgiving is a “special occasion” with friends and family gathered around the holiday table, and cheap plonk just doesn’t seem right.

So, what’s called for are decent wines that won’t get lost or be squandered competing with the bounty of the rest of the table.  They also need to be assertive enough to hold their own against a fair amount of heavy eating without adding too much of their own weight.  To this end, I would suggest serving three wines, scaled in quantity to serve all of your guests at least one glass of each.

To start the meal, I’d like you to consider a dry rosé.  Something from Tavel or somewhere else along the Rhône valley, including the southernmost AOC from the Rhône, Costieres de Nimes.  Tavel wines are more famous, and thus more expensive than the Nimes offerings, but either offers good aperitif dryness and solid red-berry fruit flavors.  These are typically blends of Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault, and/or Grenache Noir.  While dry, they give the impression of a slight sweetness through their bright flavors.  White Zinfandel has been the inoffensive choice of many a Thanksgiving feast, and this changes things up a little without presenting a huge challenge to the average palate.  You should be able to find a good Rhône rosé for $10-12.

Once everyone’s tucked into their stuffing, mashed potatoes, and green-bean casserole, the intensity of the wine needs to step up as well.  I’ll be getting comfy at this point, and lighter flavors are not going to play well.  Still, there’s plenty of food on the table, and I’m usually eying seconds, so this is no time to drink a glass that’ll make me want to curl up on the couch.  Enter the secret weapon – Alsatian whites.  Riesling, Gewürtztraminer, and Pinot Gris from Alsace are still dry white wines, but they have an intensity of honeyed, floral perfume and bright apple, pear, peach, melon, apricot, and citrus flavors.  Their balanced, forward acidity refreshes the palate and cuts through heavy foods.  A solid vintage will be a $15-20 wine.

For that last go-round of the dark meat on the turkey platter, the stuffed mushroom caps, and giblet gravy, I want a red wine.  Not only that, I want a red wine that wraps everything up in a velvet package with a nice little bow on top.  That calls for a pinot noir or Beaujolais.  However, being that I’m probably stuffed to the gunwhales at this point, I’m not breaking out the best vintage Burgundy, Moulin-au-Vent, or a big-buck “cult” Californian.  There are a few Sonoma Valley pinots and Burgundian vin de pays (Burgundy wines bottled by varietal name, rather than the AOC) that fit the bill, for somewhere around $10-15 a bottle, and Beaujolais nouveau is on the shelves.  Young pinots should be opened and decanted before the start of the meal, and served at the end.  Beaujolais should be slightly chilled, but not cold.

We’ve whetted our appetites with rosé.  We’ve re-stimulated our taste buds via the graces of Alsace.  Finally, as a prelude to a nap, pie, and coffee, we wrapped everything up with a restrained, approachable red – a cushion on which our weary stomachs may fall in repose.  We’ve tread the treacherous path of the Thanksgiving wine list, and emerged with a pleasant, wistful, if slightly drowsy smile.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.