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Thursday, June 18, 2009

It’s Halibut Season!

As you can tell from my posts, I love all fish and seafood.   I have lots of favorites…one of them being halibut.  Noticing fresh halibut in stores the last few weeks, I have been so tempted to buy some.  But, as we have been trying to tighten the old belt lately, I resisted due to the $14.99 per pound price tag.  This weekend, however, while I was shopping at Sprouts, I saw some very fresh looking halibut advertised for $8.99 per l –b. Ah hah!  I could no longer resist and picked out a nice thick fillet to prepare that evening. 

While I have tried many different preparations for this fish, I always come back to my tried and true favorite, Asian Steamed Halibut.  

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Back in my 20’s when I was just beginning to get the cooking bug, my friend and I had a dish similar to this at PF Changs.  Hello food orgasm!  We loved it, and came very close (if not right on) to replicating it at home.  It has been a favorite ever since.  It is also a pretty fool proof method of cooking the fish, as it stays moist and very flavorful, without risk of getting tough and overcooked. 

Ingredients:

1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce

3 Tbsp. sake

1 1/2 Tbsp brown sugar

1-2 tsp. minced fresh ginger

1 lb fresh halibut fillet

chives, shallots and cilantro for garnish and extra flavor

Method:

I put all of the ingredients in a wide shallow bowl and put the halibut in to start “marinating.”  Get a pan with steamer insert prepared on the stove.  When water starts boiling, put the whole bowl of halibut +ingredients into the steam basket (including bowl as you want it to steam in the sauce.)  Steam for 10- 15 minutes, or until fish is flaking easily with fork. 

I serve this on top of rice of noodles to soak up some of the flavorful sauce.  This time I used the Pasta Slim noodles from the sample that Wildwood sent me a few weeks ago.  Steamed snap peas and shitake mushrooms on the side and it was just like I remembered – sitting in the restaurant 10 + years ago. 

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We had this meal with a bottle of the Kono Baru Unoaked Chardonnay from 2006.  I reviewed this wine last summer, and enjoyed it again just as much.  I probably would have had a better food/wine pairing for this delicious and tropical chardonnay, but we had opened it to sip earlier in the afternoon, and wanted to finish the bottle with dinner.  If you like a nice medium bodied chard without the wood, this is it.  There probably isn’t any more of the 2006, but later vintages should be just as good. 

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6 comments:

Melissa @ For the Love of Health said...

Wow- that looks amazing!! Great job!

Kelly said...

i love how clean, minimalist and fresh that looks. Yum. I definitely need to budget better at the grocery store. Thankfully my veggie csa starts this month and my meat csa next so i'm hoping that since I pre-paid that will help a lot.

Need any summer reading? I just finished reading Libation: A bitter Alchemy about this woman's experiences drinking wine and spirits all over the globe and making wine at home. It's facinating. I know you're quite the oenophile have you ever considered making wine? I've become very curious about it since getting cheese cultures at a shop that also sold beer brewing and wine making supplies. Apparently they bring in wine grape from CA (I imagine they are even easier to come by in your area) so you can make wine right at home! They even sell juice for wine as well.

eatingRD said...

mmm . . I love fresh fish too, but it can be so dang expensive. Your recipe looks great and we have a steamer basket, yay! I really like unwooded chards, where you can really taste the fruit.
Have a great weekend :)

kelsey said...

I need to get some in season halibut + I want to have a fun fun food orgasm!! I love the presentation!!

lynn said...

This looks amazing! I wish I had someone to cook fish for (my hubby's vegetarian)

Cookie said...

I love how you served this dish! Did you drink some of the sake while you were cooking? :)