you've got to pick a pocket or two

Uni is the Japanese term for what is commonly referred to as sea urchin roe but is actually the gonads of the sea urchin -- of which there are five, the only edible part of the little fellas, which like starfish and other echinoderms are pentaradially symmetric.  Uni has a reputation for being a love it or hate it food, which I think is owed to the fact that so much of what is available in restaurants is previously frozen Grade C.

Urchin is highly perishable, and the flavor degrades quickly.  It's eaten in most parts of the world where it's a local food -- cracked open and eaten straight from the shell with a little lemon in the Mediterranean and South America, served as sushi or sashimi in Japan, and Wikipedia (which was no help in checking my spelling of pentaradial) tells me that in the Orkney Islands it was once used like butter.

Grade A isn't all that much more expensive than Grade C: it's still less expensive per serving than steak, for instance.  I think the perishability has a lot to do with uni's off-putting reputation -- you can really only depend on its quality at a restaurant that sells it quickly and never gives it time to sit there getting old.  

A date and I had our first uni experiences this weekend.  (Well, I had a sandwich Thursday so I had some sense of what flavors would go with the uni - no photo of the sandwich, but I spread uni and cream cheese on rye bread, much like that open-face salmon sandwich, with much of the same appeal.)  It's definitely a strong flavor, but not in a bad way.  It's oceanic but not fishy, sharp, kind of tangy, kind of ozonic.  I don't really know what to compare it to other than itself.  It reminds me of trying to describe scallops - once you've said they're sweet and shellfish, you're sort of out of words, without having said anything yet.

El Quinto Pino in NYC serves (served?) an uni panini with soy sauce and a sharp Korean mustard oil, which I think must be meant to emulate the soy/wasabi notes of the sushi experience.  I liked the idea of the panini but went a different way with flavors:

The corn on the cob and fried chicken were partly in case we hated uni, and partly because it doesn't seem to me like a flavor you want to fill up on.  The sandwich is uni, butter, brown rice miso, and some shredded shiso leaves which were totally lost in the mix but also not really necessary.  The combination was rich but not overwhelming.  Really good.

Today we had a pre-lunch salad using up the rest of the uni: radish, cucumber, and double-peeled fava beans with a vinaigrette that's just uni, barley miso, lemon juice, and olive oil, whisked together and then pressed through a sieve.  I wasn't a hundred percent sure how well it would work, although cucumbers go with damn near any flavors, which is why I love them so much in the summer (and this is very typical of my summer salads -- cucumber, radish, dressing, very little else; in the fall and spring I'm more likely to use lettuce).  But again, it was very nice.  The other vinaigrette ingredients cut the uni just enough that you could still taste the cucumber, but that beachy oceanicness was definitely present.

i'm the leprechaun

Some month when I'm not off meat, we'll talk about how to make corned beef -- and how "corned" comes from the "corns" (kernels, i.e. "small bits") of seasoning used in making it.  Maybe we'll even talk about the differences between Irish cuisine and Irish-American cuisine, I don't know.  Maybe next year I'll make colcannon or champ.

This isn't that month, so I took advantage of the sales and picked up a cheap pink corned beef for the day, and a not so cheap grey corned beef (made with regular salt, not curing salt) to put in the freezer -- this is the only time of year they sell the grey corned beef.  (Interestingly, I did not see corned ribs or roast this year, as I have in previous years -- just brisket.)

The big thing to do for St Patricks Day here -- hell, for any damn day -- is "New England boiled dinner": corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and sometimes other root vegetables, all boiled together like cozido or pot au feu. I've never been a fan, and in fact, until after my teens, I thought I only liked corned beef in sandwiches and hash -- which wouldn't make any sense, of course, but I had never stopped to wonder about it.

So me, I generally roast my corned beef. It avoids that mushy laundry texture of boiled dinner. (How I cooked it this time, for a four-pound corned brisket: after soaking it for an hour to get some salt out, and rubbing it with mustard and hot sauce as I always do, I baked it uncovered at 275 for two hours, then covered for about 75 minutes, then uncovered and rubbed with more mustard for about 30 minutes at 425. The result is really tender but has a real density and pronounced crust.) And the main goal here, the main reason I ever cook corned beef, is to have leftovers with which to make hash. I can't remember the last time I had pancakes. Why? Because I live alone, an egg makes too many pancakes for one person, and any time I go out for breakfast, if corned beef hash is on the menu, I get corned beef hash (unless I'm in the South -- southern breakfasts are a whole nother deal, whether we're talking chicken-fried steak, grillades and grits, a smoked pork chop, or a chorizo and egg taco).

Every cook seems to discover at some point that there somehow aren't many good corned beef hash recipes out there. Instead there are things calling for fresh herbs or canned gravy, handfuls of chopped parsley, hard-boiled eggs, roasted garlic, things that sound nothing like the hash you know. I don't know why this is, unless it's that usual Signature Syndrome, the same one so many new managers suffer from -- people feel the need to add their "personal touch" to things, for no reason except to do so.

But you don't really need a recipe, is what it comes down to. You want corned beef, potatoes, and onions. Add beets if you're making red flannel hash, a New England specialty. You can add small amounts of carrot or turnip, but again, these make the hash as distinct a variant as red flannel hash is (I added a tiny amount of both in mine, for the record). In any case, all of the above ingredients should already be cooked: the corned beef, of course, is leftovers; the potatoes may be leftovers from your boiled dinner or may be cold baked potatoes, a very good choice; the onions should be sauteed or grilled.

Assemble the ingredients -- the meat coarsely chopped, everything else a bit smaller, roughly equal amounts of meat and potatoes and considerably less of anything else -- in a cast-iron pan with animal fat (bacon or salt pork is traditional, beef fat is terrific, butter works), press closely together, and cook on low to medium heat on both sides, until you have noticeable browning and crisping.

Thyme or rosemary actually don't make terrible choices here, judging from a couple of restaurant hashes I've had, especially if they are in a homemade beef gravy that you add in small amounts to help with the binding. A touch of fresh cream -- a couple spoonfuls per serving, little enough that the cream isn't visible when the dish is done -- can help a lot with binding and flavor. I rarely buy cream specifically for the sake of adding to hash -- except turkey hash with Thanksgiving leftovers -- but I'll always add it if I have it in the house already.

You may need to flip the hash more than once. Look, when I heat up canned hash -- one of the only two convenience foods I ever buy -- I take at least half an hour to cook it. Texture is a real big key here. Keep it crisping, don't add too much liquid at once if you add any, and be prepared to cook it a while in order to cook the moisture out of your leftovers. 

As for the sandwiches?  This isn't a Reuben, but it's terrific: corned beef on seeded rye, with pickled red cabbage, Irish cheddar (on sale for St Patrick's!), and comeback sauce (a mustardy sauce a little like remoulade).  I swear there must be some chemical explanation for the flavor magnificence that is toasted buttered rye bread.  It's probably in McGee.

I realize there's a tradition that says that Reubens -- and presumably any sandwich riffing on them like this one does -- must be stacked high with meat, but look, I like sandwiches a lot more than I like eating half a pound of cured meat in a sitting.  It doesn't need to be a mouthbuster every time.

up against the wall, motherfucker

I had hot-smoked snapper for dinner last night (in a taco with salsa and fried potatoes), so lunch today was a snapper melt with the leftover fish: seeded rye bread toasted on both sides and buttered on the outside, flaked snapper, red miso + mayonnaise, grilled onions, mozzarella + aged Mahon.

Pepper Relish Lay's on the side.  (Imagine salt and vinegar chips, a little sweeter, with the flavor of fresh pepper and onion.  They're pretty good.)

Fish definitely makes meatlessness easier.  So does being a week away from St Patricks Day, a Reuben, and corned beef hash.  What I miss most from the meat counter: hamburgers, Buffalo wings, duck breast, roast chicken, unctuous pork bits (tails, feet, etc).  Even Buffalo wings depend on the collagen-richness of chicken wings.  That lip-smackingness, you dig, that's always missing from "boneless Buffalo wings," because the collagen in this case is all in the skin.  Unctuousness -- the almost-gooeyness of collagen-rich parts like oxtails, spareribs, pig tails, etc -- is something neither fish nor flora can provide.  

Similarly, I find that without meat as a palette for it, I have not much interest in tanginess -- the sweet-sour-sharp of barbecue sauce, for instance, or mustard glaze, or Filipino adobo.  Peppadews or pickled cherry peppers on a steak sandwich.  The contrast between a hot dog and sauerkraut.  I'm not sure I miss it yet, but it's one of my favorite counterpoints for meat, which means it's a well I'm used to going to often.  I would certainly miss it in the long run.

(Interestingly, one of my favorite fish dishes, Platonic fish, is a tangy dish -- I just haven't got round to making it yet.)