Grilled miso eggplant tacos. This was better than expected.
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Melon, or more kohlrabi? And is that a hamburger with cheese and no bun?
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Kohlrabi.
Yes.
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We were supposed to be leaving on a tropical vacation next week: obviously, that isn’t going to be happening. Instead, I took advantage of it being above 50F last night and served appetizers and cocktails outside in our patio “garden”. I made gin pineapple sours, served smoky carrot dip and fresh bread for an appetizer, roasted up some honey mustard chicken thighs and served it with a big ass salad and some quinoa/rice blend.
(Carrot dip update:it froze and thawed beautifully. This was the second half of the batch that I made a few weeks ago. The cocktail was made with an egg white - as god intended - and I sprinkled some nutmeg on top for a painkiller-esque influence.)
ETA: holy run-on sentence, batman!
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Whew. Finally catching my breath after making a mostly-Gordon-Ramsey fish-and-chips dinner for my family.
First, the fish. Pacific black rockfish fillets. These are under-rated. You can buy these for $7-8 per lb in the Pacific Northwest, and they are every bit as good as yellowtail, mutton, or red snapper in the US southeast coast (typically $25/lb when fresh). There. The secret’s out.
Per GR’s recommendation, I make the batter hours ahead, or even overnight. 2/3 cup AP flour, 1/3 cup rice flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 TS baking powder, one egg, and enough ale to make the batter relatively thin, thinner than pancake batter. I add the egg last after whisking the rest of the ingredients together. Refrigerate. You want this batter very cold, right up until the moment you use it.
I salt the fish with a light salting in the fridge for an hour, then rinse them off and pat them dry. This removes a fair amount of moisture from the fish and leaves it firm.
Oh, I also trim them to fit well in the fryer and to get fillets of similar thickness. For most white, flaky fish, there is a section of wide, thin fillet and a section of narrow, thick fillet. Try to separate the thick part from the thin part and cook like with like, or else your wide thin fillets will overcook relative to the narrow thick fillets.
Heat your frying oil of choice to 375 deg F. I used a blend of grapeseed and canola because that’s what I had.
Pat the fillets dry one more time before dredging them in 1/2 rice flour and 1/2 ap flour.
Then into the batter they go., coating completely then carefully letting them mostly drip off the excess batter before going into the oil.
About 3-4 minutes in, I try to flip them over to get the sides evenly brown. This works some of the time, and others, one side of the fish is too buoyant and just flops back over to the other side. When they are golden, remove from the oil onto a dish with paper towel to let them drain.
These don’t need salt (or really seasoning at all, unless you go in for lemon juice or malt vinegar). The pre-salting gives them plenty of seasoning. Eat pretty much as they become cool enough to avoid burning, as they are crispy on the outside, flaky on the inside.
Now for the frites. My son cut these in a way I like: 1/4” x 3/8” rectangular cross-section. I tossed some of them with the leftover flour dredge from the fish. Then into the oil after the fish was done. That led to a nice crispy outside and fluffy inside. Surprisingly, these didn’t need salting. They tasted great without. Though my son ate them with about a pint of ketchup.
I also used the leftover beer batter on some of the fries. This also turned out well, with the crispy batter on the outside and fluffy potato on the inside. They were almost creamy on the inside. I only have a picture of a few, since they went quickly:
At some point, there was a salad, but as you can tell, I did the cooking outside to keep the fishy smell to a minimum inside the house. I was a flurry of activity just cooking, eating, drinking the remainder of the ale that didn’t go into the batter, etc. The kids seemed pretty happy. My son said it was my best fish&chips yet, which is high praise. He didn’t use ketchup at all on the fish and ate it steaming hot when it was just cool enough not to cause burns. That’s high praise from a kid who considers “Heinz, Hunts, and Portland Ketchup” to be three of the four food groups.
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Now I want fish and chips. That fish looks perfect (and the chips look damn fine as well!).
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I had a similar response, aggravated by the fact that there is a good-but-now-closed fish & chips shop a block from my house.
So I made a fish finger sandwich instead.
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Working from home today, still some home made bologna sauce in the freezer, so pasta. This time a bit of gorgonzola (dolce bacco) on top for variation.
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(@Wanderfound) Thanks, guys! I’m still figuring it out, but it was tasty.
My skills with the fillet knife are lacking. I can never get enough meat off the fish’s fingers to make it worth the trouble. 
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Now I want a deep fryer!
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The problem with owning a good deep fryer is managing to not deep fry so much that you become a grease soaked spheroid. I know because I failed. I had to retire the thing before it killed me.
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I know. Which is why I will always covet one but never buy one.
I have learned “air frying” using the convection settings on my oven. But it will never approximate the goodness of the real thing. But on the upside, it is far healthier.
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Hmmm, hadn’t heard of that before. I’ll have to give that a shot some time.
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Its essentially “oven frying” but you put the food on a wire rack so air can circulate around the meat.
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Mango-chile salmon, scalloped potatoes, and steamed veggies:
This time, I only used half of the can of fruit, and fried up the peppers a bit before adding the salmon. Then after browning both sides, in went the fruit and juice, and as I usually do, I boiled it down for the last few minutes.
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No wine?!? 
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Forgot to chill the white in time and couldn’t make up my mind about an alternative red. [gallic shrug]
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