Thursday, January 23, 2014

Barbecued Blackened Rockfish

While shopping the other day at Costco, I came upon a package of wild caught rockfish. We were going to buy the farmed salmon, but after having seen the Salmon Confidential Documentary my brother linked to on Facebook, we opted for the wild caught rockfish instead.

My first thought was to fry the fish, but the ease of sprinkling on some spices and putting it on the barbecue prevailed. I keep a jar of spice rub in my pantry that I used on my Easy Oven Baked Chipotle Wings recipe, used that, and added a sprinkle of Old Bay seasoning, dried oregano and thyme for the blackening spices. I think a seasoning the rockfish with lemon pepper and paprika would be good too.

I barbecued the fish on the low heat setting for 5-6 minutes on each side, or until the fish has a little color--I don't like it to get too charred.

Simple as that!

The rockfish was served on a bed of blanched kale--we bought this big bag of baby kale at Costco too--and have been putting it in everything. I'm surprised we've almost finished the whole bag!

I prepared the kale by boiling about an inch of water in a pot and adding a few big handfuls of kale, turning the kale with tongs until it was just wilted. It took about 1 or 2 minutes, then I removed the kale to a small colander to cool, squeezed the excess water out of it and gave it a rough chop before plating. The taste reminded me of eating the tsukemono my grandmother used to make when I was little, from turnip and daikon greens--a little bit chewy and not unpleasant. Eating a little bit of the kale with a bit of tsukemono--Japanese pickled vegetables--was delicious.

The barbecued blackened rockfish was garnished with a bit of chopped chives and served on a bed of blanched baby kale with a bowl of brown rice, lemon wedges, and some tsukemono.

Itadakimasu!
***

In my Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs post, I showed you a photo collage that we had made into a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle for my mother-in-law.

She finished the puzzle relatively fast, not taking the 9 months (or so) that it took to finish her first puzzle of this era--she quit doing puzzles for about 20 years--and now spends a big chunk of her day contemplating the pieces. It's amusing to see her sometimes using her fist to pound in a piece because, "some time it doesn't fit right".

This puzzle was fun for the whole family to work on since everyone was in it--and it's enjoyable to sit around the table with Obaachan, reminiscing about the events in the photos while perusing the pieces. When you make your puzzle, set the dpi to 300--this one was 180 dpi and it came out a little grainy and the colors not vibrant.

Obaachan was so happy to have her puzzle done and hanging in her kitchen's eating-area. She looked at the puzzle and counted 12 pictures of herself (not counting her hand in the upper left) and said, "I won't be lonely anymore."

Turns out my husband likes to do puzzles too--I had this one made for him for Christmas. The colors look much better in 300 dpi. Putting the puzzle together on a piece of foam core posterboard makes it easy to move around if necessary.

Here's the original photo.
I haven't tried any other puzzle companies--you can find pages of them online. I liked Venus Puzzle because once I got my photo quality up, the puzzle came out much better, and I liked the shape of the puzzle pieces. Sometimes the puzzles we've done have really strange shaped pieces. 

Obaachan has about 15 puzzles completed, all stacked on top of the other on posterboard, and has been working on them for the past three years. I think she likes looking at all of them with a feeling of accomplishment. She says they keep her going even though each one is, "so, so hard," and each current puzzle is, "hardest one."

No printable recipe.

1 comment:

  1. I love your blog! I stumbled upon it when googling Hawaiian Chex mix, because I had memory of it. Your blog reminds me of great memories of visiting all my relatives in Honolulu (my mom and dad are both from there). I will bookmark it and visit again!

    :)

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