Foodie Friday Returns: Fishy Realness Edition

So I've preciously confessed that my favorite recipe of all time may be poule au pot, the humblest of boiled chickens, one of the classic born-of-poverty preparations that sits at the base of all good cooking, the sort of dish that, if you do it right, will taste better than anything you'll ever eat in a restaurant, anywhere, ever.  Now another recipe I really like is this simple fish soup, thickened with a roux, a rip-off of the sort of thing you find in Brittany or along the coast of Poitou, although over there you'd probably actually dry and mill the fish bones . . . I'm a little too lazy for that.  The recipe calls for a few strands of saffron, which will make it prettier and more aromatic, but which can be dispensed with if you're really into eating like a peasant.  I like to use mackerel, which is nice and oily with a firm flesh--also cheap--but almost any light-fleshed fish will do.  Do not under any circumstances use salmon.  You'll need a blender or an immersion blender or a rough-and-tumble food mill and a very fine sieve.

a 2-3-lb fish (I use a mid-sized mackerel)
1 yellow onion, diced
1 whole head of garlic, smashed
a couple of carrots, peeled, chopped
some fennel fronds, chopped (if you've got 'em)
a few tomatoes, peeled and hand-crushed (good canned ones are fine)
butter
flour
sea salt
black pepper
a few saffron strands


Fillet the fish and remove the skin from the fillets.  Set the meat aside; keep the skin for the stock.  Chop the carcass into manageable pieces.

In a deep stockpot, melt a generous several tablespoons of butter.  Add the onion, garlic, and carrots with a pinch of salt and sauté until soft.  Add the fish parts and skin and sauté for a few more minutes.  Add the fennel and tomatoes and stir together.  Fill the pot with water.  Crush the saffron between your fingers and add it as well.  Bring to a boil, and then reduce heat and simmer low for 30-40 minutes.

Take the stock off the heat and blend everything together.  It will turn an ugly, almost-brownish color, but don't worry.  Strain it through the fine sieve into a bowl, working back and forth with a spatula or wooden spoon to squeeze all of the liquid out.  Discard the solids.  The stock that remains will have a vibrant, red-orange color.

Wipe out your pot and put it back on the stove.  Melt more butter.  Add a bit more salt.  Add a tablespoon or two of flour, whisking together to form the roux.  When it is smooth and begins to darken, becoming almost sandy in color and texture, slowly add in the stock, whisking as you go.  When all the stock has been added, let it simmer quickly for a few minutes.  Chop up the reserved fish, season with salt and pepper, and add to the stock to cook in it.

Serve immediately, hot, with thick, toasted bread.

Department of Duh

In an otherwise tedious and uninteresting column arguing, hold onto your knickers, that the Americans for American Health America Act is the most important piece of domestic legislation since Napoleon signed the Magna Carta, Ronald Dworkin stumbles, like a corpse-sniffing dog, upon a corpse . . . or like a beagle upon a bedbug . . . or, anyway:

If the Court does declare the act unconstitutional, it would have ruled that Congress lacks the power to adopt what it thought the most effective, efficient, fair, and politically workable remedy—not because that national remedy would violate anyone’s rights, or limit anyone’s liberty in ways a state government could not, or be otherwise unfair, but for the sole reason that in the Court’s opinion our constitution is a strict and arbitrary document that denies our national legislature the power to enact the only politically possible national program. If that opinion were right, we would have to accept that our eighteenth-century constitution is not the enduring marvel of statesmanship we suppose but an anachronistic, crippling burden we cannot escape, a straitjacket that makes it impossible for us to achieve a just national society.

While I suspect that Ron's and my definitions of a just society differ--I cannot, for instance, see how the word "national" quite worked its way in there--I am (of course I am) plainly in agreement on the anachronistic, crippling burden part.  I'm not sure why it takes the potential overturn of a bunch of congressional backwash, a half-measure nationalization of a for-profit insurance model, for example, to get you there, but whatever works.  You mean to say that a set of bylaws drafted by the de facto peerage of a native-extirpating Roman-style slave republic are inadequate to the task of infinitely expanding the anti-communist bribe package of New-Deal liberalism?  Next thing you're going to tell me is that Aristotle is an insufficient text for Intro to the Principles of Cell Biology.

I've Never Been More Certain of Anything in My Life

I would not recommend torturing your brain by reading the full epistolary romance between William Saletan and Ross Douthat, but seriously, that dude is so gay.

Obviously Douthat isn't exactly writing in the most sophisticated tradition of apologetics, but you know, there is something about all this hemming and hawing over the proper, ahem, stance toward the gays that is deeply prurient, bordering on the pornographic.  You know, like, let us now turn our unflinching, um, gaze upon these divinely incompatible sexual beings in order that we may, carefully and in great detail, determine the most charitable possible means to disapprove of them.  If we look long enough, and hard enough, we may yet determine just how we are supposed to feel.  We wish to turn away, and yet somehow we feel compelled to keep going.  God, Ross, you are going to feel so guilty when you quiver to a deathlike little conclusion on the, uh, issue.

VIP

They also pointed to the CIA’s experience in Pakistan. U.S. officials said the agency killed more senior al-Qaeda operatives there with signature strikes than with those in which it had identified and located someone on its kill list.

-The WaPo

Wincontinence

The latest scandal in Afghanistan is another installation in the continuing series: Don't Disrespect Shit that You Have Already Killed.  Naturally, we reflect upon the things that Our Troops ought not have done.  They ought not to have posed gleefully in front of pictures of the dead, nor burned up them Krans, as we say in Pittsburgh, nor peed on them bodies.  Somehow these reflections seem to come up short of: we ought not to have killed those Afghans in the first fucking place.  Look, this stuff doesn't reveal the dark underbelly of the Afghan War; it is the war.  The first prerequisite of defiling a corpse is a corpse.

Codified Likeness Unit

Someone said that Mitt Romney doesn't understand or appeal to women; Mitt Romney said, well, shit, I've got a wife, who's a woman, to tell me what women want, which is The Economy; some Democrat or other said, Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life; and everyone rushed into the gap to explain how this was a terrible gaffe, error, mistake, embarrassment, because 1.) There Is Nothing Wrong with Being a Housewife, and 2.) Being a Housewife Is a Job.

It is the latter point, which went so far, or so deep, as to dredge up a study (apparently annual!) that says Stay-at-Home Moms R Worth A Buck Twelve, to which we turn our attention.  So, here is the first posthuman moment, if you ask me, when the biological species whose awkward form we inherited evolves into something else, après les protéines, moi, composed entirely of billable hours.

I've been told that, although an atheist, I am a religious man.  I accept that.  It seems to me that the majesty of existence is somewhat . . . um, reduced by the evident conviction that there is no activity which cannot be accounted for, literally accounted for, in monetary terms.  Like, euh, you may think I am heartless, but in fact, my first relationship was worth $1.37, so obviously, like not. You do not have to imbue motherhood with any particular mystical earthgoddess hokum to see that its particular value is precisely in its valuelessness; it is an essentially human activity; it is immune to price.  It isn't a fucking job.  It isn't work, although it's labor.  That's not a fucking demerit.

As a merely practical matter, I have a goddamn job; I even sort of like my job, sometimes; it ain't all that bad.  But I'll be doubledamned if I have to start thinking of the feel of the garden soil between my fingers, the sunshine on my face, every kiss and blowjob, the dog curling into the bend of my knee when I take a nap, laughing with my uncles, visiting my parents, hanging out with my cousins, joking with my friends, getting sick and healing and getting well again, feeling sadness and feeling joy, sleeping and waking, breathing and living as quarter-hours on a daily calendar with a wage-rate attached.  "Salary.com says that standing next to your boyfriend at the sink and doing dishes together after the guests have gone home is worth upwards of $25.45/hour, or nearly $30.00/hour if the dishwasher is already full."  No, you fucks, no.  That isn't it at all.