When Ross or I go out to eat, we’re not ordering steaks or pork chops. It’s sort of like when Paul Newman was asked why he never strayed from his wife and he replied, “why settle for hamburger when you have filet at home”. We eat the best meat around every day so we’re always interested in great vegetables, pasta or some perfectly cooked fish. When I go to the coast, the singular thing that I want to do is hit the fish market as many times as possible. Surf City Crab is kind of a perfect NC fish market. Sitting right on the docks under the bridge, the boats come in and white coolers are filled with fresh catch. As someone running a small business selling really high quality product, I always love to see others who are doing the same. Give those folks an idea of how many you need to feed and what your interests are and they will walk you through the coolers telling you where every fish came from. It’s a quintessential coastal experience.
This week, we ate many, many pounds of shrimp. Shrimp cocktails before steak, low country boil, and cold shrimp out of the fridge the next day. For our last night, I went down to see the what was available and purchased an iridescent slab of golden tilefish. Remember what I said one time about buying the best possible ingredients and trying not to mess them up. Salt and pepper and seared well on the skin side, I then basted them in butter and garlic from the pan, the butter slowly browning as they cooked. Once they were perfectly flaked, I hit them with a fresh squeeze of lemon and some parsley because parsley makes it pretty. Now the secret - beurre monte. The simplest French sauce. Cold butter slowly emulsified in simmering water. I am absolutely obsessed with the silky, fatty simplicity of it. It makes everything better and is especially good plated around some filets of the Sixty South salmon from our freezer. Five adults and three kids ate four pounds of fish and went to bed early.
I hope you have found some time to get away this summer. Traveling with a five and ten year old isn’t exactly rejuvenating but it is awesome. We arrived home yesterday and I laid face down in the floor until one of them jumped on my head. And when we walked down into town in the evening, I looked towards the butcher shop for the first time in a week and thought, that looks like vacation.
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