RECIPE: Kalamarakia Yemista-Stuffed Squid
If you read my post about the Top Fish competition, then you know that I recently made a stuffed squid dish that landed me in third place. I am pretty proud of that recipe, and I'd like to share it with you.I have served this dish to many friends, and they all enjoyed it. What is difficult about cooking squid is that you either need to cook it quickly or over a very long period of time, making sure that it doesn't get rubbery. The way I prepare it is to bake it quickly, and it doesn't take ages to chew—win win.
The prep for this dish takes about 10 to 15 minutes depending on your knife skills; I usually like a chunky chop, but with the squids being so little, you are going to want to chop everything pretty small.Full recipe and story here
Sardines stuffed with cream cheese & herbs
Stock up on your Omega-3 with sardines. Sardines are cheap and they are worth their weight in gold. If there are people that don’t really like sardines, you can stuff them with cream cheese and herbs. They taste differently and I am sure they will be a hit.
Directions
First you have to clean the sardines, which many of you absolutely hate. Perhaps you can get your fishmonger to do it for you.
In case you want to do it yourself, here is how: Put the fish in a bowl with water, and lightly scrape off the scales. You can use a knife or a special scraper. Take care not to scratch the skin. The sardines have very soft scales that come off very easily. Then you have to cut off the head with the gills and everything. Cut open the belly and remove the intestines. Rinse the fish.
Use a very sharp knife for the next step. Insert the knife in the fish from the cut side. You must feel that it touches the backbone. Run your knife along the bone to the tail. Be careful not to separate the two fillets completely. They must be joined at the back. Open the fillet and insert your knife below the bone and slide it towards the tail, so that you can remove the bone. Gently scrape off the soft bones and your sardine is ready to be stuffed. It sounds complicated but it is very easy and it doesn’t take long once you get the hang of it.
Rinse each fish as you finish filleting it and place it in a colander to drain. Sprinkle some salt over the fish and let them drain while you prepare the stuffing.
In a bowl place the cheese and the chives, dill and parsley. Mix well with a fork. Lay the sardines in a baking pan, the one next to the other. With a teaspoon, put some stuffing between the two fillets of fish. Press the two fillets lightly together. When you have stuffed all the fish, sprinkle a little salt over them and some oregano if you wish, and drizzle some olive oil and lemon juice.
Bake them in a preheated oven at 180oC for about 20 minutes. You can serve them with a nice green or Greek salad and some fries.
If you wish, you could leave some sardines whole after having removed the head and the intestines. Place them in the pan, drizzle some oil and lemon juice over them and sprinkle some salt and oregano. They are very tasty this way as well.
Another way to cook the sardines is to barbecue them. These little fish packed with vitamins and minerals are a real powerhouse, and should be added to your menu.
This delicious recipe is the courtesy of Cooking In Plain Greek!
Website - Seafood Health Facts: Making Smart Choices
The Seafood Health Facts website was recently updated to included a link to customizing seafood consumption information and also to provide guidance to a broader range of consumers.
The Seafood Health Facts site includes current information on seafood nutrition/health, safety and market topics. It will help answer many commonly asked seafood safety questions that consumers and patients often ask health care providers and retailers.
Bookmark this great new resource! It is a handy tool to help you become seafood savvy. Check it out at seafoodhealthfacts.org.
How to Eat Sardines Sustainably
Please note that the quote below by Geoff Shester incorrectly states that most of California Pacific Sardines go to tuna farms. In actuality, most CA sardines are exported for canning for human consumption. It should also be noted that the Lenfest Report identified CA’s forage fisheries to be one of the most precautionary, sustainable forage fisheries in the world. California limits harvesting to only allow 2% of the total forage pool, leaving 98% in the ocean for other marine life
Written by Miriam Goldstein
I only eat anchovies with Caesar salad, and am rather fond of the tiny fish that add a bit of strong flavor to the romaine lettuce. I’m unusual for wanting to get even that close to the tiny, oily fish – sardines, anchovy, menhaden – that used to be a staple of regular American food. That’s why Julia Whitty’s recent article in Mother Jones in which she encourages consumers to pause before they “ take a bite of that sardine sandwich” was so surprising. You won’t find sardines anywhere on the list of the top 10 consumed seafoods - or do you? Here’s why eating more sardines directly would actually be good for the ocean:
1) The United States Pacific sardine fishery is not overfished. This may be surprising to people who are familiar with the famous collapse of the Monterey (central California) sardine fishery, which was described by John Steinbeck in his book Cannery Row. Puzzlement over this collapse launched one of the most important long-term oceanographic investigations of all time, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, which continues to provide critical scientific information to this day. Over 50 years of investigation has shown that this crash actually WASN’T caused by overfishing – at least not directly.
Sardine and anchovy populations are actually tied directly to large-scale climatic conditions – if they’re favorable, there’s lots of fish. If they’re unfavorable, the fish crash. Overfishing may have exacerbate the crash and slowed recovery, but it probably didn’t cause it directly. Some researchers are predicting a similar sardine crash this year due to unfavorable climatic conditions similar to those seen before the late 1940s crash, and are encouraging managers to decrease sardine quotes in order to speed post-crash recovery. (Though this is controversial – see this response).
Historically, sardine & anchovy fisheries in other parts of the world, such as the South American anchoveta fishery (the biggest fishery in the world) are less well regulated. Overfishing in these ecosystems leads to no room for error – if there is the slightest change in the climate that causes the fish to reproduce less fast, the fishery crashes. Buy U.S. Pacific sardines.
2) Americans should eat more sardines directly, and fewer sardines indirectly. Only about a quarter of the enormous U.S. sardine haul is eaten directly - the rest are sold as bait or as fishmeal. All of the three most popular U.S. seafoods – shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna – are farmed with fishmeal or caught with bait. This is why Jennifer Jacquet developed her “Eat Like A Pig” campaign. Grist covered this issue in response to Whitty’s article as well:
Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.” Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”
Also, sardines are healthy! They appear on the New York Times list of the 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating. Also, food writer Michael Pollan’s Rule 32 (Don’t overlook the oily little fishes”) elaborates further:
Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of overfishing. Avoid big fish at the top of the marine food chain–tuna, swordfish, shark–because they’re endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury. Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant. Those oily little fish are particularly good choices. According to a Dutch proverb: “A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.”
3) Since sardine and other small forage fish like anchovies and menhadan congregate in single-species schools in the water column (see the awesome photo by Jon Bertsch at the top of this post!), there’s relatively little bycatch. Fishers are able to catch these fish, and only these fish, without accidentally killing a lot of other marine life. This is emphatically not the case with the longline tuna fisheries for which forage fish become bait. Fish farming operations have other significant environmental impacts, such as the infection of wild salmon stocks with farmed salmon parasites and damage to the ocean bottom communities. Eating sardines directly is far better for the ocean environment than filtering them through large predators caught accidentally with more large predators.
Read the full article on DeepSeaNews.
Where do you think your food comes from?
Written by Christina Rexrode | AP Business Reporter
Americans are finding some surprises lurking in U.S. government information about where the food they eat comes from.One food revelation came when low levels of a fungicide that isn’t approved in the U.S. were discovered in some orange juice sold here. It was then revealed that Brazil, where the fungicide-laced juice originated, produces a good portion of the orange pulpy stuff Americans drink.While the former may have sent prices for orange juice for delivery in March down 5.3 percent last week, the latter came as a bombshell to some “Buy American” supporters.Overall, America’s insatiable desire to chomp on overseas food has been growing. About 16.8 percent of the food that Americans eat is imported from other countries, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 11.3 percent two decades ago. Here are some other facts:Not all juices are treated the same. About 99 percent of the grapefruit juice Americans drink is produced on U.S. soil, while about a quarter of the orange juice is imported; more than 40 percent of that is from Brazil.About half of the fresh fruit Americans eat comes from elsewhere. That’s more than double the amount in 1975.Some 86 percent of the shrimp, salmon, tilapia and other fish and shellfish Americans eat comes from other countries. That’s up from about 56 percent in 1990. Read the rest of the story from Associated Press.
Eating fish reduces risk of Alzheimer’s five-fold
Kounteya Sinha, TNNCHICAGO: India's fish eating population has something to cheer about.A new research presented at Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Congress says that consuming baked or broiled fish reduces the risk for five-year decline to mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease by almost five-fold. The results showed that people who consumed baked or broiled fish at least once a week had better preservation of grey matter volume on MRI in brain areas at risk for Alzheimer's disease."This is the first major study to link fish consumption with reduction in risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI)," said lead author Cyrus Raji from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center."The findings showed that consumption of baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis was positively associated with grey matter volumes in several areas of the brain. Greater hippocampal, posterior cingulated and orbital frontal cortex volumes in relation to fish consumption were recorded," he added.The results also demonstrated increased levels of cognition in people who ate baked or broiled fish.In MCI, memory loss is present, but to a lesser extent than in Alzheimer's. People with MCI often go on to develop Alzheimer's.Read the rest at the Times of India.
Six great Bay Area sardine dishes
- Local marinated sardines with salsa verde and cherry tomato at Coco500 on Brannan Street in San Francisco (Credit: Brant Ward / The Chronicle)
Barbecued squid salad with snake beans and grapefruit
Serves 4By Bill Granger
2 green chillies, finely chopped1 tsp sea salt4 coriander root, rinsed well and roughly chopped1 garlic clove3 tbsp fish sauce3 tbsp caster sugar3 tbsp lime juiceLarge handful picked, fresh mint leavesLarge handful fresh coriander leaves300g/10oz snake beans or green beans, cut into 5cm lengths2 pink grapefruit, peeled, cut into segments, pith and membrane removed800g/1¾lb squid tubes, cleaned, cut into approx 6cm x 3cm pieces and scored on the inside3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oilRead the full recipe here.