The Verdict is in.....To Eat (June 3rd, 2015)

On April 26th, I wrote an entry called “To Eat, or Not to Eat”, which was about a fish steak we bought at the Asian market, called Escolar. All of the recipes I referred to, said that it is a very good fish, but warned that eating too much off this fish could cause intestinal distress. So I froze our steak, and have been putting off cooking it, for fear of hurting my family.

Well, today I got brave and pulled it back out of the freezer. I decided that if I served it as an appetizer, everyone would get just a small taste, and it shouldn’t cause us any harm. I had Steve throw it on the grill with a little teriyaki sauce, and then served it with some steamed edamame. 

We each ate our little appetizer sized serving, and to our surprise, we all loved it! It has a very smooth, buttery flavor, and is probably the best fish we have ever eaten!

I now understand the warning on this fish, I could have eaten a huge piece and really enjoyed every bite of it. And the best surprise of all…we all felt fine the next day, thanks to the warning of others.

To Eat, or Not to Eat (April 26, 2015)

It is now 12 weeks until retirement, and a very cold, rainy day. It would be so easy to just sit at home with a movie and a blanket, but it is also the kind of day that makes us really wish that retirement was here, and we could head to warmer weather and at least a small adventure. 

We decided to head out into the rain with two goals in mind, find a store that sells gluten free flour in bulk, and find something fun and yummy for dinner so we could just cook at home and enjoy an evening in. Most of the grocery stores near our house sell only the pre-packaged gluten free flour, at what I think is a painful price. And since I have decided to make my own gluten free sourdough, I am going to need to find something a little cheaper. Our first try was a very large Whole Foods store in an area called Belmar, in Lakewood, CO. They have a very nice parking garage that connects directly to the store, so we didn’t even have to get wet to get into the store. And to our surprise, they had brown rice flour in bulk, for the amazing price of $1.99/lb! 

If you are one of the unfortunate people who have celiac, this would not work for you since there are glutinous flours in the same area, but for our youngest daughter who has just developed an intolerance to gluten, we are okay to use this bulk flour. So we loaded up on five pounds of the bulk flour, and a cute sun hat (which I will hopefully need somewhere soon), and headed back out into the rain. Goal number one accomplished easily. 

The question now was what sounds good for dinner. We decided to go for some seafood, and what better place to find fresh seafood in Colorado but the local Asian market. Hopefully some day soon we will be able to spend some time a bit closer to the ocean, where fresh seafood will be more plentiful, but for now, the Asian market will have to do. We headed to Westminster, CO where there is a relatively new H-Mart store, which is a pretty big Asian market. I have to confess that I am kind of a closet Asian Market junkie. I could spend hours looking at their produce, meats and seafood, and wondering what one might do with that. And usually, I have to buy several of those items, and then Youtube them to see what they are. Of course, today was no exception. 

We ended up with sea scallops for dinner, and along with that we picked up some mysterious fruits, root vegetables, some fun new mushrooms, and a type of fish called escolar which we had never heard of before. It is a very white steak that we assumed would be good grilled. Goal number two also easily accomplished! 

Now home, to Youtube escolar. It is supposedly a very tasty fish that is sometimes called white tuna, although it is really not related to tuna at all, but with all of the recipes for this fish comes a big warning: Do not consume more than 6 ounces of this fish at a time. It can cause intestinal distress in some people. Yikes, that doesn’t sound pleasant. So To eat, or not to eat, that is the question. I guess we’ll stick with scallops for tonight and save that big decision for another day.  

We did end of eating our escolar, and I will post the results in a later blog.