Tuna and Fennel for Thanksgiving!

As pictured in EMP

Colin and I spent Thanksgiving in Michigan with his family, and we lugged all of our equipment with us to make the Tuna and Fennel hor d'oeurve for Thanksgiving. We packed our sous vide immersion circulator, vacuum, and 10 giant bulbs of fennel, and we planned to get fresh sashimi in Michigan after our Amazon.com sources told us that they couldn't ship until after the holiday weekend.

We ended up waiting until Black Friday to start our inaugural recipe, since the place where we wanted to get our tuna from, Nobel Fish Market, wasn't open on Thanksgiving. I started making the Lemon Oil while Colin called Nobel to make sure that they had received their 12pm fish shipment from their suppliers. We ended up with the freshest sashimi, and Colin decided to get some hamachi (yellowtail) as well to spice up the recipe. Overall, this took us about 4 hours of active cooking from start to finish.


Tuna and Fennel

Zest lemons.

   Heat canola oil with lemon zest

 Simmer lemon oil for a few hours, then chill and strain.

 Meanwhile, prepare fennel bulbs.

 I found that halving the bulbs made it easier to remove the petals while keeping them intact.

 Using a biscuit cutter, Colin cut over a hundred fennel "coins", hoping that we would be able to to find 64 good ones in the end.

 Pernod and white wine reduction for fennel.

 Preparing fennel and reduction for sous vide machine.

 Voila the immersion circulator!

 Fresh sashimi....yummm :)

 Tuna and yellowtail coins

 Assembling fennel, fish, and garnishes.

Tasting notes: this recipe turned out beautifully, even though we couldn't find the fennel pollen for garnish. We thought that the fennel coins varied a little too much in terms of thickness, which may have resulted in unevenly cooked fennel coins. Some of the thicker, crunchier fennel coins overwhelmed the delicate sashimi, and we think that using the thinnest fennel coins, or cooking them for a little bit longer in the immersion circulator, would have resulted in more consistent and delicious sandwiches. Overall, we're very happy at our first attempt at this cookbook!

To new beginnings

Colin and I were inspired by Julia & Julia's story, where the girl cooked through Julia Child's cookbook at the pace of one recipe a day. We wanted to do something similar, but not at such a hectic pace, with Eleven Madison Park's cookbook. Today, Colin and I are getting serious about our culinary undertaking by tracking down all the esoteric ingredients and equipment, and studying the cookbook for the upcoming batch of recipes.

The book is organized by seasons, and as it is now November, we flipped to the Autumn section and chose to focus on 4 seafood dishes (see Recipes on Deck for the items we are planning to attack). Our plan is to aim for one new recipe every week, assuming that Colin, hunter extraordinaire, can procure all the items needed in each recipe.

We expected that some things needed in the menus would be a little hard to find, a little expensive, and that we'll eventually end up with a lot of random kitchen equipment. Boy, did we get a reality check when Colin pointed out that we need to buy a "sous vide" immersion circular cooker - cheapest one on Amazon.com topped out at a mere $300! It looks like we can't escape it - many of the recipes in this book require its use, so hopefully we will fall in love with this cooking technique and use it even after we finish cooking with this book.

I can't wait to channel my inner artiste and start painting with sauces!