Calamari Provencal.

There's a steak in there. © Ryan Schierling

There are a lot of things I don't understand about the ways of food wording. When a cow is grazing, wandering, giving milk, it's a cow. When it's butchered, it's beef. Baby cow... calf. Unless you're eating it, then it's veal. A pig is a pig until it's pork, a moniker issued upon its demise. Chicken, well, that's just... chicken. A squid out of the water and on its way to your plate is calamari, unless you're Italian. In that case, in whatever state, it's still calamari.

Most people are familiar with the breaded and deep-fried rings of calamari, oft-dipped in marinara or aioli. This chain-restaurant appetizer staple endured somewhat of a scandal a while back. Given the shape, color and texture of calamari rings, some insidious folks had been passing off "imitation" calamari as the real thing, and you don't want to know what the faux calamari was made of. Or maybe you do. Let's just leave it at the fact that "seafood fraud" is apparently a common occurrence in the food industry, and you may have been enjoying a delicious plate of sliced, deep-fried hog rectum. Prepared in a similar fashion, pork bung has a texture that is frighteningly close to calamari rings. Fried and dipped in a sauce that masks most flavor, not many would be able to tell the difference. Hell, after a few glasses of wine, most people would mistake supple Italian shoe-leather for milanese if you breaded, deep-fried and seasoned it nicely.

Shrimp, grits, gravy and greens.

Fried grit cakes with boudin gravy, dandelion greens and shrimp. © Ryan Schierling

Every Southern cook worth their heritage cast iron pot-and-pan collection has a shrimp and grits recipe that's the best. Of course, it's a recipe that was bestowed to them in hushed tones by their mama, from their mama's mama, and so on and so forth, down a long line of mamas. My mother doesn't have a shrimp and grits recipe and I'm not a southern cook. I rock the cast iron, but there is no lineage that would tie me to a historically time-honored shrimp and grits recipe.

I'm not looking to give you one more traditional (or non-traditional) reinterpretation of what started as a Low Country breakfast dish. It's been done.

While I have a deep and abiding respect for the classics, I wanted a fussy, sassy, gussied-up little Southern belle that was more a complete plate than just shrimp and grits. Call me a Yankee all you want – but when you taste these fried grit cakes and boudin cream gravy, the little pickled green tomatoes, the robust, biting dandelion greens and that rich New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp – you will slap your mama.

Chuck, Charlie®, Charles.

Tuna croquette with plum salsa and jalapeño honey mustard. © Ryan Schierling

In food circles I will never run in, there are Chihuly-blown glass jars of Japanese-auction-sold, million-dollar Pacific bluefin tuna scraps, packed in the oil of olives so extra-virgin they’ve been immaculately conceived and harvested by eunuchs. This tuna detritus – the least of the leftovers of the left-overs from the best of the biggest of the big-bucks maguro – will find their way to children of the nouveau riche for tuna salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off by a butler, or governess or au pair. These children will still turn up their noses. Or so I imagine.

I grew up with tinned tuna that on the good days might have been StarKist® spokes-fish Charlie®. On bad days, it might have been down-on-his-luck Chuck – generic label, definitely not dolphin-safe, extra-mercury-packed, probably not even actual tuna canned tuna. My beloved childhood tuna salad sandwiches always tasted predictably perfect – smashed, flaked fish, heavily-laden with mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish, served on Roman Meal wheat bread (crusts on) by mom.

You can buy whatever tuna you want for this recipe. Maybe you went sporting in the Sea of Japan and got big, fresh and lucky. Perhaps some spendy Italian tonno in oil or just cheap chunky albacore in spring water? Maybe some of that new-fangled tuna in packets. Don't care. We do this recipe fast and cheap, so use whatever you want or feel morally, socially or financially inclined to.

What you will get is a surprisingly bright, nuanced plate. The jalapeño honey mustard is an anti-tartar sauce – sweet, spicy and with a tang that when paired with the plum salsa is a left-right combination punch. The tuna never knew what was coming. We've made this dish so many times with just the mustard sauce, and it's still wonderful. Visually, the now in-season plums suggest a pretty tuna crudo preparation, and paired with Texas sweet onion, jalapeño, cilantro and lemon juice, they'll take you from Chuck to Charles in no time.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon.

Smoked salmon chowder with salmon bacon. © Ryan Schierling

There are so many brilliant smoked meats in Texas it's a shame that no one really pays much attention to the fishes.


Granted, this is bovine country and the nearest salmon, be it Pacific or (heaven forbid) Atlantic, is an ocean away. Wherever you hail from, there’s always something sacred about cooking with smoke. Brisket is the gold standard by which barbecue joints are judged in the Great Republic, and if you've got a line out the door for beef, then pork ribs and chicken are pretty much a gimme.


Geographically, barbecue in this part of the country has never had a reason to be about the fish. Southern barbecue is beef and pig and yard bird. About the only ocean-sourced thing you’re likely to see on the grates of a Texas smoker are gulf oysters.
 

Salmon has a little less real estate to work with than most things that end up in the smoke. If someone could engineer and farm a salmon the size of a cow, you'd have cheap sides of salmon cluttering up everyone's offset, and apple trees would be shaking in their boots, err... at their roots. But salmon are not the size of cows and they're a little harder to catch than cows, pigs and chickens, so their most delicious parts are at a premium. 

King Ranch Salmon.

King Ranch Smoked Salmon Casserole. © Ryan Schierling

I've been threatening to do this casserole recipe for a while now, and I'm kind of surprised there's nothing like it out there on the whole wide world of internets. Searches for King Ranch Salmon turned up lots of hits for "King Salmon," "Used F-150 King Ranch edition in Salmon, Idaho," and "Carole King's ranch on the Salmon River for sale." The internet – insultingly enough – even asked me "Did you mean King Ranch Chicken?"

King Ranch Chicken is the only casserole that matters in Texas and there are rules. There may be as many subtle individual adaptations and family variations as there are Junior League cookbooks, but most will concur this is a dish best kept simple – with shredded chicken, cans of cream of this-or-that soups and Ro*Tel®, corn tortillas and a ton of cheese. 

This, however, is not King Ranch Chicken.

There is no condensed soup, no Cheese Whiz, no crushed-up nacho-flavored tortilla chips or tins of tomato and green chile. There is no chicken. This is the king of Texas casseroles meets the king of all cold-water fish. It is SXNW. It is smoky, creamy, rich, and as satisfying as comfort food gets. Great Republic purists will inevitably call this just another sensationalist bastardization of a classic Texas dish, but they can go put a sockeye in it. 

This is my King Ranch Salmon.

Tuna melt with Mexican mint marigold.

Tuna melt with Mexican mint marigold (or tarragon, if you please). © Ryan Schierling

Tuna, tuna, tuna, tuna... melty cheese, please.

Tuna salad sandwiches. While ubiquitous culturally, they were never a staple in the meat-free household of my childhood. The closest thing to a tuna sandwich in my experience was probably the Nuteena sandwich – but we never had a melty version of that.

Quite frankly, I never found the smell of tuna sandwiches to be appealing. But, then, it could be that my first real contact with the stuff was working in a less-than-fancy food service environment. While I do enjoy trying new things, I have never been one to bother stretching myself for something that doesn't hold the appearance or promise of present or future enjoyment.

By the time Ryan introduced me to the tuna melt, I already had some decent tuna experience under my belt – just nothing of the cheap, tinned variety. I could appreciate the creamy texture of tuna sashimi, and I enjoyed seared tuna as an entree, but chunk light tuna in water was another thing entirely and I was a bit skeptical.

Now, I probably suggest this comforting sandwich more often than he does.

Krab enchiladas.

Krab enchiladas – do not attempt without proper supervision. © Ryan Schierling

I have a few favorite, revered dishes from when I was a kid. This one is kind of a geographical anomaly, as growing up in Kansas was as far away from any coastal waters containing crab could possibly be. Billboards advertised "Beef, it's what's for dinner!" (But if you want crustacean, it's probably going to be spelled with a "K.")

And so it was. Krab (aka Sea Legs or Ocean Sticks) – constructed primarily from Alaska pollock, egg white, crab flavoring and red food coloring – was what we got at the grocer in Emporia, Kansas. Mom made these enchiladas with flour tortillas, jack cheese and a white sauce. Think enchiladas suizas, middle-of-the-midwest-style. 

I don't make them exactly the way mom did. I've tried lump crab meat and cod, and both taste a little fancier than they should for this preparation. This is, in a sense, modern day depression-era cooking – trying to make something elaborate out of an amalgam. The cream cheese tempers the whole dish well, adding a perceived richness that the faux crab doesn't provide on its own. Kind of like pulling up to Red Lobster for senior prom in a limo that you really can't afford. 

So I did switch up the filling up a little and bossed-out the garnish, but had to stay true to the shockingly-red Krab sticks, which are a little like sweet, sweet crabby-flavored string cheese. Don't hate me for loving these. 

I'm going to Wichita / Far from this opera forever more.

Chicken-fried steak and eggs at Jimmy's Egg. © Ryan Schierling

We do not eat poorly. Truly. 

But when we're on the road, any and all respectable regimens of normal dietary discipline go out the window at 75-miles per hour, sometimes even before we leave Austin proper. I'd like to think that I can blame it on genetics – mom always packed boxes of Cheez-Its for vacations, and dad had to make pit-stops for Dr Pepper and peanuts – but the truth is, the road is kind of like the bottle. "It don't make you do a thing, it just lets you."*

Wichita, Kansas is 543 miles from Austin, Texas. There are a number of other, perhaps more desirable destinations within that 543-mile radius. Tampico, Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. New Orleans, Louisiana. Mobile, Alabama. Jackson, Mississippi. Las Cruces, New Mexico. Certainly these are all more favorable locales than the largest city in Kansas? Perhaps. Depends on your history, and what your motivations are. We are headed to Wichita.

New Orleans, new again.

I-10 East, 90+ mph, just out of Houston. Swing-lens panoramic film camera. The flask is in my argyle sock, sucker. (Click for larger.) © Ryan Schierling

I was a teenager the last time I was in New Orleans, insisting on eating nothing but giant bowls of seafood gumbo as our family vacation took us through Louisiana and across the south. I didn't understand the nuances of Creole or Cajun cuisine, or the origins of the dish, and I didn't care. All I wanted was a spicy bowl of something new and exotic – kissed with Louisiana hot sauce – that I couldn't get back home in Kansas. I affectionately remember Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo, the Maison Dupuy's talking bird in the hotel lobby, and window shopping for a Nikon F3HP camera that I couldn't afford on Canal Street. 

Somehow, It's been 25 years since I set foot in the Crescent City. Julie's never been. 

Now that we're living in Austin, it's an eight-hour drive to New Orleans. There are no longer any excuses. Mardi Gras seems a touch over-indulgent for a proper reintroduction, so I make a few impulsive calls and December 30th we point the car east for a celebration of New Year's Eve.

The sandwich days of summer.

Blackened salmon with caper remoulade and red slaw. © Ryan Schierling

Ah, the salad days of summer. Who can forget those times of carefree frivolity and youthful enthusiasm, of innocence and sweet naiveté?

Back in the moderate month of May, we tackled five cucumber salads in five days. It was the perfect prelude to summer preparation. Now, we're in the thick of it in Austin – 100-plus-degree days, the sun beating down like a white-hot smith's hammer on our garden plots, perspiration aplenty. We spend cooler evening-time hours on the deck drinking aguas frescas and the occasional ice-cold wheat beer mixed with Limonata. Dinners are small, fresh – and while usually thrown together – well-planned for a minimum of ingredients. So we try to let those ingredients shine.

We're on to the sandwich days of summer.

And tonight, the salmon is King, dirtied with a little blackened seasoning and cooked on a ripping hot cast-iron skillet on the grill. Individual baguettes are split and toasted, brushed with a caper and parsley remoulade and adorned with a bright slaw of red cabbage and red onion. This easy summer fish sandwich couldn't ask for anything more.

Crawfish pot pie.

Crawdads, no. Crayfish, no. Crawfish, yes. Pot pie. © Ryan Schierling

Ten years ago, a friend in Washington who was a Houston-expat would occasionally travel back to Texas for business. Before he went to the airport to return to Seattle, he'd fill up a cooler with dry ice and Hebert's frozen crawfish pies, duct tape everything securely shut, and check it with his luggage. They were like Cajun gold, and he'd rather the airline accidentally send his suitcases to Montreal than misplace his cooler full of crawfish pies.

I didn't really understand the attraction. I mean, I liked pot pies, but I'd never had a seafood pie, let alone tasted one with crawfish in it. When he finally gave me a few to heat up, I figured it out after the first few bites. It was a foreign flavor, but still rich and comforting the way pot pies should be. The golden, flaky puff pastry crust was buttery and almost melted on the tongue. The crawfish itself I could only describe as salty, and a little fishy (sea-gamey?), like shrimp's bad cousin who did some time upstate. But the creamy, cheesiness of the filling countered nicely and balanced things out. I really liked it, but it was a taste that was very specific to a region, and I didn't grow up in that region.

I only had a few of those Hebert's crawfish pies, and as delicious and different as they were, over the years I forgot about them entirely.

Now, we're a day trip away from Louisiana. During crawfish season, from March to June, you can't miss the squirming bins of live mudbugs at the fishmonger and local grocers – waiting to be boiled, pinched, pulled and sucked. We went to our first crawfish boil this summer, and I found out that there are two types of crawfish eaters – those who suck the head and those who do not. I may be a northern transplant, but consider me a head sucker. When it's not crawfish season, you can still find two or three different brands of tail meat in the frozen sections of most decent grocery stores. 

For some reason, this week I decided I wanted crawfish pie. So, I looked up Hebert's Specialty Meats and tried to go back to the beginning. The 8 oz. pies looked like little raviolis and were $5 each (plus shipping). That seemed a bit excessive for nostalgia's sake. I thought about driving to Houston, but then found out that Hebert's is actually in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so I really wasn't sure what to do. Then I remembered the frozen crawfish tails at the grocer.

Cousin Larry's smoked salmon dip.

Smoked salmon dip w/ homemade crackers. © Ryan Schierling

Julie and I have different stories for how we obtained this recipe. She swears we reverse-engineered it straight from the Larry's Market ingredient list on the side of the plastic to-go container. I swear we begged for it from the fishmonger at Larry's Market in Seattle before the chain was bought out under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, afraid that our favorite in-house-made smoked salmon dip would never be seen on their refrigerated shelves again.

It's been years and years that we've been making this dip, and the scrawled notes on a loose piece of 8 1/2" by 11" paper tucked into our overstuffed recipe binder hold no further clues to its origins, so I'm going to side with my (perhaps misplaced) nostalgia and simply attribute it to cousin Larry from Seattle.

Get yourself a nice piece of fresh Alaskan salmon. Our local grocer was laying out sides of never-frozen Alaskan coho (silver) salmon, and that was all it took for me to get on the phone and tell J to start making crackers. Find yourself some chunks/chips of apple wood.

Remove pin-bones with a pair of tweezers and brine that fish in a 50/50 mixture of kosher salt and brown sugar dissolved in a couple gallons of water, for about eight hours. Rinse, pat dry, and let sit out at room temperature for 3-4 hours, periodically making sure your cats have not expressed an interest in the fish. This drying time ensures a nice tacky pellicle will have formed, allowing the wood smoke to really adhere to the salmon and keep moisture in while the fish is kippering on the grill or smoker.

Soak a few good handfuls of apple wood in water for half an hour. Set aside a few good handfuls of dry apple wood. If using a kettle grill, set up the coals for indirect grilling – coals on one side, and a disposable aluminum pan filled with a few inches of water on the other. Ideally, your grill or smoker will be between 150- and 190-degrees. If it's hotter, that's fine, but this isn't a race... you're just going to have to keep a closer eye on the internal temperature of your fish.

Place the wet and dry apple wood on your coals. Here comes the smoke. When using a kettle grill, I open the bottom vent and close the top. When using an offset barrel smoker, I close the top vent and adjust the firebox vent according to my smoker temperature. Kipper the salmon, thick part of the filet toward the firebox, until it reaches an internal temperature of 130-degrees in the thickest part of the filet. Remove and let cool.

I gotta go water the wood. © Ryan Schierling

Or, save yourself 12 hours, spend four times as much and get a 4 oz. piece of pre-packaged, already-smoked salmon. It's up to you, and this isn't a recipe for smoked salmon... really, it's a recipe for smoked salmon dip. So, uhm, here it is... straight from the archives.


Salmon Dip (like Larry's Market)

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup real mayonnaise 
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
4 oz. hot-smoked (kippered) salmon
4 tablespoons green onion, finely chopped

Mix first three ingredients together in stand mixer, with whisk attachment, until light and fluffy. Crumble in the smoked salmon (check well for bones) and add green onions. Mix until evenly incorporated. If desired, add additional Tabasco at this point, to taste (we use closer to 1 teaspoon). Serve with your cracker of choice. 

This doesn't taste like a lake.

Cedar-planked Alaskan King salmon, ready for some heat. © Ryan Schierling

The first time I ate salmon was at the Four Seasons Hotel. It was a work-related event as part of my first full-time job out of college – a banquet in a swanky little event room complete with requisite white table linens. The choices for dinner were the standard beef, chicken and fish options, and salmon was the featured fish… so that's what I chose. At the time it seemed the safest selection to avoid drawing attention to myself as an extremely inexperienced carnivore.

My first impression of salmon? It tasted like a lake.

It was 'good' but it took me right back to summer camp and the days I spent swimming in the lake as an adolescent.

About a year went by before I tried salmon again. This time it was at the home of a neighbor. I clearly remember that it was a whole fillet, cooked on a gas grill. I think it was essentially steamed. I recall it being unwrapped from a shroud of aluminum foil and then experiencing the luscious aroma of lemon and dill wafting a delicious "hello" in my direction.

It was a revelation – and it didn't taste like a lake at all. So began my love affair with salmon...

Pictured above is robust fillet of wild-caught Alaskan King salmon prepared for the indirect heat grill with salt and pepper, fresh dill and lemon slices. A thin, untreated cedar shake that has been thoroughly soaked in salted water overnight does duty here as an economical plank.

Finished with a squeeze of lemon and served with a simple wild rice pilaf, we're talking about a meal with classic Pacific Northwest credentials.

Anticipate. Celebrate. Grill.

(L) Mojito. (R) Applewood smoked oysters. © Ryan Schierling

While not technically the first day of summer, Memorial Day weekend falls close enough on the calendar that it has truly become a cultural celebration anticipating summer's start. While we come together on this day to pay respect to our nation's lost soldiers, we also take this holiday weekend to entertain the companionship of family, friends and neighbors. The weather is warming and a new season is upon us – what better way gather folks around than by building a fire?

Grilling season has begun.

When it comes to the grill, there are family traditions and regional traditions that influence our choices. Here in the heart of cattle country, there will most certainly be a lot of beef on the menu this summer. On the coasts you are likely to find fish and oysters featured more prominently. But whatever you choose to cook, the act of grilling itself is about much more than what you put over those glowing coals, it is about the community it builds. It is your hearth outdoors and the smoke signals an invitation to join in, contributing in your own unique way.

Even if you don't eat meat (for some, I know, it may feel like a tricky time around the grill) the community is still there and the fire doesn't discriminate. There are so many delicious non-meat preparations we have grilled over the years – skewered squash and mushrooms marinated in a favorite vinaigrette, fresh pineapple, and green beans or asparagus steamed in foil – that we don't believe anyone should ever feel left out.

Beyond the occasional roasting of marshmallows over a campfire, I really didn't have the traditional American grilling experience growing up. It was our small courtyard community in Seattle that graciously taught me to appreciate the joys of the shared grill. The lighting of the coals was an open invitation to throw something on and participate. So, if someone had just brought home a bag of fresh oysters, they might be joined by vegetables and steaks from another neighbor. There were evenings of grilled pizza topped to anyone's liking and foreign foods we had to practice to pronounce.

The diversity was fascinating, the smoke comforting, and the warmth of the coals reassuring and inviting.

This weekend marks the official start to summer grilling. So, over the next few days, Ryan and I have decided to share a few of our grilled favorites with our family and friends here on FGHD. We'd love to have you hang out with us, or take an idea and run with it.

We're ready to celebrate summer.

Of loaves and fishes.

Balik emek. © Ryan Schierling

I was driving. An English gentleman on the radio was talking about the most transcendental sandwich he'd ever eaten, so I was all ears and stomach. 

He described the sun setting on the banks of the Bosphorus, where fishermen would grill freshly-caught mackerel, place it in a lightly-toasted crusty loaf and garnish it with thinly-sliced onions, sea salt and a squeeze of lemon juice. The last rays of daylight, the smell of fresh sea air mixed with smoke and grilled fish, this simple preparation and sublime sandwich… I'd been transported. 

I was salivating. I was exceeding the speed limit. I'd forgotten where I was going, so I turned and went home. I told Julie that we needed to go to Turkey, or Istanbul, or wherever the banks of the Bosphorus were, because I needed to experience this sandwich, this brilliant sandwich that changed this man on the radio's life.