Friday, February 6, 2009

Ode to Le Poisson


Inspired by a few weeks of beach bumming in Brazil where our diet consisted mainly of caipirinhas, occasionally supplemented with fried fish and other deliciously prepared sea creatures, I've decided to (gulp, drumroll please.....it even pains me to type this!) give up red meat for a month.  All legged-meats, actually.  Any animal with legs is off the menu for a while.  I'm dubbing this experiment "Thirty-Odd Days of Fish," and by fish I mean fish and crustaceans.

This experiment is also driven by the ire I feel every time I visit Seafood City where I feel like a lost babe in the woods as I wander those endless aisles of fish on ice.  Belt, parrot, grouper, snapper, trout, milk, monk, yellow, etc.  I haven't the slightest clue what they are, how to cook them, how to eat them, or what wine to drink with them!  As a devoted foodie and amateur cook, this is incredibly annoying.  It's like a million little fishies throwing down the gauntlet with their tails.  Damned fish!

There's also the health question.  A diet high in fish is supposedly good in warding off Alzheimers.  Eating such a diet, according to one study of African tribes, also reduces the levels of a certain hormone that effects appetite.  Not that I'm losing my memory or constantly hungry (ok, I'll cop to the second one!), but now that I'm getting older (I'm admitting that too!) and seeing friends around me getting sick with cancer or diabetes, I feel like any small choices that I can make on a daily basis that might improve either my or my husband's health odds, I'm willing to try it out.

So, by initiating "Thirty-Odd Days of Fish," my goals are three-fold.  One:  learn more about tasty sea creatures and all the ways to cook them.  Two: figure out whether a high fish diet is tenable (and actually really that healthy).  Three: confirm whether retirement to a deserted island is really still in the stars for me (and my somewhat discerning palette).

1 comment:

MrsLoomis said...

yummy---WE love fish around here, so send us recipes (as we are rather bored with grilling everything)