Self-Taught Homework #7: Fish are friends?
The quick moment and disappearance of fish has really got you thinking.
Fish week: always poorly timed.
One week you’re making yourself cross-eyed writing out a “statement of purpose,” a paper that induces a mindset of certainty in your qualities and ambitions until you hit send and pass it along for someone else to decide.
Another week you started your week on Wednesday, the third day of the new year. In a firework conclusion of a year, you hold a baby then leave for the city where you hold a small dog named Cricket and dance to Abba in someone’s living room where the theme was “birds.” Those who follow the theme with plastic-bulbed eyeballs on bird-head masks are the most disturbing. You stay in town and watch the dark evening phase of the Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade. The more you ask about how people become a mummer, the more it seems to become a question of “who do you know.”
By the time you’re back in your apartment, the itchy anticipation of resolutions has dulled, and the crumbs and bad habits from the last year have found a way under the cracked door of your resolve. Fair enough.
Wednesday: Salmon
Why not start with the popular girl, Miss Salmon? Supermarket or stream-side, she is orange youth, a bright flicker up-river. And delicious. Easy. A pick-me type of girl. Cooks quickly and however you please: in parchment envelopes, in foil, seared in a frying pan, cold in a sushi roll.
Unfortunately, with this Wednesday being the first day of your year and the third day of everyone else’s, you’re in a funk. This apartment, specifically the couch where you’ve searched for jobs and picked up a copywriting course and pitched magazines to little avail, are as daunting of a back-to-reality moment as a forgotten diaper in a trashcan. It’s hard to leave this apartment without spending money, and when you’re feeling cautious with money, it makes it difficult to justify separating out your settings. When you’ve been gone for the last three weeks, your Christmas tree and other houseplants yellowed and dry, you’ve bounced into new living rooms and zip codes. You’ve laughed with family. You’ve watched movies without guilt.
But now you’re back, and your tree’s milliliter of water remaining from the break says it’s time to get back to work.
You walk to your fishmonger, because you’re someone who now has “a fishmonger you like,” which makes you feel like your life is a bit aligned and on some track, or maybe you’re becoming your neighborhood where young parents bottle-feed babies balsamic vinaigrette. The fishmonger greets you. On the ‘monger side of the counter, there’s a glass with chalky marker naming the person behind the counter as the best dad ever. He slices the pound of salmon in half because you mentioned you wanted enough for two people and tosses a free lemon in your plastic bag.
When you head home to your harissa paste, an optimistic condiment that suggests you may be cooking Mediterranean food soon or building out the specific-instance condiment graveyard in your fridge, you look at the fish. She’s beautiful, fades from light to grey, attired for a sequined new year.
But you’re late for a party, a real birthday party. The salmon, covered in harissa and lemons next to butternut squash whose natural orange pales compared to the fish, goes into the oven. You give Luke instructions on how to cook it while you’re gone, then you head out.
By the time you come back after 11 p.m., your fish waits on a foiled plate. It tastes good. Tastes like fish more than it does harissa. You scarf down the fillet and finish it in five bites before you tuck the roasted squash into a Tupperware container.
Thursday: Tuna
You look up from the drop-down Murphy desk installed in your wall. Like a Murphy bed but less mysterious. This was last year’s Christmas present. You have a habit of asking for products to fit your ambitions, like tickets to a Broadway show that seemed buzzy and talked about at work or a screenwriting software for ideas you had but had trouble executing. This year you walked away with a Dutch oven, cookbooks, new knives, and a vegetable chopper for dicing. (An implication from people who care about you: please, please prevent future finger slices.)
On Thursday, you look up and realize you never left the apartment. Oy.
Luke handles your intended errands: to grab tuna from your ‘monger and red wine. You plan to cook “tuna au poivre” from Mark Bittman’s Mini Minimalist cookbook. “Tuna for the poor?” Luke asked when you first read him the title. Sadly, no such thing exists outside of cans. You’ve checked. If your Duolingo vocabulary was more elastic with pushing old words back to the surface, you would have been able to translate the title yourself: pepper tuna.
The tuna steaks look as red as a raw organ, deeper than the red bowl where they sit on a miniature throne of ice. Bigger than your face, big as a bully, big enough to sit on your black eye to decrease the swelling from the beating it gave you.
What you pay for in fish at the counter, you find minutes returned to your pocket. After dredging the steaks in pepper, coating them until they are beef-passing, they take a two-minute sear on each side. That’s four minutes. Then you cook them at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for six minutes. That’s a ten-minute meal. You almost don’t have enough time to cook the butter and red wine in the skillet as a purple sauce before it’s finished. You are racing against yourself, against tuna’s timeline.
Since you turned 28, you’re a hypochondriac, the worst thing for a doctor’s daughter to be. Your stomach sharpens in a twist once or twice. The light catches the hair at your temples and you believe there are blatant grays grown in overnight. Twenty-eight feels like the year of 401Ks and deciding whether to freeze your eggs. The year of finally-good health insurance and onto-the-second-book energy. At 23, you would have assumed your 28-year-old self would have figured it all out. Same with 25. The future you will get it, you told yourself. You will grow into habits, into answers, but you grind these questions over and over and crack them into sand, like the peppercorns ground into a dusting.
Regardless, the tuna steak turns into a beef steak. You discuss how tuna is the top of the food chain, meaning it absorbs the most mercury. What does that mean for you, the one who eats but didn’t catch the tuna?
You’re not sure if it’s supposed to be trademark red in the middle. It has a beige-brown color to it, but it doesn’t dry out. Can you blame the tuna for changing under 500 degrees? For putting aside the thing that made it beautiful before and trusting, hoping, that the chef trusted with their beauty knows how to make it right?
You think you did it justice.
But you do also think it could use some salt.
Then in fifteen minutes, the fish is gone again.
Saturday: Mackerel
You fell asleep before midnight on a Friday and wake up at almost 11 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Are you sick? Or going through a late-twenties revival of adolescence? Who knows. There’s no swab test for “the insatiable urge to lash out” and “inexplicable mood swings,” but if you’re feeling the symptoms, you probably have it.
When you wake up, the way you remind yourself you’re an adult is you go through your December budget then read up on hero’s journey story structure.
Then there goes the afternoon.
Your fridge is a graveyard of odd Stella Artois and Guinness cans from December’s joviality. You are hungry, but your decadent fish meals have not yielded many leftovers. This is most likely why people supplement these dishes with sides and vegetables. There has to be something to microwave and nosh on for lunch!
Instead you grab a chicken breast left behind. You’re out of mayo, so you use cream cheese and pickle brine to cobble up a chicken salad that you then microwave under a slice of white American. It’s embarrassing to write the culinary ingenuity that appears like a hallucination when faced with limited protein options, only to have the light turn on and realize, “Oh? That was odd?” (It was also delicious for my adventurers.)
The only thing you really have on the agenda is you need to cook more fish.
You run back to Pisces, your local fishmonger shop, your excuse to get out of the house and stretch your legs and change your pajama pants. (Thank you, Pisces.) Your brain is swinging. These steaks and fillets have been delicious but too easy. If fish can zap be cooked in five minutes, then where’s the work? Where’s the learning? You already knew how to pre-heat an oven, but what about dealing with a fish head?
So you walk in, poke a rainbow trout and mackerel, and suppress the creepy chill of looking into the fish’s eyes. (Note: clear, not cloudy.)
“Are they gutted?” you ask, because you’re adventurous, but you have limits. The mackerel has an open belly, and the cashier assures you it’s okay. One of these fish was only $5.
What a deal, you think.
You don’t realize what these fish are about to cost you in terms of time.
As you walk home in the snow, the fish tails in the grocery bag sometimes slapping your leg, you imagine the snow flakes seeping through the plastic and touching the fish’s gills and bringing them back to life where they flap and flap.
When you were a kid, you refused to hold a towel on a fish’s belly when your cousins needed to remove the Walmart fish hook from their jaw. Now, you have two little friends whacking against your leg, both of which have eyes and squishy bellies.
You pick up miscellaneous foods from the grocery store, like carrots and parsley, with the fish bag dangling from your right arm. Your life is now a heist movie, a dead body is in your trunk, and someone else must realize that there’s something this close. These fish, as much as you would defend them to anyone who questioned your transported friends, kind of smell. It doesn’t bring you a lot of excitement to realize that, especially because most good fish should smell like the ocean, not…fish.
Your teeth buzz with anxiety. Can you move any faster? Are you doing enough? Is this seriously going to take you all day? What have you done today? A wall of easy fish—canned, pouched, jalapeño-flavored—taunt you.
They’ve been here the whole time?, you think.
Apparently so.
You pay and evacuate.
Back at home, you are freaking yourself out with these fish. If the salmon and tuna felt like welcoming in a well-liked houseguest—pleasant, well-traveled, odorless—this mackerel and rainbow trout waft in the bad juju and nerves (and minor stench) of ghosts.
Your game plan is to bake-and-stuff a fish and make a chowder of the other. The snow makes you want something to stick, to make it one extra day in the fridge. Leftovers, please, you want leftovers.
But when you really look at these fish sitting on your (too nice for this) cutting board, you realize that only one of them is gutted.
You’re going to have to gut that tiny rainbow trout yourself. (Of course Joy of Cooking has a section on this…but you only read that in case you imagined yourself picking up camping someday.)
You stall by chopping a potato. You tried the vegetable chopper on your onion, but you aren’t pressing hard enough. The dices are dream-like, tiny and clean as baby teeth, but there’s a resistance in the final layer of the onion that gums up the holes before putting another onion quarter on it. Did you leave the onion skin on? (No, because you did that earlier, so by now it’s definitely removed.)
No matter. With your (k)new knives, you slice through produce like it’s water. Can you slice through water? If you run a knife under water, it’s that level of effort to cut with a freshly unboxed cutting utensil.
But then you’re done with chopping, there are two fish corpses in your fridge chanting your name.
The mackerel, your pre-gutted champion, goes into the oven with lemons and carrots and too much olive oil. Your return on time is strong. Stuff and bake, see it when it’s done. Like a savings bond, wait and see what happens, and the result can’t be that dangerous or extreme, right?
You think it came out okay, but you’re not sure because you’re still thinking about the rainbow trout.
This, you admit to yourself, was a massacre.
You can’t escape the feeling that you killed something for a second time. You poke it, you squeal, you moan, you gag. (Once when you were ten and had a “molescum” on your thigh from chaffing biker shorts, you wailed like a Peanuts character while your dad gave you a local anesthetic and then syringed the grossness; this Linus crying is what you’re doing in your kitchen confronted with the realness of gutting.) You look at Joy of Cooking and it interchangeably used “anus” and “vent” for the place to slice on the fish, so you find a hole and give it a parallel tug.
Once again, thank goodness you have the new sharpness tools, but even with this proper equipment, you feel like you zig and zag into the wrong bones. The color of the liquid seeping at the cut is plummy brown, like a cleanse. You rinse and stick some scissors into things that look inedible and groan again.
You chop off the head and the tail like a vengeful cartoon witch, the red of your fingernails now chipping. You “butterfly,” meaning the fish’s halves show on two almost equal sides. There’s still backbone. This fish has too much fight. You pick through the rib bones, then the pin bones, with your bare fingers. You don’t want your tweezers and this fish to ever meet. The viable meat, or at least to your eye what seems less brown and more pink-white, falls apart under the search. You try to skin it for the chowder, and this mashes the remaining flesh. Now you’re left with pulps.
And yes, you are proud that you tried this or at least had this moment of “ew” so you can recognize how many dead fish you have eaten without looking them in the eye, but it didn’t have to go down like this.
You wasted a fish.
You leave your apartment like an herbal crime scene, pet a cat, watch a movie. Potential in the wrong person’s hands can be squandered and tossed out in a sealed Ziploc bag. Fish, the mirror of time and speed, only exist on land as creatures already dead. They wither and rot quickly. You respect that, the urgent demand to treat them correctly, the petty revenge if eaten past their expiration. But they deserve to be treated well, eaten to every wet crumb, treated like a small miracle. It only asks for your attention for a short time, then it’s eaten, gone, swimming in new waters.
As your Sunday night becomes too late, you still think about this chowder. Can you add baked mackerel to a fish chowder? Is there still hope for the last dish, for the opportunity to fill your fridge and prepare tomorrow’s lunch today?
Tonight, you’re back on your couch, and you’re brainstorming again.