Confession: I’ve been planning this week of grilled fish for a year. I’ve grilled a lot of fish, just to get four days’ worth of meals that I thought were blog worthy.
Which means there were quite a few that were distinctly not blog-worthy. Mostly those bloopers were too dry–that has been the hardest part, for me, of learning to grill fish. I have to force myself to take it off the heat a minute or two before I think it’s done. A few were so dry they just disintegrated, chunks falling through the grates; more than once, I was reduced to scooping the shreds off the grill and arranging them on our plates.
There’s not much you can do to salvage dry fish. It’s just dry.
There was some singed skin. Actually, more like charred-to-a-crisp skin. I guess the skin must be especially high-fat, like chicken skin–it catches on fire really easily. Once you’ve had to extinguish dinner, you can pretty much assume it’s not going to be perfect. If you’re lucky, it’ll be edible. Maybe.
But the biggest disaster–the really spectacular, stunk-up-the-house, caused-children-to-make-horrible-jokes, pretty much inedible disaster, was the skate wing. I’ve only had skate wing once, but it was delicious. It was in a beautiful restaurant in Paris; my mother-in-law ordered it, and I tasted hers and loved it. It was mild and tender, slightly sweet flesh, drenched in butter–what’s not to love, right?
Apparently the French have a magic way with skate, which I have distinctly NOT been able to replicate. The first time I bought a piece of skate, I looked at several sort of classic recipes, and decided I just needed to try something a little different. Malaysian. Have I ever eaten Malaysian food? Do I know anything about the spice combinations? No. But I found a recipe on the internet, and mixed up a rub, with a whole bunch of strong flavors (cloves, cumin, Worcestershire sauce, among others), coated the fish, and let it sit for an hour. I mean, this fish was COATED. It looked like a slab of . . . mud. Or . . . worse.
Then I mixed up the basting sauce. The only ingredient I can remember is tamarind paste, which is ordinarily delicious, but you do have to rehydrate it, then strain it. Neither of which I could be bothered to do, because by that time I was in a hurry. So the basting sauce was this lumpy, seedy much. I had to sort of smear it on with a spoon.
What a mess. I don’t know what Malaysian food is supposed to taste like, but suffice it to say I won’t be trying this particular recipe again. Plus, I think I undercooked the skate, so the texture was kind of freaking me out, and of course all those spices completely overwhelmed the delicacy of the fish. It was a disaster.
All of this is just to say that the only way to learn is to be willing to take some risks, and if, every now and again, dinner is a disaster, then you will at least know you tried.