{"id":2390,"date":"2014-10-07T06:43:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T06:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=2390"},"modified":"2014-10-07T06:43:03","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T06:43:03","slug":"dolphin-fish-with-crispy-potatoes-tomatoes-olives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/food.hoggardwagner.org\/?p=2390","title":{"rendered":"dolphinfish with crispy potatoes, tomatoes, olives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dolphinfish_potatoes_tomatoes_olives\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Okay, this\u00a0may not be\u00a0easy to explain. \u00a0I’ve never actually cooked dolphin before, and in fact I didn’t cook ‘dolphin’ tonight. \u00a0What I prepared was \u00a0dolphinfish, which is not a mammal by any stretch of the imagination: Think of all those curvaceous creatures which were\u00a0used to decorate classical furniture,\u00a0architectural features, and garden ornaments (I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe they were inspired, not by the mammal, but by the fish\u00a0seen as the beautiful, tanned, blue-haired youth’s catch seen in this Minoan fresco from 3600 years ago.<\/p>\n

\"Minoan_fisherman-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I visited\u00a0PE & DD Seafood in the Greenmarket today I saw a relatively uncommon\u00a0name marked on the board at the back of the stall, and wanting to take something home I hadn’t prepared before, more or less on an impulse I asked for some of\u00a0what I saw\u00a0labelled as “mahi-mahi’. \u00a0I think I had always ignored the fish in the past because of the, well, …, *exotic* name always attached to it, and Hawaii sort of\u00a0doesn’t fit anywhere into my personal aesthetic. \u00a0My thoughts went something like this:\u00a0 Anything which went around calling itself \u00a0‘mahi-mahi’ was certainly not something to be taken seriously, at least not as a respectable local fish or something which might be appropriate for\u00a0a more-or-less Italian table.<\/p>\n

Wade and Jan, the\u00a0fisherman\/owner Phil Karlin’s son and his sister-in-law, set\u00a0me straight, explaining that\u00a0mahi-mahi\u00a0was in fact an\u00a0Atlantic fish caught off eastern Long Island, and that it was also known as dorado, or dolphinfish (a name\u00a0easily confused\u00a0with young Sandy’s charming and intelligent friend, ‘Flipper’ – which probably explains the alias). Now the fillets\u00a0began to look like something I could work with, so I asked for a piece weighing\u00a0just under a pound. \u00a0I figured I’d easily be able to come up with suggestions for its preparations once I got home, but in fact,\u00a0even after searching through my food library, I\u00a0still\u00a0had no idea how I would cook it. \u00a0 Eventually, largely with Barry’s input, I decided dolphin\u00a0would lend itself to the kind of treatment I usually reserve for mackerel or bluefish. \u00a0My recipe\u00a0was an adaptation of one\u00a0from Marcella Hazan; I obtained\u00a0it elsewhere, but this<\/a> is a version which appears\u00a0on line now.<\/p>\n