The things people put up with just to live in NYC. Such apartment “luxuries” include: not being able to sit in the middle of your bed, stretch out both arms and touch both bedroom walls; having enough refrigerator space to hold more than Lean Cuisine and a yogurt; not having to take pots off the stove and put them on the floor; and of course, having a dishwasher. Mister and I actually have a decent-sized kitchen, but for one, we don’t live where the cool kids do (by a long shot) and two, we never make the most of it because, like most apartment-dwellers, we have no dishwasher.
Here’s the thing about not having a dishwasher: you had better be on an iron-clad schedule cleaning those dishes, because you miss a day or give in to laziness and it’s all over. So right now, we’ve got dishes everywhere, I’m ashamed to say–on our coffee table, our bedstands and this puts a real cramp on cooking. Who wants to fire up the stove when it requires cleaning 5 pans of crusty God-knows-what?
So the other day, I was exhausted and pissed off and I wasn’t in a really great mood to cook anything–particularly at the site of our unkempt kitchen. But I knew that wrapped in butcher paper–which has always struck me as a kind of charming and nostalgic in today’s shrinkwrapped world–was a ruby piece of tuna, and that was enough to scour the grill pan (there are heroics to scouring when you manage to do it over piles of dirty dishes). Not only is fish easy and quick, but tuna especially is fun because of the way you can actually see it cook, changing from pink to white like tie-dye. I’ve noticed that leaving the middle raw seems to be a more modern innovation, considering that in many of the classics, you really cooked the crap out of that tuna (see Joy of Cooking‘s tuna casserole; Julia Child’s thon a la provencale). Not only is the raw part the best–it has this delicious warmed oiliness–but it also kind of aesthetically elevates the tuna in the same way the name “ahi” does, and allows me to pretend I made such ahi in my Dwell-featured modern kitchen, where I am surrounded by miles of unadulterated planes of stainless steel. And a dishwasher.
TIP: Responsible Fish Consumerism
RECIPIES: Ahi Tuna Basics & Escabeche of Tuna
Filed under: Clean Food Daily, ahi, fish, seafood, supper
