Kitchen Note: Moonfish

This fish, a random shopping cart item at Fubonn, gets its name from having a whitish, almost opalescent sheen to its rather smooth skin. Because of its thin frame and lack of exterior armaments (scales, spines), one would assume this is a fish found in tropical or temperate waters. It actually looks like something one might find in an exotic aquarium. But, nonetheless, I found it in the freezer aisle at the Asian grocery store.

The fish would probably taste great skewered and roasted over an open fire. It has lots of small bones and there isn't a whole lot of meat to it. Eating it reminded me of perch, an equally bony fish that is the equivalent of a sunflower seed (lots of work, little reward). I've only cooked up the first of the two that came in the pack and it tastes ordinary, like the "white fish" you'd find in a breaded, fried fish fillet.

I braised (poached?) it in some olive oil and Chinese rice wine with a sprinkling of Himalayan pink salt. That was probably not the right approach for the fish. It might have been better to bake or steam it because the skin stuck to the bottom of the skillet. Ahh, what to do with its companion...

[Updated: 12/2/2010] When this fish cooks, it smells a lot like the "fish powder" condiment (not furikake) that is used on Chinese rice porridge (xi fan, also known as congee). For the second fish, I cooked it over rice in the oven. In retrospect, I think that moonfish would make a great fish stock type of fish because it's very bony and with the right mix of spices and salt, you'd get a very flavorful broth out of it.

I made the brown basmati rice (a long grain) the way Alton Brown does, heated in a foil-covered baking dish at 375 degrees F for about an hour. Because I am cooking for one, I don't really like reheating leftover rice, so I try to minimize it to a meal or two.

In my pantry, I have Mexican saffron which is several iterations cheaper than real Spanish saffron (from Spain). I picked up a few ounces of it several years ago, probably from hole-in-the-wall spice shops in California.

1 c. brown basmati rice
1 1/2 c. water
pinch of saffron
1 tbsp unsalted butter
1/4 tsp sea salt

In a small saucepan, bring water, saffron, butter and salt to a boil. Remove from heat and pour over rice in a baking dish.

Wash the moonfish and gently place on top of the rice. Cover baking dish with foil and bake for an hour. The essence from the fish adds a nice layer of depth to the rice that makes it more flavorful.

If you have sweet potatoes on hand, these bake in the same amount of time at the same heat setting as the rice.

I made a special sauce for the fish, which is a variant on the soba noodle sauce:

2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp mirin
2 tsp brown sugar
1 clove of garlic, minced

Bring ingredients to a simmer for about two minutes (long enough to infuse the sauce with garlic flavor) and pour over fish.

Mystery Ingredient: Moonfish

There are a few peculiar things I like to do when I visit an asian grocery store. Number one is always have a shopping list. This tells you what the pantry is out of and keeps you on track. Because I had been paying more attention to what I bought, I added two new rules to shopping this year. The first is, if the shopping list has been adhered to, a luxury good is allowed. Today's luxury good were persimmons, the crunchy-when-ripe kind. The second is, if feeling adventurous, then choose a mystery ingredient to make a new dish out of. The mystery is the discovery and creativity of how to cook an unknown. This is a great skill in case you were traveling with Jules Verne in 20,000 leagues under the sea or to the center of the earth and had to cook up a dinosaur. It could happen...

I've cooked a few types of fish and they are all the "normal" ones you can get at a regular supermarket: salmon, trout, tilapia, cod, mahi mahi, Chilean sea bass, etc. I saw shad in the freezer aisle at Fubonn today, but if the fishing gods would shine upon my pole one day, I could fish a shad out of the Columbia River. I've never had shad or shad roe, but seeing how it is plentiful in the Pacific NW, I passed this by. Also, for a mystery ingredient, because it is a trial 'n' error process, it's an ingredient that is also inexpensive to procure.

I settled upon something called Moonfish. It is quite small and much smaller than a blue gill. This is definitely not of the Hawaiian variety, and is probably more like some freakish thing a fisherman would haul up in the net with other fish and didn't want to throw it away. And for a mere $2 for 1 lb, there are two of these in the package: