A Herring Evening

I managed to get out of cooking for my folks on Easter. I believe it was about 9 years ago that my mom had transferred cooking responsibilities to me for family occasions: those being mostly Christmas and Thanksgiving. Although I got out of Easter cooking, my mom made it understood that she was having Wienerschnitzel for Mother's Day next month; that is, a proper breaded veal cutlet mit Pommes.

After a lunch of pulled pork sandwiches and salad at my folks, I found myself contemplating what I should have for dinner. I immediately knew I'd be having the pickled herring that I joined in making at a couple-friends' house from Saturday. It worked out to be a nice assembly line starting with Eva gutting the herring from the Russian market in West Sac. It moved onto me, as I pulled the large stray bones out of the filets and rinsing them. Mark finished the deboned filets by slicing them into smaller ca. one inch chunks. For each herring the following was called for by the recipe:

1/2 onion

1/3 c red wine vinegar

1/4 olive oil

2 tsp sugar

2 tbs fresh dill (or 2 tsp dried dill)

The ingredients are combined, jarred, and look like this:

In addition to the herring, I paired it with something that I'd been wanting to make for about a week now--korokke or Japanese croquettes. I basically followed the steps in this video from Cooking With Dog with the exception of changing the ground beef component to the ground turkey already in my freezer. It's basically a croquette with ground meat and sauted onions spiced with raw sugar, pepper, and nutmeg and then battered and fried.

While preparing the korokke, I kept trying to remember what the sauce is that is normally served on them and recalled that it was something like HP, which after some short Internet browsing is basically what tonkatsu sauce is: what with the catsup, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, black pepper, and mustard powder.

I can fry food okay, but I often opt for pan frying as opposed to deep frying simply out of cooking oil costs and lack of a Fry Daddy and as a result, I tend to avoid frying food, but this turned out quite nicely with the batter frying up crispily with a fluffy meat and potato mash.

The entire meal turned out to be nice and light fare after a porky lunch. After seeing the simplicity of combining fresh fish with simple ingredients, I'm encouraged to experiment more with the pickled fish recipes in my Scandinavian Time Life book.

Happy Easter Monday, everybody!