End of the Year Eating

It's been a great year of eating and cooking here at Kitchen Pulse, and I'm happy to share my end of the year meals with my faithful readers. Though I've been lagging in my posting in November and December, one of my many New Year's resolutions is to post regularly on my blog and return to my original intention of blogging cook books and maybe a few original recipes.




I spent my Christmas holiday in Georgetown, Texas cooking for my family with my mother. She was the architect of the great paella de mariscos I posted in September. Though my mother is the chef and primary grocery shopper of the household, sometimes my father brings home food that is given as a gift by his patients. The week I was home for Christmas, my mother prepared venison and Texas red fish, both items were gifts from my father's patients.

The venison was a cut of meat called back strap which is two long strips of meat taken from along the spine of the deer. The meat we cooked was already cut into small pieces, so it looked like each piece was cut from an individual vertebrae.

The venison was prepared as fajita meat, marinated in wine and vinegar to tenderize the meat and then served with sauteed onions and colored bell peppers, guacamole, tortillas, and homemade charro beans.

The next night we ate delicious Texas red fish caught in the Gulf of Mexico by a fisher woman. Texas Red Fish, as one sustainable fishing site put it, is too delicious for its own good, so Red fish is a commercially protected species and most Red Fish you eat in restaurants is farmed. I recently ate farmed red fish when I visited Galveston, Texas for an interview, and compared to the fish I ate there, the fresh fish my family ate was indescribably better. The fresh caught fish had the subtle taste of the ocean without a fishy taste. This is the type of fish that you eat and each bite of light flaky goodness leaves you wanting more. My mother encrusted the fish in pecans and panko and pan fried the fillets until they were slightly browned. The fish was cooked to perfection and all it needed was a bit of lemon as seasoning.