Cooking
Eric Kim’s scallion-oil fish turns olive oil, alliums and white fish fillets into a simple, luscious dinner.
Who isn’t stirred by the ease and brevity of a three-ingredient recipe? Minimalist dishes are kitchen haikus — short, focused compositions that get right to the essence of their ingredients.
In Eric Kim’s scallion-oil fish, he makes poetry with only fish fillets, alliums and olive oil. He fries scallions until the oil turns green and the scallions become golden and crisp, a preparation called pa gireum in Korean. Then, he turns off the burner and adds the fillets to poach gently in the oil’s residual heat, so they turn from translucent to opaque and absorb that pungent flavor. It’s a blessing for apartment dwellers because, as Eric writes in The Times, this gentle cooking method won’t infuse your bedroom pillows — a win for fish fans who are not ready to sleep with the fishes.
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Scallion-Oil Fish
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Next, bringing us up to five ingredients (not counting salt and pepper, because that’s punctuation), Joshua McFadden’s kale sauce pasta, as adapted by Tejal Rao, is lean and elegant. First, you blanch some kale in salted water and transfer the softened greens to a blender along with sautéed garlic and good olive oil (using high-quality ingredients is essential in minimalist recipes). Then, while your greens are whirling into pesto, you cook your pasta in the same water you used for the kale. You’ll end up with a vivid, emerald-hued sauce that’s full of umami with a suave, silky texture.
That kind of efficiency and thrift makes this cook’s heart sing. If you want to take it a step further, you can heed the advice that Andree Shore left in the notes and save the kale-pasta cooking water to make soup. Ali Slagle’s chicken noodle soup is a perfect candidate; just replace some of the chicken stock she calls for with the starchy kale-pasta water, which will add body and green vegetable nutrients to the pot. Whatever you do, keep Ali’s excellent recipe at the ready. With the first crop of autumnal colds looming, we need all the soup we can get.
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