fish and seafood

This recipe is inspired by my current region, the Low Country, and the diaspora. I’ve seen versions of this rice dish throughout my years as a chef and my years traveling the West Indies. I saw the similarities with congee and asopao. Also saw similarities with Puerto Rican arroz con pollo, Trinidadian cook-up rice or pelau, and even the famous jambalaya. I feel like this version highlighted this beautiful one-pot rice recipe.

This recipe, which features mussels topped with parsley-ed breadcrumbs, gets perfectly crispy on the top thanks to a few minutes under the broiler. It comes from the cookbook The Two Fat Ladies Ride Again| New Window by Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, the duo behind the popular British cooking show Two Fat Ladies. In the spirit of the show, source the best-quality ingredients you can find.

My friend Guillermo is originally from Mexico City and is a great cook. Over the years, I’ve learned a number of authentic Mexican dishes by watching over his shoulder – including pico de gallo, savory sopes and killer huevos rancheros. But there's one recipe in particular that Guillermo taught me early on which I return to regularly for its freshness and simplicity: fish tacos.

This recipe has nothing to do with barbecue. These shrimp are cooked in a roasting pan, not in a smoker or on the grill. Cooked in their shells with more pepper, garlic, and butter than you are probably comfortable with, the shrimp come out ready for you to peel and eat. Sop up every drop of the sauce with good French bread and make sure you have extra napkins.

I love this Ecuadorean addition of salty, crunchy popcorn to ceviche. Shrimp "cook" in the lime juice particularly well, although I have made this with firm-fleshed white fish as well as dry scallops. Ceviche is, of course, all about the freshness of the fish—so make sure that whatever you use is as fresh as you can get it.

This recipe is about the affinity that clams and bacon have for each other. In order to highlight these flavors, I decided to combine baked clams with Amatriciana sauce (which is a classic Roman pasta sauce, featuring tomato and either pancetta or guanciale). Littleneck clams are steamed open, and the clam meat gets finely diced, tossed with amatriciana sauce, and put back into the shell to bake. I tried a version of this recipe where the clam meat is left whole, but I found it too hard to eat (it was chewy).

Octopus and potato salad is a favorite dish all along the Italian coast. You can find it in practically every Tuscan and Ligurian port. Cleaning the octopus involves removing the eyes, beak, and innards, and rinsing under cold water—this is often already done when bought from a fishmonger or at a supermarket or if you have bought it frozen, but at my fresh-off-the-boat fisherman’s shop front, they are just as they were pulled out of the water.

Fish is such a delicate protein, it easily becomes a mess on the grill. You want clean, oiled and hot grates. Once the fish is on, let it cook most of the way before trying to flip it and then only give it a minute on that other side before pulling it off. It’ll continue to cook through as it rests and for a fatty fish like salmon, it’s nice to have it cooked medium anyway.

Despite its many ingredients, a finished paella is all about the rice and the flavor that the other elements impart to it. For that reason, it’s vital to use an actual paella (which is both the name of the dish AND the flat, round stainless-steel pan in which it’s cooked). You want the rice to cook evenly, without clumping, and be exposed to all of the other flavoring agents. Mom’s paella is 17 inches in diameter.

Cooking in a parchment-paper pouch is a traditional way to quickly infuse flavor into delicate seafood. Here, the flavor is butter and lemon, a classic with almost anything that swims, and the seafood is scallops. The twist is the lemon: It’s salt-preserved, citron confit, a staple in Mediterranean cuisines. You can make and refrigerate the packets up to 6 hours ahead; let them come to room temperature on the counter while you preheat the oven. Reprinted with permission from Short Stack Editions Vol. 30: Butter, by Dorie Greenspan (shortstackeditions.com).