Month 7 day 8: Fish and Orange Shortcake

Today I made:
Mahimahi with Bacon-Tomato Butter, Cooking Light August 2010
served with salad
Citrus Shortcake, Cooking Light August 2010
served with vanilla ice cream

These recipes were both rated 5 stars online, so I knew this would be a nice dinner! And it was.

Bacon-Tomato Butter is much like it sounds. You cook up a cut up slice of bacon, then add a bit of garlic and paprika to the grease before adding chopped tomatoes. Then, after it's simmered a few minutes, you add in some butter. The butter flavor is definitely present, in a good way. It's a very easy and fast sauce, and it tastes good. But, I thought that it might be better to have that sauce on some bruschetta on the side and eat the fish plain or with a lighter sauce, because it was so heavy in flavor that it overpowered the fish. Mahimahi is pricey, so if I'm having it I would like to just savor its own flavor. I actually bought one filet each of mahimahi and tuna. I always mistakenly thought that mahimahi was a kind of tuna (I think I was confusing it with ahi), so I was kind of curious to have them side by side and compare the flavors (also mahimahi is more expensive than tuna). The mahimahi had a really distinct lemon flavor, even though I didn't use any lemon tonight. The tuna did have a sort of tangy flavor but wasn't distinct. At one point I thought I tasted something like olives, but it was only in one bite, so... not sure O_o Anyway, the mahimahi is much better than tuna, so maybe it is worth paying extra for a treat. I wasn't sure about the quality of this tuna (can all tuna be served rare?) so I cooked it all the way though, and it was a little bit tough. The mahimahi had a better texture and was also quicker to cook.

While the fish was marinating in sugar-salt water (why??), I whipped up this shortcake. Its main flavor comes from the orange juice/zest, and its main texture comes from 2 Tbs. of corn meal. It kind of ends up looking like corn bread, but the orange flavor is great. Again, I used the powdered buttermilk, which seemed to work out fine, although it did feel really weird to just pour 2/3 c plain water into the batter (you add the powder directly to the dry ingredients instead of reconstituting it). The batter is really liquidy, and even just a few minutes before it was supposed to be finished baking it was really unset. A few minutes later though it was transformed and a toothpick came out clean. Once i cut it open, it looked like it could have used a bit of extra time baking though. Everything was solid, but the inside was a little gummy rather than crumbly (can you see that layer in the picture?). It also had this really interesting pattern of columns of air, so if you cut horizontally across you can see tons of holes, but if you cut vertically you can see all these tubes. I am not sure why it's like that, but it's kind of cool.

This cake is from a feature in Cooking Light about packing for a weekend cabin getaway. It's a cute idea-- there are a couple make-ahead things like this cake and a spice rub, one cooler and one bag's worth of groceries, and then you have everything you need to make a full two days of delicious and easy meals, even without a fully-stocked kitchen. I'm planning to make the BBQ chicken sliders on Friday.