West Coast Seafood represents twenty years of working with seafood as a cook, teacher, and writer.
The main focus of this book is the commercially available fish and shellfish of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Baja California, including fish caught commercially in rivers draining into the Pacific and farmed in the same region. The Pacific Coast region is rich in many food resources beyond seafood, with a range of microclimates and soil types that can produce nearly every kind of fruit, vegetable, and grain. And since the first Ice Age humans arrived from Asia over the Bering land bridge, the region has absorbed wave after wave of immigrants, each bringing their food traditions to the abundant resources they found here.
Labels like "East-West," "Pacific Rim cuisine," and "fusion cuisine" are attempts to capture the essence of the ongoing evolution of Pacific Coast cuisine. Whatever you call it, all of us in this increasingly multicultural region are enriched as we learn to understand and enjoy each other's foodways. The old image of the melting pot is giving way to a tossed salad, or an international buffet: in typically American fashion, we incorporate something from here, something from there into our cooking style, sometimes with great respect for tradition and sometimes in total disregard of the old rules.
Together with the other ingredients and influences available today, the changing seafood market offers the home cook both new challenges and new opportunities. The challenge includes knowing how best to cook fish that look and sound similar, but differ widely in flavor and fat content. It also means learning about new and unfamiliar species of fish and shellfish. But this same variety also gives the informed cook that many more ways to prepare delicious, healthful seafood meals. I hope the 250-plus recipes and the other information provided in this book will help you in your own exploration of seafood, West Coast style.
Look for West Coast Seafood (ISBN 1-57061-170-X) at your local bookstore or kitchenware shop, or wherever you buy cookbooks; or click here to get in touch with the publisher.
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