A Culinary Tour of President Obama’s Life: Part III Entree
We followed the trade winds to Hawaii for the main event – a pan fried fish fillet served on top of some coconut sweet potatoes and finished with a lemongrass sauce. You can find the starting recipe at http://www.seawatchrestaurant.com/recipes.html.
The recipe calls for opakapaka, Pacific pink snapper. We couldn’t source that locally so at the expense of a greater carbon footprint ordered up 5 pounds of fillets from Wild Ocean Seafood in Ferndale, WA and Honolulu, Hawaii. They arrived the Thursday before the dinner in beautiful shape and the perfect 6-8 oz serving size.
Everything the the main dish was fairly straightforward, but I was concerned about the sweet potato puree since there wasn’t any way I was getting Molokai purples. We ran a trial recipe with supermarket sweet potatoes and were disappointed by the overly sweet and somewhat watery result. There was no time for a second trial so we turned to Cooks Illustrated for some tips. Their tip to cook the potatoes in the binding liquid (coconut milk in this case) and mashing without draining instead of cooking in water was great. We used local sweet potatoes for the real meal and they were a big sucess. Overall the dish was light but very flavorful.
One comment on the fish preparation in this recipe – Terrific. We’ve tried it now with halibut and striped sea bass with great results. Do use a good mango chutney. The Geeta’s we carry at the store is the best I’ve found though you do have to look out for the occassional chunk of whole spice in the mix.
