Give a Girl a Fish

“One must lose a minnow to catch a salmon.” ~French Proverb

“Je ne suis pas d’accord. All I had to do was follow a good recipe.” ~Elda Eats

Give a girl a fish, and she’ll eat for a day. Teach a girl to make a good fish recipe at home, and well, she might just make that recipe, and then enjoy all the memories that may come with it, for the rest of her life.

Lucky for me, a good fish recipe was what I chose to make on Sunday as my latest culinary attempt from the best-ever recipe list from Food & Wine Magazine’s Cook the 40 Challenge.

Cook the 40

Why take on Food & Wine’s best-ever recipes from their forty years in publication? Because if you’ve been reading my blog posts and following me on social media, you know that’s what I’m doing this year!

Besides, I’m hoping that taking on these 40 recipes will also add some fun and new favorite foods to my life. If even half of them end up being tasty, this will be a very worthwhile endeavor.

40 Years of Food & Wine

According to the September 2018 anniversary issue of Food & Wine, and editor Hunter Lewis, https://twitter.com/notesfromacook?lang=en, what makes a good recipe is it being delicious, of course, and (I think even more important sometimes) the best recipes “tell a story worth repeating.” Well said, Hunter.

I am not sure what kind of stories all of these 40 best-ever recipes will tell from my kitchen’s point of view, but I am excited to find out.

Next story to tell? Ted Allen’s Pan Roasted Salmon with Tomato Vinaigrette! I was confident that this recipe would become a story with a happy ending. A happy ending, filled with happy memories of family and home.

The Fifth Recipe

Well known proverbs aside, I do know how to fish. My maternal great grandfather, Jacob Anthony Kolasch, taught me how to fish when I was about five or six years old. My great grandparents lived their retirement years together in a small private village just a few miles from the very small town of Pacific, Missouri.

While I didn’t learn to fish by catching salmon, or even grow up eating salmon, it has become one of my favorite types of fish.

Spoiler alert: This recipe doesn’t change my mind about salmon being a favorite.

My Great Grandpa

I loved my great grandpa Kolasch. I was his first great grandchild, born when he was either 71 or 73. Growing up, until the age of 12 (that’s how old I was when he died), I got to see him at least a few times a year, since my family would visit my maternal grandparents, who still lived in my mom’s hometown of St. Louis. Some years, I got to see him much more than that, but the times that were the most special were the summers.

We would usually spend at least a month each summer in Missouri, with a week (or two weeks if my brother Tony and I were lucky) in Pacific at my great grandparents’ house. My great grandfather was so much fun for us to be around, and times with him are some of my most cherished childhood memories.

Jacob Anthony Kolasch was born in 1899 (or maybe 1897) in what was then officially the empire of Austria Hungary, present day Germany. Great Grandpa always said he was Bavarian, and so that is what I say too. He was very proud to be an American; proud and grateful to have been brought here as a baby. He proudly fought in World War I (He was the first person who told me that it was once called The Great War. “The war to end all wars, they said. Of course, it didn’t, did it?”). He was proud of his son, my grandpa, for fighting in The Battle of the Bulge during World War II; and he was proud that his oldest grandchild, my mom, married my dad just after he had come home from volunteering to serve in the Vietnam War.

Great Grandpa grew up in St. Louis, speaking German at home with his parents. He would tell stories of his life as a kid, of working all sorts of jobs in his youth, of fighting in the trenches in Europe and being asked to listen to the Germans and then translate back to his superiors, of running rum during Prohibition, of raising a family, of my mom and my uncles when they were young, of my mom marrying my dad, and of being so happy when I was born.

Besides teaching us how to bait a hook and clean a fish, he also taught us to appreciate a good beer, and we learned to love the smell of his pipe tobacco and we didn’t even mind taking a puff every now and then. He taught us how to raise rabbits (he had several dozen in the backyard in pens), and he taught us that it was okay to ignore our great grandmother’s nagging and constant pleas to be quiet and “stop doing that.” (We did a lot of things that got on her nerves, I guess!)

He, however, was never sour or in a bad mood. He was probably the most constant positive person I knew as a kid; always telling jokes, and laughing and enjoying all the little things. Maybe it came from being of that generation and having lived through The Great Depression, or because of his experience in the war, or because he needed to balance out the not-so-positive attitude of his wife (kind of family joke, but it’s really true!). Whatever the reasons, he always had a smile on his face. I don’t know why he did, but he did, and I have always been better because of that influence.

Besides indeed teaching my brother Tony and me how to fish, what my great grandfather really did do, and how he truly did influence us, was by spending time with us. He spent time getting to know us, talking to us, teaching us, and letting us be ourselves. He let us be dirty and annoying, silly and loud, he let us be kids in the summer. I was a wannabe Huckleberry Finn back then, and he let me be that to my heart’s content. We spent so many hours on his screened-in front porch in Pacific, or on the docks of Lake Tekakwitha, or in the kitchen frying up fresh fish and sausage for breakfast after early morning fishing treks to the lake.

My great grandmother hated that we would eat fried fish for breakfast, but I loved it. She hated that he would let us drink beer, but I loved it. She hated that we used an old tree stump in the front yard to scale and clean our freshly caught fish, but I loved it. I loved spending all that time with my great grandfather. I loved him, and I loved fishing with him, and to this day, eating good fish always reminds me of him.

Let’s Cook, and Make Great Grandpa Proud

While this isn’t a difficult recipe, I was hoping it would be good. It surely would have been quite fancy for us to make for breakfast at eight in the morning with Great Grandpa, having with a glass of orange juice and a can of beer back in that small kitchen in Pacific, Missouri.

TV personality and author Ted Allen’s Pan Roasted Salmon with Tomato Vinaigrette recipe from a 2007 issue of the magazine, called for grape tomatoes, a shallot, red wine vinegar, capers, salt, olive oil, salmon filets, black pepper, oil, cumin, parsley and fresh basil.

Where Was I When This Recipe Was Published in 2007?

If you’re following me along this “Cook the 40” journey, you’ll know that besides cooking each recipe, I am also including where I was the year each recipe was published in the magazine. After all, I have been alive for the last 40 years, so why not include something about me when writing about each recipe and the year it was published.

In 2007, I came home. Well, I came home to work. And by home, I mean San Antonio.

San Antonio has always been home. I wasn’t born here because my dad was still in the Army in 1970, so I was born on post, at Fort Wolters in Mineral Wells, Texas. But, my parents moved to San Antonio in time for me to spend my first birthday walking for the first time in Concepcion Park in the city’s Southside.

You’ve been reading about my great grandfather on my mom’s side of the family, but the majority of my identity and influence growing up came from my dad’s side, from being a Texan, and from home—no matter where we lived— being San Antonio. My parents bought their first house just a few blocks from where my dad’s parents lived, and only a few more blocks from where I would later graduate from high school in 1988.

I left San Antonio to go to Austin in 1988, moved away from Texas in 1991, came back in 2005 (to Austin), and finally moved back to work in San Antonio in 2007.

You Can Go Home Again

As Food & Wine was publishing Ted Allen’s recipe in 2007, I started a job at The St Anthony Hotel. A hotel that, growing up, had been my favorite hotel. The St Anthony was my grandmother’s favorite hotel. My past even included some personal some history at the hotel, as my best friend and I wrote our last wills and testaments (no longer valid, mind you) on St Anthony stationery back in 1986.

I loved that job, I still love the hotel, and I especially love thinking about the feeling I still get when I think about coming home.

Much like thinking about my great grandfather and the stories of my childhood, home feels like love; love feels like home. And I love that a simple recipe can bring back so many great memories.

Because It’s True

As I write this, I realize that I also ended the last “cook the 40” blog post about home. That post was about Food & Wine‘s recipe from 1997, the year I started making a home with Peter.

Maybe they are just recipes. Recipes using bread, or tomatoes, or fish, or other foods. Those foods then remind us of places or people, or any part of our lives, and that makes them more than just recipes to me.

Home is more than just a location, I think it can also be where our memories take us, and the stories we tell and share from those memories. The best memories fill us with love, and to me that feels like home. If I repeat myself, it’s only because it’s true.

Elda XO

For more information about this recipe, click here to be taken to the Food & Wine link: https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/pan-roasted-salmon-tomato-vinaigrette