A Fishy Cooking Post

We had planned to cook fish when Steven came home Friday, so I made tartar sauce.

Many years ago, my mother taught me to make tartar sauce by chopping up a dill pickle and mixing it with mayonnaise. I haven’t bought tartar sauce since. After tasting some fancy tartar sauces at various restaurants, I have modified my recipe.

Friday I found the jar of dill pickles in the fridge and was a little sorry they were not farmer’s market dill pickles. Perhaps I will make my way to Clapsaddle Farm for the Ilion Farmer’s Market and get something more distinctive for next time.

I poured myself a glass of Salneval Albarino (there should be a tilde on the n — All-Bar-een-yo — but I don’t know how to do that on my computer), because I like cooking with wine, pulled out the glass cutting board Steven gave me for my birthday, and commenced to chopping.

As usual I had trouble with it. Pickles are not as firm for chopping as non-pickled vegetables, and I think my knives need sharpening. Also, for tarter sauce I like my pickles finely minced, that is, more minced than I usually accomplish. And it just now occurs to me, I’m saying chopped when I really mean minced. If this were a real cooking blog, I would never make such a blunder. Actually, I think it is accurate to say I wanted minced pickle, but settled for chopped because mincing was too damn much trouble.

Anyways, I chopped one pickle, added it into the mayonnaise I had spooned into the container, and wondered if I could put enough other stuff in to make up for there being not enough pickle. Then I told myself to stop being so lazy and cut up another pickle.

When I had really really had enough of messing with the pickles, I added horse radish, lemon pepper, Pampered Chef All Purpose Dill Mix, McCormick’s Perfect Pinch Salt Free, minced onion (dried minced onion in the bottle; I didn’t cut onion as well as pickle), and stirred well.

The flavors had plenty of time to blend, because Steven was working a half hour later than I had thought. Damn! I was hungry! Oh well, they do say hunger is the best seasoning. The tartar sauce did taste good when I finally ate it. I was almost too impatient to wait for the fish.