At Bocconi in Hackensack, a tasty dinner of vegetables, fish and wine

Grey Sole Oreganata with Shrimp and White Wine, one of two wild-caught fish entrees at Bocconi Restaurant in Hackensack.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

The list of specials at Bocconi Restaurant in Hackensack would please anyone who doesn't eat meat or poultry.

Vegetables, salads and shellfish appetizers are the prelude to nearly a dozen pasta and seafood entrees on the one-page listing.

On Saturday, we visited the moderately priced Italian-American restaurant for the third time, and though we had a nice dinner, saw some limitations.

A half-dozen fish entrees are offered, but only two are wild caught, grey sole and tuna.

I'm watching my cholesterol intake, and found Bocconi was less accommodating than on earlier visits when I asked the kitchen to hold the butter.

And the specials menu didn't list a small block of tangy goat cheese that came with a wonderful appetizer of beets and arugula.

Salmon Grilled Over Arugula & Cherry Tomato.

Vegetables, fish and salad

We started with appetizers of Asparagus Gratinato ($9.95) for my wife and Red Beet Carpaccio for me ($12.50).

My wife wanted wild-caught Grey Sole Oreganata ($18.95) for her entree, the dish I had on our first visit, and I chose the second wild fish, tuna, on our last visit.

So, looking for something else, I was left to pick one of the farmed fish, and I chose Salmon Grilled Over Arugula & Cherry Tomato ($20.95).

I asked for the fish to be prepared medium to medium rare, but it was delivered cooked through, though still moist.

When compared to its wild cousin, artificially colored farmed salmon isn't a very exciting fish -- raw or cooked.

At least it was a nice portion, and came with a great salad of peppery arugula, my favorite green.

The other farmed seafood offered are branzino, tilapia and shrimp. 

Details

Bocconi Restaurant, 363 Essex St., Hackensack (near Prospect Avenue); 201-342-3888. Web site: bocconifood.com

BYO. On weekends, reservations aren't necessary.

A tiny lot off Prospect means you're better off parking across Essex Street at the medical building with a Starbucks Coffee on the ground level.

An appetizer of Asparagus Gratinato with Grated Cheese and White Wine Sauce. We liked the small dish of pitted olives served with it. The waiter said the asparagus were made with only a "little" butter.

A block of tangy goat cheese crowning Red Beet Carpaccio, another appetizer, wasn't listed on the specials menu, and the price shown also was incorrect ($9.95 on the menu, $12.50 on the receipt)

Bocconi Restaurant is a BYO with about 50 seats. I brought a bottle of Italian red wine.

Crusty Italian bread comes with butter and for dipping, extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and grated cheese.

Where to find food-safety horror stories

The safety of basa fillets from fish farms in Vietnam is under scrutiny.

Today, I'm providing a link to U.S. Food Safety, which calls itself an "award-winning food safety blog."

I don't think this is a government agency (it's a .com, not a .gov), but the site carries announcements from U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

I'm also going to list U.S. Safety in My Blog Roll, which you can find on the right side of this page.

Here is the link: http://blog.usfoodsafety.com/

Meanwhile, questions have been raised about the farming of a Vietnamese catfish called basa.

The fillets are frozen before they are exported to the United States, where they appear on menus at Simply Vietnamese in Tenafly and other restaurants.

This appeared on a site called Vietnam Talking Points in 2010:  

http://talk.onevietnam.org/cause-of-death-consumption-of-basa-fish/  

Food safety experts have said repeatedly that if you are going to buy farmed fish, including tilapia, salmon and catfish, make sure they were raised in the United States. 

Even better, buy your farmed fish at Whole Food Market, the only retailer I know that pledges the farmed seafood it sells is free of antibiotics, preservatives and other harmful additives. 
 

No waiting for $11.95 dinner

Image via Wikipedia
If you go for the early bird dinner at Amici Family Restaurant in Bergenfield, you might find yourself sharing the dining room with the Family in the restaurant's name -- three generations speaking in English and Italian.


For $11.95, you get a chicken, veal, eggplant or fish entree with pasta or vegetables; a cup of soup or a side salad; a soft drink, coffee or tea, and bread.


I dropped in Wednesday about 4:30 in the afternoon and ordered a salad and tilapia in a garlic-and-white wine sauce. 


My diet limits bread or pasta, so I was happy when the waitress offered vegetables with my fish, but the restaurant doesn't have canned seltzer or club soda.


I also liked bringing my own wine to this BYO, and enjoying a couple of glasses with dinner.


The salad was served in a soup bowl -- romaine and iceberg lettuce with tomato, cucumber, red onion and a stuffed olive -- which I dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.


The fish was wonderful in a garlicky, light-red tomato sauce with chopped fresh tomato. On the side were bright-green, crunchy cooked broccoli and yellow squash.


I finished with two cups of strong black coffee from a fresh pot. Only one other table was occupied by customers while I was there.


Even without bread and pasta, this was a satisfying meal. My total was $14.78 with tax and tip.


The early bird special is served Mondays to Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Dine-in only.


Amici Family Restaurant, 127 S. Washington Ave., 
Bergenfield; 201-374-1996. BYO.


Web site: All in the family

Salt in Costco Wholesale almonds, Trident Seafood fish sticks

Image via Wikipedia

Blanched almonds, like those sold at Costco Wholesale.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

A half-dozen or so roasted almonds are one of my favorite snacks -- alone or with fruit and cheese -- and I rely on Costco Wholesale in Hackensack for these crunchy treats.

But in looking at labels, I've discovered that the more expensive Kirkland Signature Marcona blanched almonds from Spain have twice as much salt as the Kirkland dry-roasted almonds from California.

A 28-gram or 1-ounce serving of the Spanish almond contains 9% sodium, compared with 4% for the same serving size of the California almond (on the daily value scale). 

The former costs $7.99 for 17.63 ounces, while you'll pay $8.89 for 40 ounces of the latter. They are both delicious.

I believe Costco sells a 3-pound bag of raw, unsalted almonds, but I've never bought them or checked out the label. Next time.

Update (2015)

For the last couple of years, we've been buying the raw almonds at Costco to cut down on our sodium intake, and roasting them in the oven at 275 degrees for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

After they cool, we put them in a container on our kitchen counter and dust them with plenty of ground Saigon Cinnamon, also available at Costco.

Cover via Amazon

Fish shtick

Costco is the only retailer I know that publishes a magazine, and the February 2011 issue  of Costco Connection has an upbeat story on Trident Seafoods, the Seattle, Wash., company that supplies fish sticks and other products to the warehouse store.

I read about The Ultimate Fish Stick from Trident and asked my wife to pick up a package this week. Four pounds or 60 breaded fish sticks are $12.99. 

I prepared some last night. I found them tasty, but think the name is overblown. 

They are finger-length and cut from fillets of snow-white Alaska pollock, the largest wild fishery in the United States. 

Pollock tastes like cod, but is cheaper. Salted pollock, for example, retails for about half the price of salted cod.

A sad footnote is a 2008 incident that killed 120,000 wild king salmon when they were caught in pollock nets, according to "Four Fish, The Future of the Last Wild Food," a new book by Paul Greenberg.

The Trident package calls the fish sticks "crunchy" and "more fish, less breading." They are 65% fish, but they weren't crunchy. 

I didn't preheat the oven to 475 degrees, so that may have been a problem, though I baked them for much longer than indicated in the directions. 

Costco also sells Trident's tilapia-fillet fish sticks, but the package doesn't say whether they are made from farmed fish. They appear bigger than the pollock fish sticks. 


I've seen wild-caught tilapia at H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain, but most tilapia is farmed. It also is called St. Peter's Fish.

Restaurant-quality meals -- no need to tip

Image by Topdog1 via Flickr

I was surprised to see an unusual assortment of Jerry's Meals To Go around noon Friday, when I walked into the Italian specialty food store in Englewood.


I had stopped at Jerry's Gourmet & More around lunchtime a couple of days earlier, just for free food samples, and there were only three of the $6.99, restaurant-quality dinners available: grouper, stuffed flank steak and barbecue chicken. But on Friday, there were three fish entrees in the case: red snapper and tilapia, in addition to grouper.

At home that evening, I made a small organic spring-mix salad, plated the food from the plastic container and heated it up in the microwave. 

My entree was breaded grouper oreganato with side dishes of cavatelli and broccoli, eggplant caponata and grilled eggplant and zucchini.The pasta needed a little grated cheese from my freezer.


My wife and son shared their dinners: entrees of red snapper in a roasted pepper sauce and roast pork with grilled shrimp. Their side dishes were meat lasagna, eggplant rollatini, grilled vegetables, rigatoni pasta salad, cauliflower and stuffed mushrooms with sausage and cheese.

I love these dinners for their sensible portions (a total of 12 ounces), their quality and their low price. You have to go early for the best selection.


After choosing my dinners from among about a dozen or more in the case Friday, I sampled about 10 cheeses and, waiting on the check-out line, a pinot noir wine from Argentina.


Jerry's Gourmet & More, 410 S. Dean St., Englewood; 201-871-7108.

Shopping, eating and restaurant notes

Image by g[wiz] via Flickr

 If we eat meatless meals, do I have to do less food shopping?

We started our regimen on Sunday, I made my weekly visit to Costco on Monday and didn't go food shopping again until today, when I bought broccoli rabe (photo) to go along with tonight's spaghetti and sardines in tomato sauce. (I even have some terrific Balthazar Bakery mini-baguettes in the freezer to scoop up the sauce.)

I didn't have to go to ShopRite, but wanted to recycle plastic bags that were piling up in my garage, and thought I'd go in to see if I could get collard or mustard greens for tonight. But the greens had brown edges or looked as if they had been there from the day before. 

The broccoli rabe seemed high at $2.99 a pound, and it rang up at $4.69 (1.57 pounds). Wow. So who is more bitter, me or the broccoli? I looked at arepas (Colombian corn cakes), and they were priced $1 more than at Hackensack Market. The other items I bought were on sale: extra-sharp cheddar cheese and Breyers ice cream for my wife and son.

Yesterday, I met Bernadette Baum, the vibrant and charming author of the "Diva Indoors" food blog, and her friend Jennifer for lunch at Huong Viet in Nutley, and managed to find meatless choices on the extensive menu: vegetarian summer rolls, egg noodles with tofu but without the usual ground pork, fried tilapia and mustard greens with garlic.

Service was slow when I had dinner there with my wife and son, but I was brought tea and a menu when I walked in around 12:15 yesterday afternoon and said I was waiting for someone. After Bernadette and Jennifer arrived, we were moved quickly to a bigger table and, although the waitress was pleasant, some of our food took a long time to emerge from the kitchen. I also noticed food stains on the uncovered table from previous customers.
 
I again tried the thick, black coffee I loved from my dinner there, and again didn't have the patience to wait for it to drip into the cup -- a full five minutes. I hurried it along, but it was only lukewarm when I drank it. Bernadette asked for "Vietnamese coffee" and later asked to see the package, but the waitress said it was too big to bring out to the dining room.

For dinner last night, we had fully cooked, all-vegetable patties (Costco) that I warmed up in the oven and topped with sliced cheese. I put mine in pocket bread and added some of my organic salad mix and Dijon mustard. Very nice.

Shopping and tasting notes

Costco continues to be the source of great food, despite the frustrations of shopping there and dealing with the crowds at the Hackensack store near my home. The cash rebates with the Costco American Express card more than pay for my annual membership fee.

On Monday, I picked up Legal Seafoods Alaskan king crab and sweet corn chowder, two containers totaling 40 ounces for $9.99. Two pounds of the reddest strawberries I have ever seen were $6.99. And, of course, I couldn't leave without a one-pound tub of Earthbound Farm organic spring mix for $4.49, the lowest price around. It's prewashed, so you just grab some for sandwiches or a dinner salad.

At H Mart, the Korean supermarket on Bergen Turnpike in Little Ferry, I bought two fresh, wild-caught whole tilapia at $2.99 a pound. The store also sells farmed whole tilapia, but these fish were red (photo), not the dark green of the farmed variety. I poached them Tuesday night in cheap sake, soy and fish sauce, and sweet rice wine for about 20 minutes and served them with yellow rice and leftover canned black beans combined with canned diced tomato.

We had free-range shoulder lamb chops from Australia tonight with potato fritters -- or rosti -- I bought in IKEA, Paramus, and stored in the freezer. Produced in Poland, they made a fine, non-greasy substitute for potato latkes. All we needed was a salad of organic spring mix to complete the meal.