So many fish in the sea

This week, I've been eating a lot of wild-caught fish and enjoying it immensely. I'm thinking I could be very happy on a diet of seafood and hardly touch poultry or meat.

I started off the week with the smoked wild salmon I get from Costco as the main ingredient in my breakfast sandwich, with pesto, sliced tomatoes in za'atar, Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings and fresh arugula.

When that ran out, I tweaked my canned fish salad. Last time, I combined red salmon, sardines and yellowfin tuna. This time, it's albacore tuna, Moroccan sardines from Fattal's (one tin of boneless and skinless and another in spicy oil), smoked herring from Trader Joe's and Japanese-style mackerel. This salad got lots of chopped red onion, some olive oil and teaspoons of powdered cumin, and it's great stuffed into pita halves with organic salad greens and fresh arugula and basil.

Dinner on Tuesday night were those New Zealand Greenshell Mussels with sun-dried tomatoes and pesto (see post, "Here's a natural for dinner"). Last night, I had a fillet of fresh wild halibut from Costco ($10.99 a pound), seasoned with fresh oregano and parsley, cumin and Aleppo pepper. I bought the halibut because there was no wild salmon to be had that day.

Tonight, I'll have leftover mussels and halibut and two freshly baked whiting I picked up today at H Mart in Little Ferry ($2.99 a pound). I'll also have a chunk or two of Korean-style Alaskan pollack ($5.99), stewed in a sweet and spicy sauce with carrots and hot and sweet peppers that I found in the long refrigerated case of side dishes, or panchan.

Here's a natural for dinner

Have you tried mussels from New Zealand, the ones with the green shells? I unearthed a box from my freezer the other night and prepared them for dinner Monday. I remember buying them at H-Mart in Little Ferry.

I searched and searched the copy on the box, but could not find anything that said they were fully cooked. Yet, the instructions said they would need only 5 minutes under the broiler. So I added chopped sun-dried tomatoes to some, pesto to others and both to the rest, about two dozen in all. They were delicious and needed only a big salad to make a satisfying dinner.

These mussels are farmed and I usually try to avoid farmed seafood. But when I looked at the Web site of the New Zealand Greenshell Mussel, it said no additives are used. "In respect to the environment, New Zealand Greenshell Mussel farming is cleaner and greener than organic gardening."

I've always loved this shellfish, from the days I hopped from one tapas bar to another in Spain, where the mussels are enormous. I first encountered the New Zealand green-lip mussel in the 1970s, in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. I liked them so much, I went back the next night for more.