Fishing for dinner at Costco

Image via Wikipedia

Most of the money I spent at Costco in Hackensack on Thursday was for seafood.

Wild haddock fillets made a great dinner cooked in Mexican green salsa, spooned over steamed yellow rice and served with a salad.

 For breakfast and lunch sandwiches, I got a pound of smoked and sliced wild sockeye salmon from Alasaka  (photo) at $14.79. I refer to this as wild lox.

From the Seafood Road Show, I finally broke down and bought four pounds of frozen Black Tiger shrimp from Vietnam. These big shrimp, which are deveined, come 13 to 15 to the pound at $8.60 or so per pound. I haven't bought them before because they are farmed and that method of raising them has led to habitat destruction.

Unfortunately, Costco, unlike Whole Foods Market, provides little information about the farmed shrimp or fish it sells (beyond saying farmed salmon is artificially colored). Whole Foods says all of the farmed seafood it sells is drug-, hormone- and preservative-free.

Who forgot to scale my red snapper?

Image via Wikipedia

I find my self buying more fish and related items at Costco in Hackensack. I used to drop into a Korean supermarket each week to browse among 20 or more different whole fish for our family meal, but I've been succumbing to the convenience of picking up lots of items at once in the warehouse store.

Costco usually has fillets of such wild fish as meaty haddock or the more delicate flounder (photo) that are great for frying. Starting in June, wild salmon will start showing up. Year round, you usually can find smoked wild salmon, lobster ravioli, king crab and corn chowder, and other items.

Costco also stages a Seafood Road Show, starting on Fridays, with enormous tiger shrimp, big crab legs, clams, mussels and other items, but we try to avoid farmed shrimp (because of habitat destruction).

On Thursday, I was checking out the fish fillets when I saw beautiful whole red snapper from Panama in shrink-wrapped foam trays that had been put out that day. Their eyes were clear. I bought a package of two that weighed a total of 2.2 pounds at $5.49 a pound. My wife loves the head, my son the tail and me the middle of the fish.

For dinner, I opened a can of diced tomatoes and another of tomato paste, emptied them into a large pan with a clear glass cover and added extra-virgin olive oil, Italian seasoning, red-pepper flakes, salt and garlic powder. I started to cut three slashes into the body of one fish when my wife noticed the red snapper had been gutted and cleaned but hadn't been scaled, and she grabbed a fork and went to work over the sink.

The two fish didn't fit into the pan, so I cut them in half  (nearer the tail), laid the pieces over the sauce, covered the pan and cooked them over medium heat until the exposed flesh turned white -- approximately 20 to 25 minutes. I served them with leftover yellow rice, crunchy French green beans I picked up on the same trip to Costco and warm pocket bread. If you use two cans of diced tomatoes and tomato paste, you can boil some pasta and cover it with the fish-flavored sauce.

The beans had been blanched in boiling water, then cooked for about five minutes in a covered pan with lemon-flavored olive oil, salt and Costco's organic no-salt seasoning. A wonderful meal, despite the need to scale the fish. But I plan to go to customer service today to register my complaint.