Fortifying fish fumet takes this already flavorful stock and makes it much more intense and delicious.  You’ll be sacrificing the shellfish in order to lend their essences to your broth, after simmering for so long they’ll be overcooked and not worth eating.  That said, this seafood ambrosia is worth all the time and effort!

The finished fumet is strong enough for use in soups, and will bring tremedous flavor to poached and steamed seafood.

Ingredients:
1 ½ quarts Traditional Fish Fumet
¾ cup Shallots, finely sliced
3 Garlic Cloves, crushed with the skin on
½ cup Carrots, finely diced
½ cup Fennel Bulb, sliced
1 tbsp Tomato Paste
3 large Tomatoes, diced
10oz Shucked Oyster Meat
1 + ½lbs Live Clams
1 + 1/2lbs Live Mussels
¼ cup of Pernod
3 sprigs Fresh Thyme
Olive Oil

Directions:

1. Wash the clams and mussels.  Remove the mussel beards.

2. Heat olive oil in the bottom of a large pot.  Add the shallots, carrots, and garlic.  Sauté for a few minutes.

3. Add the fennel bulb.  Stir to coat everything with the oil.  Reduce the heat to prevent the vegetables from caramelizing.  Saute for a few minutes to sweat the vegetables.

4. Add the tomato paste and stir it into the vegetables.  Saute for about 30 seconds.

5. Add the fresh tomatoes, let them cook for a few minutes.

6. Deglaze the pan with the pernod.  Let the mixture simmer until you can no longer smell the alcohol.

7. Add the fish fumet, clams, mussels, oyster meat and thyme.  Simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

8. Strain the fortified fumet through a fine mesh strainer or chinois (ideally lined with a cheesecloth).  While straining, do not squeeze the spent vegetables and shellfish to get them to release more moisture, as doing so can bring small particles to your fumet that can make it cloudy and negatively affect its flavor.  Discard the solids.  Either use your fumet immediately or quickly chill it for storage in your refrigerator or freezer.

If you’ve been drooling over the fennel pollen recipes that have been featured on the blog lately, you’ll jump at this chance:

Melody Fury is giving away tins of our super potent, super tasty fennel pollen on her blog, Gourmet Fury, to the two people who submit the best asparagus recipes by April 2^nd.

What are you waiting for?  Get over there and enter now!  There’s fennel pollen at stake!

Christo from ChezWhat, who is never short on innovation, is back with a trio of dill pollen appetizers…

Ask ten people what goes good with dill, nine of them are going to say cucumbers and the tenth one will say salmon. Since majority rules I am going with cucumbers (but that doesnt mean I wont be doing a salmon thing later)

Cucumber cups with dill pollen cream cheese are more a preparation than a recipe. With your melon baller scoop out the center of a one inch to one and a half inch slice of cucumber. I scored the skins with a fork but if you would like to peel them partially or all the way it is up to your taste – I like the extra crunch of the skin. Mix some cream cheese and dill pollen together and set aside.

Fill the cups with the softened cream cheese, sprinkle a little dill pollen and fresh dill to make an amazing appetizer.

You could also plate them up individually for a very crisp and cool amuse bouche.

A little creme fraiche and a cucumber cup with dill cream cheese is a lesson in simple sophistication.

Now for the salmon and I fudged it a bit and included cucumber, simply slice some cucumbers and alternate salmon between the slices and serve with dill pollen, fresh dill and creme fraiche. It doesnt have to be complicated to taste complex.

As it so often goes in our little foodie universe, the simplest things can make the biggest difference.  One of my recent “a ha” moments was discovering dried chilies and how to use them.  

Homemade chile powder blows away store bought. And, once chiles are rehydrated, they can be made into chile sauces, tabasco-style sauces, harissa, chile paste and so much more.

We are running a promotion this week: Buy any 2 oz. or 4 oz. dried chile and get free samples of three other varieties.

Your readers don’t need to be jealous of all the free samples you get! They can get in on it too … if you tell them about it.  So, hook your readers up and tell them about the wonderful world of chilies and this opportunity to experiment with a bunch of varieties.

If you like this badge, the HTML for it is pasted below …

<a href=”http://www.marxfoods.com/products/Bulk-Dried-Peppers”><img src=”https://system.netsuite.com/core/media/media.nl?id=12125&c=659425&h=4b96d4ecb7a013e49e65” width=”187″ height=”209″ border=”0″></a>

We’re looking for 12 bloggers to take a morel recipe challenge!  The prize for the winning recipe is two pounds of fresh morel mushrooms.

Here’s how the challenge works:

1. Email Justin Marx if you want in on the challenge (see below for instructions).

2.  On March 22nd, we’ll select up to 12 bloggers and mail each 1oz of dried morel mushrooms, gratis, to make whatever recipe you want.  

3.  You will have until April 7th to make your best recipe (and photo) and post it on your blog or ours. 

4.  On April 12th, we will open the polls and ask readers which recipe sounds the most delicious.  The top vote getter will win 2 lbs. of fresh morels. 

Who is in?  If you want to be considered, email Justin (at) MarxFoods (dot) com with your blog URL and mailing address.  We will select up to a dozen bloggers (or maybe more if we decide to change our mind).

Sound like delicious fun?  It is!  Check out last year’s morel recipes We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with this year.

These heirloom mashed potatoes are sweet and creamy up front, with lot of spice at the finish.  Is there any savory recipe chorizo can’t improve?

Ingredients: (6 Servings)
2 ½ pounds either German Butterball Potatoes (for a creamy/smooth mash) or Austrian Crescent Potatoes (for a rustic/chunky mash)
1 Cinnamon Stick
1 Fuji, Gala, or Braeburn Apple
8oz of Chorizo (bulk or link chorizo removed from its casing)
3 Whole Garlic Cloves, peeled
3 cups Whole Milk
1 cup Heavy (whipping) Cream
Olive oil
Salt to taste

Directions:

1. Peel and rough chop the potatoes into roughly equal-sized pieces (you can leave the peels on if you prefer).

2. Peel the apple. Slice the flesh off of the core and cut it into a small dice.

3. Heat a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan, and add the chorizo.  Break it up into small pieces and cook over medium heat to render out the fat.

4. In a pot or deep pan combine the milk, cream, apple, garlic cloves, cinnamon stick, and potatoes.  Bring to a simmer.

5. Once the chorizo has finished rendering, remove it from the pan and reserve.

6. Simmer the potatoes for 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tender (the amount of time depends on the size you cut them to).

7. Strain off the excess liquid (about 1-1 ½ cups) and remove the cinnamon stick.  Mash the potatoes, adding some of the liquid back in as necessary to achieve your desired consistency.  Season with salt.

8. Fold in the chorizo.

9. Serve. 

You’ve read about Szechuan buttons here and maybe you have recently tasted a trend-setting mixologist’s cocktail …

Now is your chance to experiment with the buzz buttons.  On Thursday, we will be sending out some free samples to bloggers who want to either develop a recipe for their blog or guest post with one on ours. 

If you want some free samples to play with, send an email to me at  justin (at) marxfoods (dot) com by Monday afternoon.  Be sure to provide me with an address that FedEx can deliver to and a phone number for the FedEx slip.

Don’t know what szechuan buttons are?  Read more:  
About Sechuan Buttons
Sechuan Button Recipes

As you may or may not know, MarxFoods.com is the sister company of an ultra high-end restaurant distributor.  You may think the Marx Foods store is big, but we actually have access to thousands of other products. 

No kidding.  Thousands.

Anyway, one of my favorite things to do here is have the occasional moment to look over our available product lists, checking to see if there’s anything particularly awesome to offer on the store.

I was picking through all of the different cultivated & wild mushrooms…and I came across an entry for “Bamboo Mushrooms.”

I wasn’t familiar with bamboo mushrooms, so I started to do a little research (yes, I’m a total food nerd).  I hit Wikipedia, and discovered that the odor of the Hawaiian variety of bamboo mushrooms has been demonstrated (in one, un-duplicated study) to cause spontaneous female orgasm.

Spontaneous.  Female. Orgasm.

This was it.  My ship had finally come in.  Clearly whoever had linked the study on Wikipedia hadn’t seen the true potential of these mushrooms.  I was all set to march into Justin’s office, propose MarxColognes.com, demand a lifetime supply of fresh morel mushrooms as a finder’s fee, and usher in a new era of world peace (sure global productivity would plummet, but who cares? SPONTANEOUS FEMALE ORGASMS!).

No wonder so many couples honeymoon in Hawaii!

Then I read that men apparently find the smell revolting (I’m sure there’s a lesson about the sexes in there somewhere). 

Goodbye millions, goodbye Nobel Peace Prize, goodbye beloved morels.

And that’s my story.  To be honest the Hawaiian mushrooms aren’t really widely available anyway, I think the ones we have access to are Chinese.

Still, it would have been pretty cool…

Don’t have a probe thermometer handy to judge your meat’s level of doneness?  Experienced chefs often test steak doneness by feel. 

As meat cooks it firms up (cooking protein causes it to tighten and expel moisture), so if you’ve felt enough steaks, you can tell how cooked they are by how they spring back when pressed.  Though it will take experience to be exact, here’s a quick and easy way to roughly estimate how done your steak is, using a tool you always have with you – your hand!

Directions:

1. Push down on the surface of your steak with a (clean!) finger.

2. Hold one hand relaxed, and likewise push down on it with a finger from your other hand.

Does your steak feel:

Like the meat of your thumb? (where your thumb meets the rest of your hand)
Then it’s currently Rare.

Like the area between your thumb and your palm?
Then it’s currently Medium.

Like the middle of your palm?
Then it’s currently Well Done

Rich and tender braised shortribs served on a buttery brioche bun topped with sweet slow-caramelized onions and sour-crisp tzatziki sauce.  In other words: heaven on a bun.

Drink Pairings: Belgian Dark Ale (such as St. Bernardus ABT 12) or Bitburger Pilsner (Germany)

Ingredients: (Makes 4 Servings)
2 medium Onions, sliced thin
4 Brioche Buns
1 ½ lbs Short Ribs (we recommend Kobe Short Ribs), braised according to this Braised Short Ribs Recipe
1 cup of the leftover Braising Liquid

Plus: Tzatziki Sauce

Directions:

1. Caramelize the onions.

2. Remove the bones, silver skin and any other tough tissue from the braised short ribs.  Shred the meat.

3. Add the meat to a frying pan with the braising liquid and bring it to a simmer.

4. Reduce the liquid down to a glaze.

5. Toast the brioche buns.

6. Put a healthy portion of the short rib meat on each bun, topped with the caramelized onions and tatziki sauce.  Serve.