— Judith Trusdell

What I like to do is, if you've ever heard of pork keta, it is an Italian dish where it's pork loin or pork belly that has been marinated in garlic and rosemary, anchovies, fennel seeds, all sorts of stuff. I put in a lot of chili flake, and then it's rolled up and tide and it's already in the skin. And so the skin gets cr crispy, crackling, crunchy on the outside, the inside tender and moist, super flavorful. You slice that thin, serve it with some mayonnaise and some grilled broccoli raw on some chibata toast. It's like the best sandwich in the world. Anyway, I take inspiration from that and I make it in a salmon or in arctic char, which is a small salmon type species. What I like about the char is that it's, uh, small enough so that it feeds my family of four for a couple of days rather than a whole salmon, which would feed my whole family for a week plus. So what I do is I take a headed and tailed fish and I butterfly it. So here's the backbone of the fish. I come in through the belly side and I butterfly along both sides of that backbone. Split it open. You take that backbone out, you now have the rib bones on either side. I'll slice those off very thinly, uh, very just right under those bones. Then I'll take out the pin bones, those little rib bones that run down the center of the filet. And now I've got a boneless filet that has been split open or butterflied. And then what I do is I skin, I take some of that filet off of this skin so that I've got this flap of skin still attached. And I've got now these strips of meat that I cut into strips, and then I make a marinade, fennel seeds, diced fresh fennel, tons and tons of garlic. I mentioned I'm a garlic farmer. I love me some garlic, tons of garlic, sauteed and olive oil. I'll throw in some almonds in there as well. Chunked up or sliver tons of lemon zest, lemon juice, chili powder, not chili powder, I'm sorry, chili flake in there as well. Lots of fennel seeds as I mentioned. And I'll make this whole paste out of this. I'll put in that lemon juice, lemon zest, et cetera. And once that cools down, I will marinate those strips and those of that filet in that, and then I'll place them all back in the skin and roll the whole thing up, tie it off like a roast. So it's beautiful. And, uh, the same thickness all the way throughout. And then I'll roast that at a very low temperature, 275 degrees until the internal temperature in the center reads about 130, which is cooked for fish. I'll take it outta the oven and then I'll crank up the broiler super, super high. And when that oven is screaming hot, I'll drizzle the outside with olive oil on top of that skin, which is now nice and dried out. I'll put it back in until it is crackling audibly crisp on the outside. I will take those, uh, bits of twine off in the roll. And you have this like beautiful ade of, of this sam beautiful pink colored flesh from the arctic char or the salmon. And you slice down through it and you get this wonderful crackling crispiness and texture of that. You get the texture of the marinade, those almonds on the inside, as well as that just beautiful aian flavor of that wonderful fennel and lemon and all that goodness slice that. Oh my gosh, like that is a fish centerpiece to be very proud of. It takes a day or so. But you know what, when cooking seafood, how often do you get a processed dish like that where you have time to really see to it, nurture it, love it, develop those flavors. And so that's something I really like. When I cook Thanksgiving, I take three days to cook. Why? Because I love it. I love the preparation of it. And so that idea that you get to really nurture a dish as you would with a stew, a long, slow braise, those kinds of things really call to me, especially, uh, this time of year when it gets cold. So there you go.