Get to Know Your Shellfish

Shellfish are festive, which is why so many people eat it this time of year. But not many people know much about it -- the main questions we get are "Is it wild?" Or "Is it fresh?" Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I'll go through the various shellfish species and tell you what you should be looking for, wherever you're shopping for shellfish.

SHELLFISH THAT SHIPS FROZEN
Shellfish are basically shipped 2 ways: Frozen (pre-cooked or raw) or alive. Shellfish tend to be more perishable than fin fish, so here's how most of the shellfish we sell arrives:
SHRIMP: Frozen at the source, either PDV (peeled and deveined) so it's ready to cook, or EZ peel, with the shell still on, but split down the back with the sand vein removed. All of our frozen shrimp is raw, and needs to be cooked before eating. We don't  regularly sell the shell-on shrimp with the head still on, because nobody eats the heads, so why pay for it? We do bring it in for people who have a recipe that calls for it, but most people prefer their shrimp headless.

     We go through hundreds of pounds of our cooked cocktail shrimp every year during the holidays. We cook both farm raised and wild shrimp, but most of what we sell is farm raised. We don't source our shrimp from certain areas of east Asia, because we don't feel that we can trust how the shrimp is handled or what they feed it. Our shrimp is mainly from small farms in Indonesia, an industry vital to the local economy. We cook it fresh daily, with our own blend of spices. It's delicious.
     Grocery stores very rarely cook their own shrimp - they buy shrimp that was cooked on a boat or in a factory and frozen, probably months ago, and thaw it out.
     Our PDV Gulf shrimp are wild, and also delicious, so if you just have to have wild shrimp, we have those, too.

KING OR SNOW CRAB LEGS, CRAB MEAT: Crab is so perishable that it's pretty much all cooked right on the boat, then frozen. It is occasionally possible to get cooked crab legs that haven't been frozen, but since they're all pre-cooked anyway, it makes little difference. Crab legs just need to be re-heated. I thaw mine out first in the fridge over night, then I put them in a large roasting pan with a cup of water, cover the pan with foil, and steam in the oven for about 20 minutes at 400 degrees. I serve them with herb butter and lemon or our Lemon Dill Sauce.
     Crab meat also comes in cans - we get the restaurant-quality lump crab meat that needs to be refrigerated, a much higher grade of crab meat than the stuff that's packed to be kept on your pantry shelf. We don't recommend canned crab meat that doesn't require refrigeration.
LOBSTER TAILS:  Lobsters are nasty creatures that can't be farmed because they would kill and eat each other. That's why they put those rubber bands on their claws in lobster tanks - to keep them from lobstercide. We get ours from 2 sources, the northern US and Canadian East Coast, and off the coast of northern Australia.

    Once endangered, fishing regulations have helped the resource rebound -- females caught in traps get thrown back to reproduce, the males land on your dinner plate. Lobster tails are frozen right after harvesting, and are shipped raw, so they need to be cooked, not just warmed up.
     Our North Aussie tails are harvested by aboriginal farmers off the coast of Darwin - they consider their lobster fishing areas sacred, and manage the fishery very well.
SCALLOPS - SEA OR BAY: Sea and bay scallops (the smaller ones) are deliciously sweet in many recipes, but are the most confusing of all shellfish. They can be shipped and sold "fresh," but the packers are allowed to add chemical salts to the scallops, so that they hold their moisture and are preserved. This gives the scallops a strange, metallic taste, not very pleasant. The frozen, or "dry pack" scallops are the ones to buy - they don't contain chemicals.
     Scallops are harvested wild, which is very damaging to the sea bed, or they are being farm raised, like oysters and mussels. In this case especially, farmed is better for the environment.

SHELLFISH THAT SHIPS ALIVE 
Other shellfish that's very perishable ships best alive, which means that you have to kill it in order to eat it. In fact, if it isn't alive when you cook it or serve it, you generally shouldn't eat it.
OYSTERS: We pretty much always have our East Coast blue point oysters, by far the most popular with our customers. The taste is sweet, they're not as hard to open as some varieties are, and you can eat them just as they are, or with a dab of cocktails sauce or a squeeze of lemon and a little hot sauce, or like the French with vinegar and shallots,. During the holidays, we get requests for other oysters, like Kumomotos from Washington State, and Malbec's from the East Coast. Pretty much all oysters are raised these days, because that allows the farmers to know that the water they come from is clean. They're raised in tidal waters, and the oyster grow on ropes that you can see at low tide -- if you ever get the chance to go to an oyster farm, it's quite a sight.

     The exception to the rule is our shucked oysters, which we sell by weight. These are meant to be cooked, not eaten raw, but it's much easier than shucking them when they're for stuffing or scalloped oysters, or any other cooked oyster dish.
NB: Anyone with auto-immune issues should be very careful about eating any uncooked seafood. 
MUSSELS: Like oysters, mussels these days are almost all farmed, which is a good thing. I remember the days of de-bearding the wild mussels, an onerous task. They often contained sand and grit, not the most pleasant experience. Now the farmed mussels are easy to prepare, just rinse in cold water and drop them in a pot with your cooking liquid of choice. And everybody gets to eat with their hands. Just provide lots of napkins and crusty bread to soak up the broth.
CLAMS: Like much of our shellfish in the US, stocks were horribly over-fished for years, threatening the resource, along with the problems brought by massive development along our shores, and with it massive pollution. The aquaculture operations that have grown over the past couple of decades are helping to preserve the wild resource, and provide us with a wonderful product. About 80% of our US clams are ocean raised. Unlike oysters and mussels, clams don't attach to ropes, they burrow into the sand, and have to be dug up.
SOFT SHELL CRABS: Only available in the spring and summer, when blue crabs are molting, these little guys are shipped alive. They die when we clean them for you, right when you buy them, and should be cooked (or frozen) within 24 hours. These are one of the tastiest treats from the sea. They make a super great sandwich! Once cleaned, you cook and eat the entire beast. Because they've been over-harvested in recent years, supplies are less available due to restrictions, and prices have gone up.
LIVE LOBSTERS: Ours come from the northeast coast of the US or the southeast coast of Canada. They should be live and kicking when you drop them into the pot, but if you get one that isn't very

lively and dies, it's OK to cook it right away, refrigerate it until you want to eat it, and just drop it in the pot with the others at the end, to warm it up. We will also cook your lobsters for you --
all you need to do is warm them up in the oven, or eat them cold - tastes great, either way!
Check out our various How To videos (cooking lobster tails, opening an oyster etc.) by Clicking Here: Shellfish Videos. Our lobster tail cooking video has over 1,000,000 views!

The Damn Cups...Finally!

My Great Grandmother Stemwell was a German immigrant living in Milwaukee, and her English wasn't very good. My dad, who had moved to Chicago, suggested that she listen to the Cubs games on the radio to help her language skills. Milwaukee at that time (late 1930s) had no major league baseball team, (the Brewers were a minor league team then), so lots of people up there were Cubs fans because they could hear the games on WGN radio.
     By the time I knew my great grandmother, her English was pretty good, but I didn't learn until later years how the Cubs had helped her. She became a die-hard fan, listening to every game. When my dad would call her he'd ask her how she was, and she'd invariably reply "Terrible, terrible, the damn Cups, they lost again."
     We all became Cubs fans, my younger brother Billy in particular. He loved going to games, and was a follower of Billy Buckner - he'd moved out west to California, but watched as many games as he could on WGN, the first "super station. " He was glad when they started playing night games at home - made it much easier for him to watch. I lost my little brother 8 years ago, sadly because of a medical condition that was totally curable but his insurance didn't cover the test he needed and he died before he could see his daughters grow up and his beloved Cubs win a world series. I bought him a brick outside Wrigley, we go and visit it whenever we go to games.
     My dad was a Cubs fan from his Milwaukee days, and would have loved seeing them win it all. He was great friends with John Allyn, who owned the White Sox in the 1960s and early 1970s, and he was also friends with Jack Brickhouse, with whom he played golf occasionally. We would go to the White Sox games and sit in the owners box at Comiskey, but it was never as much fun as sitting with the Cub fans in the bleachers at Wrigley. One time, when I was 18 and working a summer job up in Michigan, I'd come home for a family funeral and was flying back to Petoskey on a Tuesday morning. John Allyn wanted my dad to play golf, but he said he was taking me to the airport and couldn't. So Mr. Allyn said "I'll fly her and Marge (his wife) and Nancy (my mom) in the Sox plane, then you can play golf with me." So I, a huge Cubs fan, had to fly to Michigan in a plane that said Chicago White Sox on it. Hard to live down.
     Watching the playoffs this year nearly gave me a coronary. The guys didn't make it easy, for themselves or for their legion of fans. When Kris Bryant threw the ground ball to Tony Rizzo at first for the last out of the World Series, I had tears running down my cheeks, and I said, incredulously, to my husband, "they won!" How much my great grandmother, my dad and my brother would have cheered -- I'd like to think that somehow they were watching, perhaps through me or my children who were also glued to the TV. I honestly didn't think they would win it all in my lifetime -- thank you, to the Ricketts family who spent the money to get a great team, and to the players who played their hearts out.
     Grandma Stemwell would have to change their name, from the Damn Cups to the Great Cups, or the Super Cups - or probably she'd still call them the Damn Cups, but she'd be beaming from ear to ear.

Memories of State Street

I grew up just a few blocks from the Burhop family in Glenview, and my mother, a friend of Vern and Janis Burhop, would call Vern at the State St. store and he would bring home her seafood order, even dropping it off at our house. I only remember going to the State St. store once as a child, when I thought it seemed very big and the men in white coats and brimmed hats behind the counter seemed quite intimidating.

State St. fish counter c. 1960

    In the 1970s, when I started dating Jeff Burhop, he took me down to see the State St. location, both in the front retail space, and in back, where the thousands of pounds of wholesale seafood was moving in and out. Whole tuna, giant turbot, cases of shrimp and lobster tails.
     I loved it -- it was amazingly Dickensian, a mostly wooden building, with each room on a different level, making it hard to move things around except through human muscle power. There was a fleet of green and white Burhop delivery trucks that parked outside, and virtually every restaurant in town, if you asked where they got their fish, would say Burhop's, even if they didn't. Known for their quality and honesty, everyone wanted to claim that their fish was the best, hence from Burhop's.
     The owners of the building, the American Medical Assoc., also rented out the top floor of the building to a health club. With great regularity, someone up there would leave the showers on until there was a flood and water would come through Burhop's ceiling, causing enormous, expensive damage. Burhop's had to take them to court to get repairs done, and finally the AMA made the decision to sell the building. That area of Chicago was getting more and more built up, and it was assumed that the new owners would tear down the old building, so Burhop's had to move. A new location for the wholesale was found near Elston Ave., much newer and far less interesting, but easier to keep clean. What was Burhop's for about 50 years became the Weber Grill Restaurant. The retail store was moved to the corner of LaSalle and Chicago, and was dubbed One Fish Plaza.
     By this time, Vern had retired very quickly, because of health issues, and two new partners bought him out, joining forces with Jeff and his brother Jim. This became a period of extreme change -- the new partners, one a lawyer, the other in real estate, had grand ideas but little experience in seafood, retail or wholesale. Jeff and Jim, who had the experience, were basically not consulted or their advice was ignored about many of the changes that the new partners made, and the result, along with other influencing factors, was the closing of the wholesale side of the business.
     Many restaurants went out of business owing Burhop's large sums of money for seafood, and then the owners would open a new restaurant a block away and want Burhop's to deliver fish. Competitors would sell fillets of west coast flounder which they were able to sell very cheaply, and call it genuine Dover sole. Chefs who should have known better were fooled.  Too much money was being lost, so Burhop's wholesale was shuttered, and the focus was put on expanding the retail.
     Up to seven retail locations by the mid 80s, the decisions made by the new partners came back to bite us. A couple of the locations turned out to be extremely bad choices, and were shuttered after sizable losses. One Fish Plaza was closed after the building was sold, leaving Burhop's with no Chicago store for the first time in almost 60 years. Two more of the suburban stores closed, leaving Glenview, Wilmette, Hinsdale and Highland Park. The Highland Park store, in an out-of-the-way location, closed, and then the remaining three stores were sold to pay outstanding debt. Jeff had left the company a year before it was sold, his brother after the sale. Glenview and Hinsdale were bought by a former Burhop's employee, Phil Kulin, and Wilmette was purchased by the owner of the Plaza del Lago shopping center, Joe Moss.
     Two years later, Jeff put together a deal to buy back Hinsdale and Glenview, which he owned until the Glenview store was closed last September. The extremely high rent was just too much to make the store successful. The last family owned store, located in Hinsdale is now for sale, as there is no one in the family to take it over.
     For 90 years, Burhop's has stood out as the premier purveyor of fine seafood in the Chicago area -- as we look to retire, we hope to find someone who can continue the legacy. We have loved going to seafood shows and visiting wineries and wine tastings, meeting our many "foodie" customers, and enjoying the best seafood in the Chicago area in our own dining room. There is much to commend being in the seafood business!

     

Fish for those back to school blues

Recently I've run into a number of people sending off their first child to college - that's when it generally hits moms & dads that things will never quite be the same at home. The house gets quieter, the errands get fewer, though remaining kid(s) can expand his/her/their demands to fill the void. Don't worry - your college student will come back during the holidays, and it will seem like they never left. You'll breathe a sigh of relief when they go back to college.
     For parents who have littler ones going back to school, there will be more time during the day for work (and play - grown-up style). But most households these days have two working parents. So how to cope?
     As long as you have kids at home who are going back to school, life changes when summer ends  I was a "working mom," part time when the kids were very small, 2 days per week, then full time when they were around 10 and 11. I was lucky, I worked very close to home, and could do my shopping during lunch, take it home and put it away and be back at work. I could also call my husband, and ask him to bring home fresh fish several times a week - that was a real bonus. I was close enough to "pop in" on a regular basis, to make sure the kids were following the rules, e.g. no friends over when we weren't home. This was pre-cellphones, so monitoring their whereabouts was more difficult than it is today. Both kids often went to friends' houses after school, ones where mom was at home, and were very good about calling to tell me where they were. Here are some tips from my own experience to help you keep things running smoothly:
     1) Talk to your kids about "the rules" and why you have them. I think children respond much better to rules that are explained rather than Mom and Dad just laying down the law.
     2) Breaking the rules should have consequences - otherwise, there's no point in having rules.
     3) Eat together as a family every evening as much as possible - that's when you can tell each other what you all did during the day.
     4) Eat healthy foods - too many people in this country give their children fast food for dinner - like a pizza or fried chicken in a bucket - because it's easy. It's no wonder we have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes in the US - the expression "you are what you eat" has more meaning than most people realize.
     5) Incorporate seafood into at least 2 meals per week - fish is brain food, you can Google it, and kids' brains need a lot of nourishment as they develop. Our kids started on fish when they were babies, one of their first solid foods. We had a baby food grinder, and they got pretty much the same food we did, because we eat a lot of healthy food. Fresh fruits and vegetables, organic if available, lots of fish and occasionally some lean meat.  And our kids are definitely both brilliant (no prejudice here)...
     6) Talk to your kids quietly when you put them to bed - read the little ones a story. We used to play "The Goodnight Game," where the kids and I would share things that happened during the day - we'd each tell each other one good thing and one bad thing that happened, and one thing that we liked about each other. It was amazing what I learned about my kids during those quiet moments. And about myself. The other advantages to this - our kids never ever complained about going to bed, and they were always well rested for school. Our babysitters used to remark about how great it was to sit for kids who would cheerfully go to bed when told it was time.
     Enough sleep; good food; explained, enforceable rules; family togetherness time. Nothing hard here! Kids grow up incredibly fast - it will fly by. Take the time to make it good for all of you.

Dog Days Dining - Beat the Heat

August can be a very hot and steamy month. That's why some people pack up and head for Maine or Canada, hoping for a cool breeze.
     If you're stuck here, like I am, and you still have to cook, here are some easy meals that everyone in the family will enjoy.
1) Something on a bun.
There are so many tasty seafood items that you can serve on a bun - salmon burgers, crab cakes, a rare piece of grilled tuna, a piece of grilled mahi mahi, a piece of sauteed tilapia - there are many choices. Fire up the grill, get some nice soft buns (we like the pretzel buns we get from a local bakery, really tasty) and then top your fish with something yummy. Our stone Ground Mustard Sauce goes wonderfully with salmon burgers and crab cakes, tuna is great with Stonewall Wasabi Grill Sauce, mahi and tilapia are tasty with some of our Creamy Coleslaw on top, or make it really healthy with a heaping spoon of our Pico de Gallo or Tropical Salsa.
2) Tuna Salad & Melon or Tomato.
Pick up some nice ripe melons from the market, get about 1/2 pound of tuna salad per person (we have two, Crazy Cranberry and Nutty Tuna, both delicious with melon). If they're small melons, just cut in half and fill the center with salad. Bigger melons, cut a large wedge, or for kids, use a sharp knife to remove the melon from the rind and cut into smaller pieces. Set it on some mixed greens, maybe add a toasted English muffin or crusty bread, and dinner is served. You can also use a large tomato the same way - cut the tomato into 4 wedges, not going all the way through, and heap the center with tuna salad. Yummy, easy, healthy.
3) Kebabs.
We always have salmon and shrimp kebabs, but if you call and place an order, we'll make tuna, swordfish, scallops, just about any meaty fish, into a fresh kebab. They look tasty, they cook in a few minutes on the grill, all you need to add is perhaps a little marinade and some rice or roasted new potatoes. Or make your own -- 1 lb. of most fish will make 3 kebabs - cut into chunks and stack on a skewer with some fresh pepper and onion slices - colorful and tasty. Swordfish kebabs marinated in our Tahitian Marinade are amazing, and oh so easy.
These are just a few ideas - come on in and we'll suggest more!

My favorite summer salad, from Nice

Days after 9/11, the fish husband and I were in the south of France, and little local fire and police stations were all holding blood drives for the people of New York. It was incredibly touching, and it made me quite angry when we were told by our government that the French were no longer our friends and we had to change the name of French fries and French toast. Spare me. These people were lining up to give us their blood.
     Now the events this past week in Nice reminded me of that experience, so I looked for ways to help and found this recommended web site: http://www.giveforfrance.org/en, with the added suggestion of a donation to the French Red Cross. I made a donation, and then I made a Salade Nicoise.
     This wonderful summer salad is great for summer entertaining, because you can make it all ahead of time, and because most of the ingredients come from your local farmer's market, just like they do in France. The recipe is on our web site http://www.burhopsseafood.com/swordfish--mahi-mahi--tuna.html.  I cheat a little, so that I don't leave so much cleaning up to do -- I boil the potatoes in a pan that's large enough to allow me to drop in the eggs to hard boil after the potatoes cook for 15 minutes, then a couple of minutes later I drop in the green beans to cook. Potatoes total cooking time is about 20-25 minutes, eggs 8 minutes, beans 6 minutes.

 I grill the tuna for about 3 minutes total -- 1/2 lb. of tuna is enough for a salad to feed 4 to 6 people. As you can see from the photo, we like our tuna on the rare side. (The potatoes are under the tuna. I use small round multi-color ones.)
     A few weeks ago we had the pleasure of dining with friends at Ravinia, where I ordered a Salade Nicoise, and it contained no potatoes, only a ton of chopped lettuce and some canned tuna. There were a few olives and a couple of beans, but it's supposed to be a potato salad! A really good one.
     The French are obsessive about their food, and the result is some of the best food anywhere in the world. They are also basically very nice people. It makes my heart ache to think of the terrible events of Bastile Day in Nice, and how terrified everyone must have been. My Salade Nicoise is a very small way of honoring them. The city of Nice and all of France is in my heart, they have suffered some horrible attacks in the past year, by a group of people who would have us believe that killing innocent strangers will somehow make us sympathetic to their cause. It's not working.

Friends, Fish, Summer Entertaining

I love entertaining in the summer, because I can get so much great produce from the farmer's market, and because I can cook the main course outside on the grill, leaving a lot less to clean up. Here's my recipe for a great summer dinner party:
1) Put together a menu that won't require you to be in the kitchen cooking instead of enjoying a glass of wine with your guests.
2) Set up a beverage bar/table, with multiple choices - wines, beer, non-alcoholic choices (ice tea, lemonade, juice, soda etc., glasses and an ice bucket. We like to start with a sparkling wine, even if we're in shorts - it's just more festive.
3) Start with some easy finger foods - cocktail shrimp, spreads and crackers, baby carrots, fresh salsa and chips - all easy to eat, easy to serve. People can just help themselves.
4) Make your side dishes ahead - for a green salad, wash and drain your lettuce and put it back in the fridge. When I put the salad together, just before serving, I add fresh chopped herbs from the garden, usually some avocado and a sprinkling of fresh berries. Herb roasted potatoes, rice pilaf dishes or cous cous make great summer sides, and you can buy them already made from us or make your own and refrigerate the night before. Bring to room temp before serving, or if appropriate, warm up in the oven, not the microwave.
5) If possible, spend some time outside -- we do drinks and appetizers on the deck, then move inside for dinner when the mosquitoes come out.
6) Fish as a main course cooks really quickly - I've recently done shrimp kebabs (marinated the shrimp in a garlic basil marinade) and fresh wild salmon, grilled and then brushed with some of our Mustard Green pesto.  We LOVE our Weber gas grill - turning it on is so much easier than making a charcoal fire, and you can control the temperature. If guests are sitting outside, you can carry on talking to them while you cook. Other entree ideas include any of our kebabs, any of our fish fillets or steaks that are suitable for grilling, salmon burgers or crab cakes. You can also do a lobster or fish boil out on the grill - you just need a really big pot. We have recipes on our web site, www.burhopsseafood.com.
7) Keep dessert light -- our Key Lime pie is great, but I also often just do something like cookies and fresh fruit, or a little later in the summer, my fresh peach cake (made with buttermilk) which I make the morning of the party, after I get the peaches from the market. I serve it warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt.
8) Put fresh flowers on the table, and use real plates and utensils and cloth napkins - unless you're eating outside in a park somewhere, there is no need for disposables. You're just creating more garbage when you throw away all your plates, napkins and utensil. Plus it's a lot nicer to eat off of a real plate. I have a ton of cloth napkins in many colors, I get them on sale, and they make your table look nicer and your guests feel more special.
9) Invite compatible people - it's rarely fun to have people with wildly varying political or religious views sitting across the table. Unless, of course, you're Bill Maher and your dinner theme is politically incorrect.
10) Most important of all - marry a guy who's willing to do the cleaning up. After 38 years, my guy still does the dishes, and I absolutely love him for it.