I’ll be honest, not that I am not usually, but, I really find it difficult to eat in a healthy manner. I mean, I eat healthy portions and I use healthy ingredients, but more often than not, those healthy ingredients are besieged by an onslaught of fat; be it cream, pork fat, butter, you know that really tasty stuff. I need like a fat-equals-flavor twelve step program.

We have made a huge change since my last few conversations with my internist. I got the usual lecture; less of this, more of that, cut that out completely, I can’t believe you actually DO that! So, I have spent time on the interweb Googling, and Googling until I found various methodologies and theories. So after much pondering and sleepless nights, I conversed with the wife and after many a negotiation and critical thought I had an epiphany. We’ll incorporate muh… modum… um… *sigh*

…moderation!

It seems we were actually doing that with the healthy stuff; moderating it when it should be the other way around. So call it a reverse healthy culinary application. I do.

Most of the meals that I have been preparing in this new health conscious manner have been purely experimental and not yet ready for the blog. I still have a nice uber-caloric comfort meal from time to time, it’s just that the ratio has changed.

With this meal, I had to share. I saw a recipe for sake sea bass in the May issue of Gourmet magazine and I thought, this looks healthy and flavorful. So I decided to give it a try. I only used the recipe as a guide and I can attest that this is a great launching pad for any type of improvisation that you can think of.

I decided to place a few shitake mushrooms at the bottom of the parchment paper topped with a 5-6 oz sea bass fillet that had been seasoned with salt and pepper.



The bass was then topped with a sake wine, soy sauce, red pepper flake mixture. I used enough of this for each pouch to come up to about halfway of the fillet. The finishing touch was a kiss of some shaved ginger, minced garlic, and scallions. Each pouch was tied with kitchen twine, placed on a baking sheet, then into a pre-heated 400 degree-f oven to 12-15 minutes. The parchment enclosure makes for a nice steaming vessel and the fillets were perfectly done. They were flaky, juicy, and full of flavor, with NO FAT!!!