opah means moonfish

i'm no chef by any stretch of the imagination. but i really enjoy good food, so once in a while, i'll try my hand at cooking. the urge is usually fired up by chancing upon a yummy-sounding recipe or ingredient. this time, it was definitely the ingredient. 

i was pretty stoked to find opah at our local costco. i had some vague memory of it being a large fish favored in hawaii. (google it. it's pretty cool how large and weirdly beautiful the opah is.) it looked like tuna meat, only pale pinkish-orange in color. i was half certain it would make for good sashimi. (later research confirmed this.) but then i'm no fan of eating raw food at home. this is because wasabi seems to tastes better when it's from a restaurant and, more importantly, because bo learned all about proper food safety when he worked for ecolab. temperatures, work surfaces, stuff not touching other stuff especially when raw, and so on... all this triggered my dark suspicion that, despite any attempts at sanitizing, harmful bacteria lingers in massive quantities in my kitchen, unseen by the naked eye.

 

so i cooked the opah fillets using my own version of this recipe--that is, i pulled the whatever-you-can-find-in-the-kitchen cheat, skipped the too-time-consuming parts of the procedure, and used only 1/4 the amount of butter the recipe called for. (i mean, one entire pound of butter? really?! i don't think so!) the consensus was that it turned out pretty good. but then, it did have lemon, white wine and tomato. you can't go wrong with any of those three flavors in my book, so combining them is a sure winner!