I’ll Never Eat Mackerel

JWise Food

Fishwife Smoked Mackerel

I ate mackerel for the first time today. There had been no ambiguity in my mind that I didn’t like mackerel (I think I smelled it once). Earlier in the week, I’d prepped more than a pound of mung beans that had been with us too long. I used some for a bean and tuna salad, and yesterday, we cooked some up for breakfast with roasted green chili, onion, and crispy fried egg. And then lunch rolled around. I still had arugula in the fridge, some shallots, and I knew I was going to add a can of fish, but which one?

Maybe it was back on Thursday when I woke at 4:00 a.m. with the dumbest of thoughts, “Should our next salad feature sardines or mackerel?” I knew I had to tackle my fear of mackerel at some point. Heck, I bought it just for that reason if I’m honest. But, don’t put it past me to keep something in the pantry forever and then foist it on my wife, lest we get rid of it (i.e., in the trash). This time, I was determined to overcome that pitiful version of me. I’m 63 years old, damn it.

It was a now-or-never moment, and I needed to rise to the occasion. Oh yes, I wanted to gack a bit after opening that can of mackerel (the smell was not pleasant), but I’ve also had plenty of washed-rind cheeses that might have stunk more. I flaked that mackerel to the best of my ability before folding it into our lunch, and with the trepidation of a petulant three-year-old determined to have a fit before they eat something a parent wants them to try, I half-skulked off with my bowl of putrified ocean ass knowing that unless I started vomiting, I would overcome this fear that had no good basis in my bias against innocent little mackerels. Yeah, you know the rest of the story. It was actually pretty good, so good that after finishing it, Caroline and I went to the store to pick up six more cans of this amazing Fishwife Smoked Mackerel with Chili Flakes. With those now in the pantry, I’m committed to trying different preparations of mackerel before I graduate to eating it straight out of the can, when I’m about 110 years old.

Vaccinated for Domestic Travel

JWise Photo of the Day

Bandages on Caroline's arm

Getting ready to venture into Middle America, Caroline and I had appointments at Walgreens this morning to get vaccinated up, as one can never be too safe when heading into the wilds. Two in one arm, one in the other, that’s how Caroline rolls. As for me, I opt for the Robert Kennedy school of protection, hence my breakfast of raccoon penis this morning after snorting a judicious amount of cocaine off a toilet seat at a nearby gas station. I’d like to write more here on this post, but how does one follow up after the admission of doing such things? Oh yeah, I should become a government official!

Sulfur Beans with Smoked Turkey

JWise Food

Sulfur bean and smoked turkey stew

The dreaded creeping cholesterol monster is chasing Caroline and me, meaning we are looking for more fiber, omega-3s, and cutting way down on pork and beef. This created an initial shock of what we might lose, as smoky beans are a favorite of ours, be they seasoned by bacon or a smoked hamhock. We are already familiar with smoky paprika, but some of the yummy factor that pork fat provides has typically been missing. Tonight, our bean dish used smoked turkey thigh, and it turned out perfect. The bean type is known as Sulfur. The seed stock that allowed this bean variety to be saved was from Brewer, Maine, near Bangor. These heirlooms are only available from Baer’s Best Beans, where Charley Baer has been working for more than 30 years to bring beans into cultivation that might otherwise be lost.

Sulfur beans don’t require soaking, so last night, I put a pound of them in the crockpot with my still frozen smoked turkey thigh, a chopped onion, garlic, carrots, bay leaves, dried thyme, and plenty of water. I cooked them on low for nearly 14 hours. They cooked up as a wonderful comfort food, which gives me confidence in using smoked turkey in the future.

Shrimp & Cassoulet Bean Salad

JWise Food

Shrimp & Cassoulet Bean Salad

The recipe called for a Tarbais bean, a.k.a. the Cassoulet, which we had on hand. But this dish, a French-Californian fusion, wasn’t immediately on the menu. It sprang into our meal plan out of necessity because one of its ingredients was sent to me in a package where an ice pack was completely thawed. The relatively fragile item within was a package of Boquerones, Spanish white anchovies in vinegar. The customer service rep of the company that had mailed them immediately volunteered to replace them or refund our money, no questions asked, but I asked him to hold off, as the package wasn’t warm, per se, and maybe had stayed just cool enough. In any case, we’d open them on Sunday, do the sniff test followed by the nibble test, and if they passed, we’d eat them, and if we were still alive on Monday, I’d let him know the verdict.

Getting started the night before, I had the opportunity to try the baking soda process on our beans as I put them to soak. You see, adjacent to my recent bean-buying splurge, I identified about five pounds of beans of unknown age in our pantry, and I knew they were quite old. An email search revealed that these Cassoulet beans from Rancho Gordo were sent to us in June 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means they were likely picked and dried back in late summer 2019, making these seven years old. I didn’t have much hope, but that was wrong; they turned out perfect. With that out of the way and Sunday evening coming on quick, we could turn our attention to the anchovies in the fridge with Caroline acting as the guinea pig, like she always is. I should point out that I’m already apprehensive about using anchovies, even if they are called Boquerones. Sexy name or not, they are still anchovies, and it’s taken me a long time to become an avid fish fan. Heck, last year was the first time I ever ate sardines, and sometime this year, I’m going to try mackerel. But more of that when the day comes.

Back to the bean salad at hand, we picked up the fresh raw shrimp and some arugula at the store. We had the piquillo peppers in our pantry along with a new bottle of Spanish Columela 30-year-aged sherry vinegar. Add shallots, some Dijon mustard, olive oil, and a fried egg each, and dinner was served. Neither Caroline nor I anticipated this salad would be an instant favorite for the two of us, but it was. It was so amazing that we skipped the planned use of more of the Cassoulet beans and instead, on the next day, made the same salad again, this time with even more of those yummy anchovies.

Sinaloa Mayocobas

JWise Food

Mayocoba Beans from Sinaloa, Mexico

Psst, hey man, want some beans? That’s how I first met Brenda, my Sinaloa Cowgirl frijoles dealer. And they weren’t just any beans: they are Mayocobas from the mothership in Mexico, and they are gold. If you think pintos or black beans are great, these beans melt brains and taste buds. To ensure that these did just that, Brenda hooked us up with her personal recipe for Charro Beans. Before going bean-elitist here, I already know that these are also known as Peruano, Canary, and Mexican Yellow Beans, but that’s not important; only the preparation matters.

Brenda told me not to soak these and just dump them straight into the crockpot with a proper amount of salt, enough water, and to let them cook on low overnight. She insisted that I add nothing else. The next day, I needed to visit Carneceria Los Pinos, about 15 miles away from me, as only their chorizo was worthy of her gift. Lucky me, they also had white onion, serrano peppers, Roma tomatoes, and the crucial Salchichas de Pavo, a.k.a. turkey hot dogs. I was incredulous about this last item and had to ask more than once if she was serious about turning Charro Beans into Beanie Weenies. No joke, turkey hot dogs for the win. Those ingredients were fried all together before I added the mixture to the crockpot with a couple of tablespoons of chicken bouillon from good ‘ol German brand Knorr; another favorite of Mexicans.

The beans are drop-dead perfect, even with those funky turkey hot dogs. I admit, she told me I should use lard (manteca), but cholesterol said to skip it. As good as these Charro Beans are, they were even better the following day. Next time I make them, the one thing I would change is doubling the amount of serranos from two to four, maybe even five.

My First Vibe Coded App!

JWise Food, Moments

Vibe coded bean app tracking recipes and ingredients

Last week, I wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that I should vibe code an app for managing my bean recipes and ingredients. Well, that’s exactly what I did this morning. Ryan, another coffee shop regular, encouraged me to grab Codex from OpenAI or Claude Code and give it a try. I scoffed at the silly idea, thinking, I don’t have time for that.”\ After he left, that’s exactly what I did though: I downloaded and installed Codex. Ten minutes later, I was giving it permission to read a directory with my recipes and ingredient lists. I identified the layout structure of the text and the spreadsheets to Codex. Minutes later, I had this rudimentary app running locally on my computer. See screencap above.

I see the potential utility here plain as day. This idea of having my recipes, inventory, and shopping list living on my phone is an obvious no-brainer. Now that I have to give consideration to exactly what I’d want from such an app before I throw it up on one of my unused domain names to be available all the time, no matter where I’m at, as one never knows when the need arises to check on their bean recipes.

It’s mid-afternoon as I return to this post, and while I thought this app might be a great assistant for tackling bean management issues regarding the hundreds of recipes split between salad or crockpot variants, I had another thought: Why don’t I create a complete inventory of all foodstuffs we have on hand, all recipes we already enjoy, and those we are looking forward to trying?

Agents start to enter the picture and make sense. I buy beans from twelve different sources, they are often out of stock, awaiting a new harvest, and while a couple have notification processes, most do not. Or maybe they have brought a new bean into inventory that is not in our list of 124 varieties we own or have tried out of the 399 estimated to exist. Utilizing AI agents, it could have them make daily sweeps of those resellers and alert me when something interesting shows up. Come to think of it, if I understand things correctly, I can also give it permission to purchase me a pre-agreed-upon amount, simply by asking my permission to buy them by text.

This brings me to shopping agents. Recently, I was looking for the lowest price I could find for Fishwife Albacore Tuna in Spicy Olive Oil. Target at $6.99, while not as cheap as Costco (they only had it for a short time though), was the best price I could find. So, on their site, I ordered ten cans to pick up during the day. When I got to the store, I visited the shelf where tinned fish is kept, and checked what else was on offer. On sale for 50% off was more Fishwife, Albacore Tuna in Olive Oil for only $3.49 a can, far cheaper than Amazon. I bought a case of twelve. Writing this, I’m wondering who else in Phoenix might be selling Fishwife product and is running a sale that I don’t know about, if I had an agent working on my behalf scouring these company websites, I could keep up on where I can save us money without the effort of me spending time in a browser searching daily or worse, visiting each store to try and keep up.

Writing “out loud,” so to speak, I see that my helper app should also be able to negotiate the creation of our meal plans. If I’m looking at a recipe, why should I be able to assign it to a particular day? Once I have two weeks of meals mapped out, which is typically as far as I try to see forward, I could have the agent notify me in the morning what our meal plans are for the day. With that, it could also let me know if I have a particular bean to soak or ingredients I should be buying later in the day. From this logic, shouldn’t I be able to have it reason that if I bought something, say red cabbage with an average weight of 1.5 pounds (680 grams), and my recipe calls for only a quarter pound (113 grams), it could consider other recipes in our repertoire that use it and suggest subsequent meal ideas that will use the remaining ingredient if it sees I’ll likely have leftovers.

Uh-oh, this is a rabbit hole. I already know from experience that AI works quickly to dissect a recipe and its ingredients to provide me with a nutrition profile. This just had me ask AI (DeepSeek) to consider my activity, current weight, and age; it said I should be eating about 2,250 calories per day to maintain my weight. Great, DeepSeek, now consider that my triglycerides run on the high side, look at my meal plan, and offer me red flags where I’m crossing healthy levels from particular foods, such as those unhealthy fats, and offer green flags where other foods are offering healthy alternatives.

By having an overview of my diet and the impacts it can have on my diabetes, weight, and cholesterol, I think AI can build me a personal assistant that provides daily oversight on things I’ve never had an easy means to monitor. After bringing this all together, I’ll need a robot in the kitchen to cook on our behalf.

Just as I think I’m finished, I realize it will learn our favorite flavor profiles and then start searching for recipes that are complementary to our tastes. Then, I don’t need to know the names of Burmese salads that I don’t already have the name of, which stops me from asking for their recipe, or Korean stews we should try that aren’t available in Phoenix, Arizona. What about Indonesian recipes that are healthy and complement our interest in flavors from other lands? My agent could constantly be on the lookout for those treasures, even making suggestions that would alter a recipe to fit my diet restrictions.

All I needed to do was take my eye off the novel that has consumed me for more than two years to open the headspace to think a bit differently. Although I should add, this is my way of lashing out at my doctor who can recommend meds, but can’t give me real guidelines that are compatible with my likes, lifestyle, and culinary curiosities.