Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Japanese researchers have coaxed salmon to lay fertile trout eggs. They injected sperm-producing cells from trout into newly hatched, sterilized male salmon, and 1/3 of the fish grew up to produce trout sperm. Furthermore, when they injected the same male cells into sterilized female salmon, some of them laid trout eggs.

The researchers used the resulting trans-species [my term] trout sperm to fertilize both wild trout eggs and trout eggs laid by the female salmon. All the resulting fish were pure trout.

The next step is to try the process in reverse: inject stem cells from threatened species of salmon into rainbow trout, which are plentiful.

At home in Japan, the goal is to produce bluefin tuna: the lead researcher, Goro Yoshizaki, "has begun experiments on how to produce baby tuna from mackerel,which are nearly a thousand times smaller than adult tuna. If it works,'we can save space, cost and labor.'"

I wanted to do something different on/with pasta. Hence, rotini and broccoli florets agli e olio, which is to say topped with lightly browned garlic and lots of olive oil. The recipe I found called for sauteeing fresh parsley in the oil along with the garlic, but we didn't have any. (I didn't decide to do this until late afternoon, well after we went out shopping.)

With that, we had little mackerel filets, cooked quickly in more olive oil and topped with fresh ginger. (Also a bit of dill, but I could barely taste that.)

Next time, maybe a bit less garlic, and parsley or maybe fresh basil.

Which reminds me, the three of us had pho for lunch on Friday (at Le in Harvard Square, "formerly Pho Pasteur" as it says on the menu), with lots of fresh basil, and it was very good indeed.

I picked up a nice piece of flounder filet from our usual fishmonger this morning, and cooked it for lunch.

Cut fish in half, to serve easily to two people. Melt plenty of butter in the pan over a low light. When it's melted, pour most of it into a bowl and mix in ginger paste (about 1 part ginger to three parts butter), and a handful of dried chives. The chives were a last-minute impulse, and any number of herbs might do as well.

Turn the heat up under the pan. Cook the fish in the remaining butter for about two minutes on the first side, turn and cook another minute. Spoon the ginger butter over the fish.

I served this with thin slices of baguette, and lemon wedges. It was good.