Happy Arbor Day! Celebrate with smoked paddlefish nicoise, page 114-115

Happy Arbor Day! What a great holiday, celebrating trees! Yah. Trees are great, aren't they?!

My arborist friend kindly invited us over to his (inagural, I hope) Arbor Day party/take-a-dish. Now wasn't that a good idea having an Arbor Day party? I rather think so. In fact, I'd love to hear about someone else seconding their action by hosting their own Arbor Day party.

I really wanted to share a dish from from our woods to food project for the take-a-dish. Since we recently got paddlefish, Fred smoked a batch of it so I could make the one paddlefish dish in the recipe book: smoked paddlefish Nicoise (pronounced ney-swaaz, or so I hear).

Nicoise for those who aren't familiar but want to be (and that should be all of us 'cause it's a fun dish to make) is a platter of cubes of firm fish along with lightly steamed vegies and potatoes drizzled with a lemon vinegarette and herbs, all served at room temperature.

Yum. I so enjoyed bringing this dish to the party. I used sweet little carrots from the farmers market with their tops still on, fingerling potatoes, campari tomatoes, fresh asparagus, corn off the cob, olives, our own hard boiled eggs, and of couse smoked paddlefish. We served the dish with a fresh baguette from Uprise, a local bakery. In fact, we ended up taking the baker's two boys home with us from the farmer's market so they could play with our boys!

I think people at the party enjoyed the Nicoise. I brought the recipe book as well to help explain to people our project of hunting/gathering/fishing and cooking our way through the Cooking Wild in Missouri book in a year while blogging about it. It's fun to talk about. One lady at the party had recently moved to Missouri and wasn't aware that there were trees that produced edible nuts here. Then another lady told her black walnuts were her absolute favorite nut. We talked about how it's interesting doing a year long project and that her husband, who'se a music fan, programmed his stereo to play a different song when he woke up every day for a year. Fun, eh? He kept a record of his songs.

I'm glad to have made Nicoise. It's quite pretty and like I like to eat: lots of vegies with some tasty and lean meat on a platter for all to share. Thank you, Bernadette, for the experience. And, thanks for the Arbor Day party, ya'll.