So, Mark Bittman likes Mackerel. Well, I do too. The sleek blue tinged fish is, I think, the anti-salmon : a little ornery to farmed Salmon's accessible, independent minded rather than willing to go along.

Bittman's recipe is perfectly fine. And contra Bittman, who says "mackerel is best eaten when it is super-fresh," I tend to think quite the opposite. My taste runs to preserved mackerel - whether smoked, and make into a salad with beets, or scooped into a baked potato. Even with fresh mackerel, I'd rather it was pickled for a day or two first, in lemon, and capers, and white wine. In any case, the only mackerel I'm likely to have right now is sushi-ed mackerel. Which is more literally true than it usually is when someone uses that phrase, since mackerel sushi is exactly what my tired hands are balancing towards my mouth as I think about what to write.

Having said that, mackerel is the excuse for my favorite supermarket story of my clerkship year. I had gone to my usual supermarket in Wilmington to see if I could luck into enough mackerel to preserve in oil, and asked the woman behind the fish counter. She said, "mackerel? Mackerel? What, you goin' fishin'?"

Of course, this is the same place that charged figs as pearl onions for about a month in the summer until I caught on. So culinary ignorance isn't all bad. And mackerel certainly isn't either.