I’m going to bill this as “adventure cooking” — Upward Wing was in downtown Baltimore’s Inner Harbor this fall, and for sailors, anything downtown is adventurous!  While Captain Peter tended to land-job obligations, Pirate Kristin headed up Federal Hill to Cross Street market to figure out what to serve for dinner as they set sail to head home to Annapolis that evening.  This is much simpler than my Ceviche Verde — you can make it with fish, lime, and whatever you have for seasoning.

I bought Cross Street market out of flounder to start with — a pound with the skin on.  The proprietor kindly removed the skin and wrapped the fish up for me to carry back, putting a separate bag of clean, food-grade ice in the package to keep it cold on my walk.

In addition to the flounder, I picked up a red onion, a couple of hot peppers, and a bunch of cilantro.  I already had limes from a week of making Dark-n-Stormy by the pitcher for the captain’s land-colleagues who stopped by for cocktails, as well as some green salad olives and olive oil.

This is when I became so grateful for the separate, clean baggie of a couple handfuls of ice.  If you soak red onions in ice water it takes away some of their bite.  But I didn’t want to buy a 10-pound bag at the marina office just for that! Submerge thick slices of onion in ice water for about 10 or 15 minutes.

Dice the fish into about 1/2 inch dice.  Mind you, you can’t really dice fish — there’s a lot of pulling and shredding — but that’s about the size you want to get to.  Shape is irrelevant!  Salt and pepper the fish.

Juice the limes directly onto the fish.  You want about 4 tablespoons juice for the little-less-than-a-pound of fish, so 4 smallish but juicy limes did the trick.

Seed and roughly chop the peppers to prepare for mincing.  I had a little bit of a language barrier with the proprietor of the produce stand in the market and wasn’t really clear on what and thus exactly HOW hot these were, so I seeded them carefully, gave them a rinse, and minced them pretty finely in my hand processor.

That, and adequate beer served with the ceviche, should do it!  Add the peppers to the fish, and stir it all together.

Lift the onion out of the ice water, drain well, mince it finely, and add to the fish.

Finally, give half a bunch of cilantro and a good handful of salad olives a whirl in the processor to chop.  Add to the fish and stir it all together well.  Let this sit in the icebox for a couple of hours to season.

Serve with corn chips and beer…

And a brilliant sunset on the way out of the harbor!