Mexican. Thai.

Kathy visited the nearby Asian food store— “nearby” in this case meaning a 75-mile round trip— and returned with a whole red snapper and a whole tilapia. The snapper I stuffed with parsley and lemons, wrapped in banana leaves, and grilled.

Call it less than successful. I’m having a hard time mastering my new grill, which puts out a colossal number of BTUs, enough to incinerate any form of protein in jig time. Either my grilled dinner is turned to charcoal or it doesn’t cook at all. (Works fine with the rotisserie, though.) Alas for the poor snapper, which turned out after 20 minutes’ grilling to be quite raw: I turned on more burners and in another ten minutes managed to rescue what remained of the meal from a wrapping of shredded, completely incinerated banana leaves, which resembled nothing so much as burned newspaper.

The fish wasn’t bad, wasn’t good. A watermelon salsa helped.

I had better hopes for the tilapia, and decided to keep it off the grille until I mastered the machine’s intricacies. Complicating my cookery was my reluctance to go in search of more ingredients. I decided to cook it with what was in the house.

So I rubbed the fish down with pepper and sea salt and let it set in a lime juice-and-onion marinade for a while. I chopped up a whole bunch of cilantro, intending to make that fine Mexican dish, pescado en cilantro, wherein you bake the fish with a vast pile of cilantro on top. The cilantro cooks down to nothing while imparting its flavor to the fish. Simple and elegant.

Yet I was missing an ingredient. The recipe calls for chopped jalapenos to add those necessary ASTA Pungency Units. (Isn’t this techspeak, umm, interesting?)

We had no jalapenos, but I was confident I could turn up some serranos or Thai peppers or something that would work, or— if all else failed— a can of chopped green chile. But we had nothing. Nothing.

A New Mexican without chiles! It’s like a cat without his kibble, a cowboy without his boots, a Heinlein character without a slide rule.

The only source of Scoville Units I could find were a few teaspoonsful of leftover Thai green curry paste. Well, I thought, why the hell not? Should go nice with the lime juice, anyway.

So I diluted the curry paste in some olive oil— making this Mexican-Mediterranean-Thai fare— then poured it over the fish, added the heap of cilantro, and chucked it all in the oven at 375. When it was cooked, it was served with rice and bowls of gazpacho that Kathy had made from vegetables purchased at the local farmers’ market.

Holy Kanzeon Bosatsu in Heaven! What a terrific dish. The cilantro and the lime juice and the curry paste cooked down to an incredibly concentrated, flavorful sauce. The onions stayed crispy but soaked up enough of the sauce to be a delicious treat. And the kitchen retained a wonderful odor till the next morning.

Thai-Mexican cuisine. I don’t see how it can avoid being the Next Big Thing.