I was a chicken when it came to fish. I could cook a terrific Thai green curry, or a mean vindaloo, or a yellow cloud of hollandaise. But when I used to cook seafood, I froze. The mussels vulcanized; the salmon was overdone. Cooked cod resembled a glacier: it calved sections of itself. I knew that seafood and lake fish are, in fact, the simplest things to cook.