Weekday Meals

Weekdays are a busy time for me, and it's easy to get into a habit of eating fast food, frozen food, or take-out food. When time and energy are at a premium, the goodness of your food can get sacrificed. Now, I'm not saying to stop getting those Cane's chicken fingers on the way home from work - just that 3 times a week is probably too many.

I left school at 6:35 today. I was already pretty hungry!

My favorite easy and quick recipe is one my mom used to make all the time - baked salmon plus some sort of vegetable. The words baked salmon even as I write them bring up thoughts of hard, flavorless, dried out fish at a potluck buffet line, because people don't know how to treat a fish right. I don't think I ever connoted my mom's salmon with that monstrosity, but "baked" is quite literally the method of cooking involved, so I'm not sure what else to call it.

Yummy Salmon

Things you should just have in your kitchen

• soy sauce
• fresh garlic (you can buy a big bag of this - they last for 3-6 months in bulb form)
• ginger root
• sesame oil
• butter
• salt
• pepper
• olive oil
• aluminum foil
• baking sheet

Things to pick up at the grocery store

• Salmon fillet (just eyeball how much you think you'll eat; I usually eat about half a pound by myself, but it's nice to have some leftovers too)

A note on what type of salmon to buy:

People get really intense about what type of salmon to buy. Especially people from the Pacific Northwest. In most places, though, you might only have one or two choices of what type of salmon to buy. If you're cooking for someone who's going to raise a fuss about you making farm-raised "Atlantic" salmon (and they put hand quotes around the Atlantic part as a preface to informing you that "Atlantic" salmon isn't a real thing), I suggest you disown that person and cook for someone else. This is about a quick weekday meal, so don't go spending $35 on wild Alaskan king salmon. Just chill out.

Note #2:

As I was glancing back over this I thought I had written "drown" instead of "disown". Either one is acceptable.

• white wine (I usually buy a $10 bottle and use part of it for cooking and the rest of it for drinking; you could also just use some white cooking wine that you keep in the kitchen and it would work just fine)
• a lemon (you could use lemon juice that you have in your kitchen, but you have to go to the grocery store to pick up the salmon anyway, might as well get a fresh one)
• some sort of vegetable that doesn't take too long to cook (I like broccoli with the salmon)

When I got home I realized I still had some of that same wine in the fridge. Sigh.

When you get home

Why I can't add a picture in the middle of a numbered list without having the numbers restart at 1, I will never understand.

1. Put the oven at 400 degrees.
2. Make an aluminum foil boat by folding up the edges of the foil - there's going to be some liquid involved so the boat part is just to make sure it doesn't spill out of the foil. It also helps because you don't really get anything on the baking sheet so usually a quick rinse is enough to clean it.
3. Wash the salmon fillet. I just run some cold water over and use a knife to get off any remaining scales that the fish counter didn't get (they never get them all if you just get it from a regular grocery store). If you're one of those weirdos that doesn't eat the skin, I guess you can leave the scales on.
4. Pat the fish dry with paper towels and plop it in the middle of your foil boat.
5. Add soy sauce (1/4 cup), white wine (2 tbsp), sesame oil (1 tsp), the juice of one lemon, and season both sides of the fish with salt and pepper. The amounts in parentheses are approximate and probably depend on the size of the fish and stuff. I've never measured because it's a week day and who has time to get those things out and then wash them afterward??
6. Smash some garlic and remove the peel. Chop up some ginger root into pieces. The pieces should be large enough to brush off the fish when you're done cooking, because aside from my girlfriend, nobody likes eating a chunk of unexpected ginger. Arrange the garlic and ginger on top of the fish in a roughly uniform distribution.
7. Cut up a few chunks of butter and arrange on top of the fish as well.
8. If there's a part of the fish that's a lot thinner than another part of the fish, cover up the thin bit with aluminum foil so it doesn't overcook and dry out like the gross buffet fish.
9. Stick the fish in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until it seems done on the inside.
10. While the fish is in the oven, smash up some more garlic and cut it up finely.
11. Heat up some olive oil in a pan or wok on medium heat and throw the garlic in there.
12. Right before the garlic starts turning brown, throw your veggies in there. Season with some salt and pepper. Stir it around a bit. Then add about a quarter cup (???) of water and cover it to let it steam.
13. There are some other things you could do to the veggies at this point but we can save that for a weekend meal. This will do just fine for the weekday. Cook the veggies until they're as done as you want them.
14. Take the salmon out of the oven. Turn the oven off. At this point my mom always used to put some green onions on top of the salmon. I always forget to buy this from the grocery store and even when I do remember I end up with way too much to use in a timely manner. Although sometimes I have some from the onions that started sprouting because I forgot about them.
15. Eat the salmon and the veggies. Drink the wine.
16. This also tastes good with some white rice, but we're trying to cut down on carbs.

Million-dollar idea: Breed a strain of broccoli that doesn't have a stalk.
Alice: "I like the stalk."
Kevin: "You're lying to yourself."

The pictures above correspond to steps 11-13

While you're waiting for the veggies to cook, enjoy some of that white wine.

Dig into the thickest part of the salmon with a fork to check for doneness.

At this point I was too hungry to care about plating.

A pleasant September evening = outdoor dining.

One hour after I left school I was dining on a delicious, healthy meal.

Enough left over for lunch tomorrow!

Clean up

All you really used was the baking sheet, which was lined with aluminum foil and might be completely clean, whatever you used to cook the veggies, a knife and chopping board, and your plate and utensils. If you were by yourself you quite possibly didn't even use a plate. This can be cleaned in a few minutes.

This meal usually requires a ten-minute trip to the grocery store after work, half an hour of cooking, twenty minutes of eating, and ten minutes of cleanup. It can easily be scaled to feed more or fewer people. If you use a really big piece of fish it might take more than 20 minutes.

Guest Post: Buffalo Cauliflower

So now that I have a successful food blog (it's had over 70 views!!), I have decided to include my first guest post! My words will be in the font you're reading, and hers will be in the one that isn't this one.

This is my beautiful girlfriend:

*sometimes I want to kill Kevin

She doesn't like cauliflower unless it's covered in buffalo sauce. She got this idea from a vegan restaurant she went to in Los Angeles. We add non-vegan things to it because we hate animals.

Buffalo Cauliflower

Tis true.  Having grown up on a hog farm in Southern Virginia, I don't really understand people who don't eat animals.  My vegan friends say things like, "But would you eat a pet cat?  Or a dog? If not, then it's illogical to eat any animal."  What they don't realize is that I would absolutely eat their beloved pets under certain circumstances.  With ketchup.  No regrets.  But I digress...

When I was in L.A., visiting some vegan friends, they took me to some fancy vegan restaurant called Sage.  Most things tasted like spicy cardboard, but the hero of the meal was the buffalo cauliflower.  It was so well executed.  For realz, I thought I was eating buffalo wings when I closed my eyes.  From that day onward, I swore that I would bring the deliciousness of buffalo cauliflower to the other LA.

So, I've tried this dish now a couple of different ways.  While I don't think mine is a perfect match to Sage's, I feel like I've gotten pretty close.  I adapted the recipe from Skinnytaste.

Servings: 6

Ingredients:

- 1 cup water

- 1 cup All Purpose Flour

- 2 tsp garlic powder

- 6.5 cups cauliflower florets

- bottle of Franks Hot Sauce

- 1 tbsp melted butter

• Preheat oven to 450 degrees
• Combine water, flour, and garlic in bowl, then mix.
• Dump florets into mixture and coat well.
• Using tongs, remove florets from mixture onto baking sheet.

• Bake 20 minutes.
• Remove cauliflower from heat; drizzle florets w/ butter.
• Pour bottle of Franks Hot Sauce over florets.

This picture was taken after we had already eaten some.

• Broil additional 3-5 minutes.
• Serve alone or with celery & blue cheese.

Or with a piece of fish. In retrospect possibly we should have eaten these things on different days.

Thank you to Veronica for the best guest post we've ever had on this blog! Coming later this week: how to cook and eat good food on a busy weekday, plus another guest post!

The Best Way to Eat Mustard Greens

Mustard greens are delicious and healthy, but probably pretty gross if you don't know how to cook them. They have a distinctive flavor that not everyone likes when it's all by itself - it's not at all like mustard seeds or mustard sauce, but it's somewhat bitter with a little bit of bite to it. You might like it just boiled with a bit of salt and some ginger root, but not everyone will. My favorite way to eat mustard greens involves roasting a whole chicken first. Obviously this isn't the only way to make delicious mustard greens, but it's the best way.

Roasting the chicken

Roasting the chicken is actually pretty easy. To roast the chicken I loosely followed this New York Times recipe, skipping the ramps, because where do you find ramps anyway?

Basically you need:

• A cast-iron pan (a 10-inch one is probably best, but I only have an 8-inch one and it seems to work fine)
• A good oven mitt (the cast-iron pan gets really hot and stays really hot!)
• A meat thermometer
• Some sort of non-metal stirring tool
• 1 whole chicken (this is where they usually suggest a size of chicken, but I find that all the chickens at my grocery store are about the same size, and never the size that's suggested in the recipe - it doesn't really matter that much)
• salt
• pepper
• garlic (as much as you'd like)
• 1 large lemon
• As much mustard greens as will fit in your pan if piled to the top.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees with the cast-iron pan inside. 

Rinse the chicken and discard the parts that you don't want. Sometimes I trim little ugly bits off. Pat the chicken as dry as you can with paper towels.

Pop the leg bones so they're flat against the thigh. Rub the inside and outside of the chicken with salt and pepper. I usually use kosher salt but whatever type of salt you have is most likely fine (like that fancy Himalayan pink salt - so pretty!). Fresh ground pepper is also preferable, but use whatever you've got. If you cook a lot though, you should probably have some kosher salt and a pepper grinder around for everything. Cut up the lemon into quarters and stick it in the cavity.

If for some reason you're starting to cook dinner several hours ahead of time, people tell me that it's good to put the chicken uncovered in the refrigerator for a few hours and let it dry out. This makes the skin crispy. I've never started cooking dinner more than a hour ahead of time so I have no experience with this. If you're like me, just leave the chicken out on the counter while the oven is preheating.

The cast-iron pan should by smoking a bit by now and really hot. Carefully take it out. Stick the chicken in leg/thigh side down (breast side up). This cooks the dark meat a little faster so that everything comes out even and nothing comes out dry.

After you put the chicken in the oven, start to get some ventilation going. I've set off the fire alarm literally every time I've ever cooked this, because the high heat gets things really smoky. The chicken goes in the oven at 500 for about 45 minutes. That's for about a 4-5 pound bird, so adjust as needed. Use the thermometer to make sure you don't get salmonella (it should get to 165 degrees, although if it's a bit less when you take it out it will get there while it's resting). At about 35 minutes, throw in some coarsely chopped garlic.

Once the chicken is done, take it out, and remove the chicken from the pan and onto some sort of platter (I usually just use a chopping board). Don't eat the chicken yet. It will smell and look delicious, but you have to wait.

The pan is now full of delicious chicken drippings and garlic that has been cooking in the delicious chicken drippings. Throw in as much mustard greens as you can fit in the pan. Pile it up high. It will take a few minutes for them to cook down; just stir them around a little bit so nothing burns. Medium heat on the stove is fine. Be careful!! The pan is still really hot - you just took it out of a 500 degree oven! Speaking of which, make sure you turned your oven off.

Above is a picture of kale, not mustard greens. I didn't have any mustard greens.

Don't cut into the chicken until the greens are all done.