Seared tuna salad

28 Saturday Sep 2013

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I don’t have a recipe link for this one, because I sort of made it up. I read a bunch of recipes and picked up ideas from them, then combined bits and pieces. So…

Sprinkle the tuna with rice vinegar and sesame seeds, then sear it in a pre-heated on high pan with a little coconut oil for about a minute per side. Slice into thin, bite-size pieces.

Mix two tablespoons of rice vinegar, two tablespoons of soy sauce, one teaspoon of wasabi powder, and 1/3 cup of olive oil, and whisk briskly. Pour over salad greens and sliced radishes. Add tuna.

Eat.

Say yum.

I did pour a touch more soy sauce on the tuna, because it needed a little color. But I don’t think it really needed it for the taste, although it didn’t hurt. The salad dressing had just a little bit of kick, so might have been good with some more wasabi, but I’d eat it exactly as it was any time.

Spicy tuna volcano

27 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Seafood

≈ 1 Comment

So CostCo sells seaweed salad. Once before I bought the giant box of it and ate seaweed salad for days. I actually thought that maybe I’d be done with seaweed salad after that, but turns out I still like it. And I particularly like it when it accompanies the spicy tuna volcano at Arigato, my favorite sushi restaurant.

When I saw the seaweed salad again, I wondered how hard the tuna volcano would be to make. Answer: EASY!

Chop fresh ahi tuna into small chunks.

Mix two tablespoons of sriracha sauce with one tablespoon of sesame oil and pour on the tuna. Add the green from two spring onions, finely chopped, and mix thoroughly. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Serve with sushi rice (1 1/3 cups fine-grain rice, cooked on the sushi setting of the rice cooker, mixed with 2 tbsps rice vinegar and 1 tbsp sugar) and seaweed salad.

Eat. Say yum. Yum, yum, yum, yum.

Given the price of the seaweed salad and the tuna (total, $33), it’s probably cheaper to buy it as an appetizer. But we have enough tuna left for another recipe and enough seaweed salad for a dozen more meals. And it really was delicious. Just as good as at the restaurant, and maybe even better — it had a bit more kick in my version.

Sweet chicken apple sausage salad

25 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Salad

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So the number of ways in which I didn’t follow this recipe almost outnumber the ways in which I did. But the recipe is http://www.yummly.com/recipe/external/Sweet-Apple-Chicken-Sausage_-Endive_-_-Blueberry-Salad-with-Toasted-Pecans-AllRecipes-201954

We had Aidell’s chicken apple sausage in the freezer and I wanted to use it up. Found this recipe and thought I’d give it a try. Endive and blueberries and pecans were expensive, though!

So I made it with basic salad greens, raspberries, and walnuts. The goat cheese was honey goat cheese that I’d had for a while. Because I knew the goat cheese might be sweet, I used less honey in the vinaigrette, maybe a little more than a tablespoon, instead of the two and a half tablespoons the recipe calls for.

It was delicious. Definitely say yum.

And also remarkably filling. The same amounts would be a spectacular side salad for four people, but for C and me, it made a very solid dinner, with a little leftover.

Chicken with Roasted Lemon, Olives, and Capers

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Chicken

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This dish was mostly based on this recipe from Kalyn’s kitchen: http://www.kalynskitchen.com/2007/03/recipe-favorites-chicken-with-roasted.html

I really liked the idea of the roasted lemons, and they were tasty. It’s an interestingly different flavor from simple lemon juice: both a little more bitter from the rind and a little sweeter somehow, probably from the roasting.

Things I did differently: well, only made half the recipe for starters. Pounded the chicken breasts thin and then sliced them in half, so cooked them for a lot less time. I didn’t have poultry seasoning, so I used a little kosher salt with the pepper. I also didn’t have green olives so I used kalamata. And I didn’t bother to rinse the capers. The chicken broth was homemade, so low-salt enough that it balanced out the flavors of the salty ingredients. I used coconut oil instead of olive for the cooking and then about a tsp of fake butter instead of the two tablespoons of real butter. Coconut oil seems to thicken a sauce nicely on its own.

Things I would do differently next time: probably mix whole-wheat flour with white. I could taste the flour and didn’t love it. Make sure the lemons are sliced thin and cut off any really big rind. Otherwise… well, maybe try it with green onions. But it was pretty delicious as it was, so I might not bother.

Two thumbs up — definite keeper!

Blue cheese burgers

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Beef

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Mix up some ground beef with crumbled blue cheese, some finely chopped onion and… nope, nothing else. That was it. I thought about adding something green–parsley or cilantro, but I didn’t want it to wind up tasting like meatloaf. Amounts entirely optional: I’d say go proportional, you want mostly meat with much less blue cheese and an even smaller amount of onion.

Shape into patties. Cook on a hot grill, five minutes per side. I actually timed it, because it was completely dark outside and I couldn’t see the grill at all. Came out just about perfect, although one minute more wouldn’t have hurt.

Serve with a side salad of spinach, red onion, cucumber, tomato, and feta cheese, and…maybe something else? I didn’t make the salad.

Drizzle both salad and burger with balsamic vinegar.

I would definitely make again, although I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to do so. It was tasty but not in the way that made me want to keep eating on the spot.

Spiced rum shrimp tacos

18 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by wyndes in Seafood

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Marinate shrimp in spiced rum (a couple glugs, maybe about 1/3 cup?), jerk seasoning & Season-all (1 tsp each–or, you know, whatever comes out of the container with a few good shakes), coconut oil (say 2 tablespoons?) and the juice from half a lime.

Saute a little red onion in coconut oil until it goes translucent (maybe 1/4 cup? I used considerably less than half an onion). That should take no more than two minutes. (Heat the pan first, at medium to high!) Add some cherry tomatoes, sliced in half. I used about two thirds of a container. Saute until they’re soft, but not mushy. Three minutes or so. Turn up the heat to high, wait a minute, then add the shrimp and cook quickly, turning frequently, as if it were stir-fry. Add some chopped cilantro, and squeeze a quarter of a lime over the mixture. After two to three minutes of cooking–probably closer to two–remove pan from heat.

In a tortilla, place some chopped avocado, shrimp mixture, plus sriracha to taste, a little more lime juice, a little more cilantro if you have it, and anything else that you happen to have lying around that might taste good — ie, lettuce, chopped cabbage, sour cream, greek yogurt, etc. Fold into a wrap.

Eat.

Say Yum.

Food, food, food

31 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by wyndes in Food, Randomness, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

I’m not going to turn this into a food blog, I promise. Apart from any other reason, I don’t feel inclined to learn enough about photography and lighting to do all the pretty pictures most food blogs have. That said, I’ve had so much yummy food lately.

I made this recipe for grilled shrimp with italian tomato salsa from simplyrecipes, and it was delicious. Brushing the shrimp with olive oil and sprinkling with salt made it so much tastier than shrimp just stuck on the grill, so yay, learned something new.

The next night, we made fish in parchment pockets again. We had a lot of the italian tomato salsa left over, so it became the vegetable used on top of coho salmon. . Yum, yum, and yum again. Never tried tomatoes with salmon before, but they added a lovely flavor.

Last night, we were going to have chicken and I decided to try an Asian-inspired pan sauce. Sherry, red wine vinegar, soy sauce and red paper flakes with a teaspoon of butter. It didn’t work out exactly the way I expected it to, because I decided to cook the rice noodles in the sauce and the sauce got soaked up by the noodles. Instead of a sauce poured over chicken and rice noodles, it wound up being spicy rice noodles with chicken. The noodles had serious kick to them, which blended well with the plain chicken, so serendipity for the win.

In other news, writing has been going really well, until this morning, when I decided that the chapter I’m working on stinks. *sigh* Yes, that is the reason I’m writing about food now. I promised myself I wasn’t leaving the house until I’d written 500 words one way or another, and this post counts for at least 350 of them.

However, I still love–and am definitely going to save, somehow, one way or another!–this bit:

Zane shrugged. “Tough to say. If you ask Akira, she’ll mutter some mumbo-jumbo about quantum entanglement and the position of photons in time.”

Hmm, when I went back to copy that bit, I found at least three more bits that I quite like. So maybe this chapter isn’t as bad as I was thinking it was an hour ago…

The Litany of New Foods

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by wyndes in Belize, Food

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Once upon a time, I liked only white foods. White rice, mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream. When I left home for the first time, I wound up eating plain pasta mostly, eventually graduating to crackers with slices of cheddar cheese, and then moving on to plain bagels with cream cheese. Sadly, I’m not kidding. During college, I could go days at a time eating only one of those foods and mostly eating other food under the mild social pressure of roommates and friends acting worried about me.

Michelle was the first person to teach me to eat and like other foods. When she and I spent six months in Europe together, she got me to try squid (it’s white, after all) and Nutella (initially with marshmallow fluff, I seem to recall) and even artichoke (served with mayo, which is, of course, white.) She liked to try every new fruit that came our way. Her attitude was “take a bite and if you don’t like it, stop there.” She even tried durian, which has a smell that is so completely overpoweringly disgusting that being in the same train compartment with one made me nauseous. (I cannot believe that wikipedia says that some people find it “pleasantly fragrant.” Those people are insane.)

Anyway, Michelle started me on a path to food curiosity and then I moved to San Francisco. Sushi. Thai. Indian. Dim sum. Avocados and mangoes. Weird ingredients like cilantro and salsa! From thinking that only white foods were good, I became an adventurous eater, always willing to try something new, at least once.

Before going to Belize, I thought “relatively poor country” plus “traveling on a tight budget” would equal “rice, beans, tortillas.” Well, I was right about the rice and beans part — almost every meal included them as a side — but I was wrong about the lack of adventure. What follows is a list of the new foods I tried, and my opinions about them.

Barracuda: A strong-tasting fish, more like swordfish than anything else I can compare it to. I ate it at least twice, I think, once in a coconut curry, and it was fine. Just fish, nothing amazing.

Conch: Wikipedia tells me it’s an edible snail. I wasn’t so sure about the edibility the first time I had it — it tasted like I imagine shoe leather would, only with less flavor. But I tried it in ceviche and again in a coconut curry and it was much better. I wouldn’t order it at a restaurant again, but I’ll try it if it comes my way.

Lionfish: Tasted like fish. White fish, maybe a little closer to haddock than snapper, but unremarkable. I suspect that it’s all about the preparation. I’d try it again as a creole dish or maybe fried, but I didn’t love it. (I only had a bite of Suzanne’s.)

Hogfish: One of the worst dishes I tried, but I suspect it was the preparation. I ordered it with butter and garlic and it came to me swimming in a sea of yellow liquid. I like butter, but more as a flavor than as a soup. Anyway, the fish was fine, but not exciting. Same restaurant as the lionfish, so again, a different preparation might have made me like it more.

Hudut: Wikipedia failed me! But hudut is a traditional fish stew of the Garifuna people, made with coconut, garlic, and fish. I’m guessing other ingredients vary. The link I found said it had thyme in it, but I didn’t taste any thyme and I’m pretty sure that the hudut we had included okra. It was delicious. I think the fish in ours might have been snapper, but I don’t know for sure. If I asked, I don’t remember the answer, and I probably didn’t ask, because delicious is delicious, after all. The type of fish didn’t matter. Along with the hudut came a ball of a doughy substance. I know it contained plaintain, but I’m sure it contained something else, too, because it didn’t taste like banana. You take a spoonful of the dough and drop it into the soup and it turns into something like a little dumpling from the heat. I didn’t love it–it was sort of thick and chewy, but I didn’t dislike it either. (I think I’ll write another post about that meal, because if I tell the whole story here, I’ll never get back to the other foods.) Anyway, if you have the chance to try hudut (and you like fish and coconut), totally go for it.

Johnnycake: Ah, looking for a link let me know that Belizean johnnycakes are not the same thing as the ones in historical novels set in New England. The Belizean variety is made with flour and coconut milk and tastes a lot like a biscuit, while the American version is made with cornmeal. But it was delicious and a new food for me even if it wasn’t the romantic historical food I thought I was getting.

Stone crab: I wasn’t sure how different stone crab would be from other crab that I’ve eaten and taste-wise, it wasn’t really. It wasn’t as sweet as some Alaskan crab or as salty as the crab you can get in Maine, but mostly it was just crab. Except that breaking it open was a serious challenge — forget those little tongs, we needed a serious meat tenderizing hammer and even then, you had to hit it hard.

Stewed gibnut: You know how often people say strange meat tastes like chicken? (Frog legs do taste just like chicken.) Gibnut tastes nothing like chicken. I think it was closer to a roast pork taste, but with a different texture, meaty but not tough or stringy. I knew it was a rodent, but until I found that link, I didn’t really know what kind of rodent. I’m glad it’s closer to rabbit than rat! Although honestly, as long as it’s not dog or monkey, I’m good with trying pretty much anything. The stewed gibnut was a little salty but overall yummy. I would absolutely eat it again.

Most of the food I ate in Belize was really good. It was the most unexpected and yet delightful part of the trip–so much fresh seafood and so much of it delicious!

Serendipitous mistakes and chicken soup

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by wyndes in Food, Personal

≈ 4 Comments

On my first mouthful of chicken soup tonight, I said, ‘whoa.’ Five minutes later, R said through his first mouthful, ‘this soup.’

I make pretty good chicken soup. Tonight’s, though, was well beyond ‘pretty good’ and into the, ‘is this the best soup I’ve ever eaten in my life?’ category. R, who is a huge fan of Thai chicken soup, wasn’t willing to go that far, but did agree that it was the best soup I’ve ever made.

I’m about 90% sure that it was accidental. Well, I know it was accidental, in the sense that I didn’t actually intend to make the best soup ever, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t my tossing a few cloves of garlic into the broth or adding a little pepper that made the difference, but accidental in the ‘oh, dear, I burned this, I wonder if it matters?’ way.

My soup starts with home-made chicken broth. I use the bones, a little meat still on, from a grocery-store rotisserie chicken, plus carrots, celery, an onion with its skin on, and sometimes a few other random ingredients that are lying around. This time it happened to be garlic, but I honestly don’t think that made a difference. A little sriracha sauce, some salt, and this time a couple grinds of pepper, and then let it simmer for a few hours. Sometimes I let it simmer for days, but this time I wanted my soup, so I started it in the morning, around 9, and sieved the junk out of the broth by 5.

Then I saute the vegetables, usually just carrots and celery. I saute them because I figured out a while ago that if you cook the vegetables that way, they retain their flavor in the soup. It’s also faster, which was how I learned it, but I do it now because it’s yummier. This time around, I added onion. I don’t know why. Because we had one, I guess? Then I walked away from the stove. Oops. Bad idea. Or so it seemed. When I got back my vegetables weren’t gently cooked through, they were verging on burned. The onions, especially, had made it to browned and shriveled, and the carrots were almost blackened. But you know, I was hungry. And they didn’t look burned to inedibility, they were just darker than I would have liked.

So then toss the veggies in the broth, add some chopped over left-over chicken (what was left from the rotisserie), serve over left-over rice. I keep the rice separate from the soup until the last possible minute so that it doesn’t get mushy.

Today’s soup wasn’t actually that soup, it was the leftovers from that soup. The extra time spent simmering probably made a difference. But I think the real difference was those carmelized onions. The soup was really dark, almost the color of beef broth, even though it was chicken, and the taste was … yum. Just yum. A little spicy, a little sweet, solidly umami. Delicious.

I would go have some more right now if it wasn’t entirely gone. But next time I make soup, I’m going to burn the onions on purpose.

When I started writing, I had some other serendipitous mistake to write about. I’m pretty sure it had to do with WordPress. But my yearning for more soup has completely driven it out of my mind. Oops. Maybe I’ll come back with an update later!

I’m allowed…

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by wyndes in Food, Personal, Zelda

≈ 2 Comments

R and I went out for dinner tonight. We had Korean food, as we did last Christmas day, and the restaurant was amazing. I had exactly the same experience that I did last Christmas, though, which is that the food was so good that I ate too much and then I was uncomfortable and by the time we got home, I felt vaguely hostile to the restaurant. But really, the food was terrific: we had their Korean version of sushi for an appetizer, which was yum, and then they do little dishes of vegetables, including a pickled radish, sesame seed green beans, spicy tofu, a sweet potato thing that R decided was too good to share with someone who doesn’t like sweet potatoes, fish cake, kimchi…and I’m not sure what else. But yummy food, which I say to remind myself, and which is not my story.

So this is my story: when we got home, the dog — the naughty, naughty, BAD dog — had gotten into a bag of Lindt truffles. R saw the ripped up bag first and he was scolding her and upset before I even got into the house. The dog is, as per usual, completely insane with delight that we’re home, madly excited, dashing between us, while R stomps around, mad as anything. It was his present to me, so he’s upset that his present has been destroyed, but he’s also upset because we’ve done this with Zelda before. This being the emergency vet visit, several hundred dollars, stomach pump thing.

I’m looking at the bag and trying to figure out the math. This will be the fifth time that Zelda has gotten into chocolate, which might say that we’re really bad dog owners, except that Zelda is a Jack Russell terrier who can get into anything. Seriously, she opens closed doors by standing on her hind legs and using her paws, she opens cupboards with her nose. She can leave the backyard any time she wants, through multiple routes, and the only reason she doesn’t (most of the time) is that she knows I don’t want her to, even if she doesn’t understand why. The only object in the house that she hasn’t figured out how to open is the refrigerator, which is a good argument for keeping all chocolate in the fridge, but it was a present. Who keeps presents in the fridge?

So I’m working on the math. Six ounces, partially dark chocolate, and three ounces is the magically bad number for dark chocolate for a dog of her weight, but there’s some left in the bag, and how many servings are there in the bag? Even as I’m trying to figure that out, I’m also trying to take her pulse. Racing heart beat is a symptom of chocolate poisoning for dogs — that’s how they die, really. But it doesn’t feel that fast. It’s fast, sure, but she’s excited that we’ve just gotten home and bouncing around and…it’s normal fast.

I lean in and take a big whiff of her breath. Her breath is not lovely. It never is. But it doesn’t smell like chocolate. Or like vomit. It was the vomit that I was trying to smell. On one notable occasion, she had her stomach pumped and only a day later did I find the pile of chocolate vomit under the bed in the spare room that would have told me the stomach pumping was unnecessary. I found said vomit because she went back to it for a snack–gah, dogs–and I smelled it on her breath. So I’m smelling but there’s nothing there, no chocolate smell, no vomit smell. And she’s settling down. We’re home, that’s good, and maybe she’ll just take a little nap now that she can relax.

But a dog in the midst of chocolate poisoning? Is not going to be taking a little nap.

I finish my math. Ten truffles are missing. Presumed eaten. I go into the spare room to look under the bed. I don’t get there. In the back corner of an arm chair is a Lindt truffle, half under the cushion. She didn’t eat it. She didn’t even break the wrapping paper. I start searching. Over the course of the next hour, I find eight of the ten missing truffles. One in her window dog bed, one in the dog bed under my desk. One in the couch in the living room, another in the arm chair. One in my bed, one under a pillow in the guest room. And so on.

A 9th is, I am sure, in my closet. I can tell from how she’s acting now. She keeps going into the closet but when I follow her in, she acts innocent and quickly leaves. She’s figured out that I’m stealing her treats. I have no idea what that feels like from a doggie perspective. She did some perfectly good hunting, gathering, and storing for later, and her pack leader has screwed it all up. Does she think it’s unfair?

Along the way I find a bag of pills — Vitamin C maybe? — that she has also stashed. The citrus smell reassures me that it’s nothing too scary but some guest in my house, I don’t know who, lost a lot of pills at some point. Oops!

By the end of the hour, I’m totally comforted that the dog hasn’t eaten enough chocolate to be dangerous and the dog is sulking. And R is not happy. In fact, he’s pissed at Zelda — she ruined his present. Not cool.

I point out to him that it was actually kind of fun in a way — like an easter egg hunt. Been a long time since I got to do that. I didn’t mind it and was amused by her creative hiding with the last couple chocolates. He says, “Oh, I should view this an as an entertainment value addition to my present?”

I say, “well…” and then point out the real plus. When we got home from dinner, I thought the dog might die. I was faced with the real possibility that Zelda had eaten enough chocolate that we would lose her. On Christmas Eve. On CHRISTMAS EVE! The relief of knowing that no, that wasn’t going to happen? Golden. The joy of realizing that the ridiculous dog had hidden chocolate all over the house? Priceless.

R listened to this and nodded. And then he said, “So the perfect Christmas gift is for me to threaten to kill the dog and then not carry through on the threat? Handy. And cheap. I’ll remember that for next year.”

I think he has not quite forgiven her.

But it made me laugh.

And I’m allowed to share it, because he told me just the other day that it was okay if I told stories about him online.

Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: Food