ShadowMeTeresa

One of my favorite topics of discussion is food – whether it be food sustainability, the eat local movement, organic and environmental issues, consumption/dieting, or cooking – it’s all there, in that thing we do at least three times a day. Today I was thinking about food appreciation. It’s so easy to buy meals these days and make or cook them instantly that we just don’t appreciate what we have, and we take it for granted (which global warming may change someday, but don’t get me started).

Everyone has those “throw-together” meals – the fall-backs for when you’re just too busy to figure out what to eat. The makings are always in the fridge or the cupboard just in case. Aside from mac & cheese, one of mine since college has been the very strange cheese and pickle sandwich. It sounds odd, I know. But to me, it’s enjoyable, easy, and has only four ingredients (or even less, if I’m skipping the mayo). The other day I was eating this sandwich and realizing that even this lowly food item that I slap together and could eat just about every day for lunch on auto-pilot, has so much to it. Never mind something as complex as an actual multi-course dinner, or a typical American processed food item like a frozen dinner.

Let’s look and see what we’ve got:

- 2 pieces of bread
- a couple of dill pickle slices
- a couple of slices of cheese
- Kraft olive oil reduced-fat mayo (or alternatively, Dijon mustard)

Simple, right? Well, let’s see. That slice of bread – I’m kinda  partial to the multi-whole-grain with oats kind, which means its got at least four types of flour and grains in it, if not a lot more. That’s at least four individual farmers growing their individual crops, worrying about the weather and waiting all season for my grains to ripen, harvesting them, milling them, selling them to the bread or flour companies, along with all the transportation and energy that goes into all those steps. Someone bakes and delivers the bread – I try to buy local, so that part of it probably isn’t very far away; maybe a bakery within 20 miles of where I live. Every now and then I stop in at that bakery for a latte and treat, and watch them making bread, rolls, and pastries.

Dill pickles – eek. Well, I know it starts with cucumbers, and I like kosher dills. So there’s probably not TOO many ingredients. Let’s see… vinegar, salt, natural flavors. Yep, not too much in that jar. But again, someone somewhere grew the cucumbers, who knows where. Then another business went to the trouble of being certified kosher. The salt – who knows where. Normally I buy from a more local company, but was at a different store this time. My jar says, ack, “made in India” !! How very strange. Kosher dill pickles made in a Hindu/Muslim country all the way across the world, shipped to Portland, OR, then distributed to a local store near me. Given the source of the pickles, the cucumbers probably came from northern Africa, based on what I’ve been reading lately, and the salt and vinegar from the middle east or the Mediterranean. Oh, and don’t forget conveniently sliced at the factory the better to fit on my sandwich. Sheesh. I wouldn’t have bought these if I’d seen that “made in India”. Not that I have anything against Indians making a living. Just that it’s a heck of a long way and a big environmental footprint just to have pickles.

Cheese… Trader Joe’s. No point of origin specified, which makes it hard to identify whether I’m meeting my buy local goals. They are a west coast company, so one hopes they’re buying from someone here, since there are multitudes of dairy farms from WA to CA. Let’s pick Tillamook, just for fun. I’ve actually seen that factory, on the coast of Oregon. They buy from local dairy herds, make the cheese in their factory with natural ingredients (although they are not certified organic, why I’m not sure). And again, presliced. Lazy, lazy, I know. I don’t usually do that. Not sure how I ended up with it this time, except that TJs had a wider variety of reduced fat cheeses than most stores, which actually taste good. So I may be buying it again. Here we must not forget the dairy hands getting up early to milk the cows… hmm. Does anyone still do that, or is it all by machine?? Paint me woefully ignorant about this part of the process. Most likely I really do not want to know.

Last, mayo. I don’t eat much of this, but recently found this olive oil version that I like – again, lower-fat but tastes just as good. Let’s see what’s in it – well, this is a long list. Three different kinds of vegetable oils, vinegar, sugar, eggs, starches, salt, onions, garlic and the seven or eight other random ingredients that every processed western food seems to have in it these days. Focusing on the “normal” ingredients – at least 5 crops in there, along with the other seasonings, starches, and eggs. So now we’ve added chickens to the mix and another multitude of farmers – some of which are highly likely to be in other parts of the world (olives, soybeans). And chemical companies for all those funky food additives =/

All those people growing crops, raising chickens and cows, milling, cheese-making, pickling, packaging, transporting, processing, mixing, baking, storing, never mind the containers, labels, advertising, trucking, wholesalers around the world, buyers and grocers – all so that I can make and eat one sandwich in under 15 minutes and never give it a thought…

Which brings us to the slow foods movement – if we really thought about what we eat and the impossibility of personally creating it ourselves, gave thanks to all the people who brought it to our table, all the animals, crops, weather, and nature that made it possible along with the manmade infrastructure, we’d appreciate every meal, no matter how lowly. We’d stop and think about what we are eating, how complex it is, how far it came, and whether we want all of those attributes in our food. We might slow down, eat less and with more gratitude, and be healthier. Next time you eat your favorite comfort meal, give it some thought!

A while back I posted my famous salmon marinade, and it’s one of those posts that gets a lot of hits, especially this time of year. I just found another really great salmon recipe, which I made this year with the first of the Copper River sockeye run from Alaska. This one is so good that it just had to be posted, especially since the entire dinner takes under 15 minutes to make!

It’s a perfect time of year to pair wild salmon with spring asparagus, so that’s what I did. Baby bok choy would be a very good choice as well. Basically, you heat up the water for the asparagus and chop the ends, then brush the salmon with olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Throw the asparagus in the boiling water (this is better than steaming) and at the same time, cook the salmon however you prefer (broil, pan fry, barbecue). Take the asparagus out when they’re bright green and crisp-tender. Cook the salmon over medium heat until it flakes easily, but don’t overdo it!

Meanwhile, make the super-simple sauce, which is a sweet-hot Asian sauce:

2 T honey
1 T lime juice
2 t soy sauce
1 t Asian hot chile sauce (like Sriracha)
4 t thinly sliced green onions

This is so fast you can easily make it while the fish is cooking. When the fish is done, drizzle the sauce over the fish, and voila! If you prefer a mild version, use Asian garlic-chile sauce. There is still a tad of heat, but much less. The sweet-hot of this sauce goes really well with salmon, and would also be great with shrimp. I couldn’t part with the left-over sauce, so I put it in a glass bottle and kept it for later use.

Enjoy!

On Friday, my long awaited gas stove was finally installed. I’ve really been looking forward to this, as I had all but given up baking anything in my old oven, whose temperature was so unpredictable and so uneven that essentially nothing came out right. Along with the stove I have a nice new overhead vent with much brighter lights, so I can actually see what I’m cooking.

As soon as I knew it was working, I sat down with my recipe file to see what I might want to cook first :) Bread pudding with bourbon sauce came immediately to mind, as I’ve been definitely wanting to make that for some time now but absolutely knew this was the kind of recipe that would fail miserably in the old oven. Needing a more well-rounded shopping list, I added cauliflower gratin (since I have some that needs using), oatmeal dinner rolls (my first attempt at making yeast rolls), spring asparagus and goat cheese quiche, and herb-baked halibut. I ran off to the grocery store and happily bought all the ingredients, expecting to make them in the next week or so.

In the end though, it was a simple pasta salad, with leftover chicken, home-made walnut pesto, and cherry tomatoes that won out. Something just seemed right about having pasta be the first thing – the simple pleasure of turning that back burner on high and really heating that water up fast, followed by a flick of the wrist to instantly achieve the exact simmer temperature I wanted. For the first time since I moved in, my water didn’t boil over due to a burner that didn’t cool down fast enough. My salad came together in about 15 minutes… just as much time as it took the pasta to cook.

What a pleasure. And I can hear that bread pudding calling me…

My doctor tells me flu season is late this year – I found that out the hard way. And I’ve been kicking myself for NOT getting a flu shot for the first time in many years… but there I had it, I had the flu, yet another lung problem in as many months. You can tell it’s the flu when your skin hurts all over (weird) and there’s that permanent headache that is just now receding after a week.

So here I am trying to work through all of this, and meanwhile there’s been a natural gas contractor at the house hooking up new stuff. Halfway through the week the tankless water heater went in, and yay! for the first time, long hot showers :) Does the lungs good. My previous water heater having something cracked inside that let the hot and cold water mix some, meaning I never really could get through an entire shower without losing my hot water. So this is luxury.

Next is going in the new pro gas stove that I am all excited about -complete with a really hot burner for firing up large pots of water, a really low simmer burner, two regular burners and a grill to slide hot pans onto, which is key in my tiny kitchen. It has a reputation for heating very evenly and on temperature in the oven, and both the oven and the burners can be lit with a match. No electronic parts to break, and overall… well, I can’t wait. But that’s next week.

Speaking of cooking. So, it’s the third day of gas line work and my contractor sees that I’m still sick. Off to the store he goes to buy a chicken (!) and starts making chicken soup from scratch (!!). It’s boiling away on my old stove while he’s clanking away in the garage, and I’m feeling like some kind of miracle has descended. In go the carrots and bay leaves, onions, basil, and special stock stuff, a whole chicken into my biggest pot, which according to him isn’t really big enough :) Then later I’m stuck on a long, technical, boring call while he’s busily separating the stock, discarding the veggies, deboning the chicken, and soon arrives before me a steaming hot bowl of chicken soup! Back into the garage he goes, man of miracles.

Turns out he’s just a really nice guy who used to cook for the army, and knows how to take care of his family (of which I’m temporarily, one). He exhorts me to NOT pour off any of the fat (“that’s where all the good healing stuff is!”) and drink at least two glasses a day until I get better. I debate for a day or so, then save some of the fat and pour off some (because there’s really a lot). But I diligently have my two bowls per day, and yes, I’m feeling better :)

I posted this question to a couple of groups, and as it turns out (I should have known it), chicken soup actually has been tested in a lab. Apparently all the nasty molecules (ok, neutrophils) that get so busy producing all that mucous during the flu or cold is what the chicken soup acts on – it keeps them from doing their dastardly deed, giving your head a chance to clear up and your lungs to clear out. Which is surely what I needed. Now why a chicken should be able to do that, I have no idea :)

This one never fails. I just made it up one day and I was so happy with it that I’ve used it ever since. The only problem is, I’ve never measured it. I’d really like to send it in to Cooking Light, so I suppose someday I’ll just have to make it, and try measuring it as I go along. It sounds really weird, but it’s really, really good.

Here goes. Don’t worry about the proportions really, because it’s hard to mess it up, and I’m just guessing here.

1. Mix together about a cup each of soy sauce and lime juice – anyway, equal proportions. Scale up if it’s a large party. I used to use light ginger-soy (Sun Luck), but whatever kind of soy sauce you like. Sushi soy might be good too – basically a lighter variety that’s not too salty.

2. Add a bit of olive oil to make it stick to the fish, but not too much (this is a light recipe). Try a 1/4 cup.

3. Add about a tablespoon of ginger and a tablespoon of lemon grass powder (if you don’t have that, just skip it, no big deal)

4. Press a bunch of garlic to taste and add that. 1-6 cloves depending on how much you LOVE garlic :)

5. Chop up a ton of cilantro and mix it in, enough that it pretty well thickens the mixture.

6. Salt and pepper to taste (or not, if you don’t want it, it’s not actually necessary).

Marinade the salmon in this mixture for 30-40 minutes. While the coals are being prepared is about right. Take the salmon out of the marinade but leave plenty of cilantro and garlic sticking to it :) Grill as you normally would and enjoy!

PS – if you’re reading this, also take a look at this entry for more salmon recipes and this entry on wild salmon.