As much as we have tried, and want to, love (or even like) grilled salmon, we’ve yet to find a recipe that musters anything more than a “good-not-great” reaction from us. But we very much enjoy smoked salmon, and often have it for a weekend breakfast with cream cheese on a toasted English muffin, some finely chopped red onion or shallot, and maybe a little bit of diced hard-boiled egg and/or tomato. Dan will sometimes order salmon in a restaurant, but only when it is Copper River Salmon, which is only available for a limited amount of time once per year. So why don’t we like salmon? Mostly the taste. To us, salmon has one of those love it or hate it flavors, which is tough to describe, other than “it tastes like salmon.” I also have issues with the texture of salmon, which is a meaty fish. Grilled salmon will flake, but the texture is still pretty dense, which I don’t really prefer. So why do a post on grilled salmon if we don’t love it? Because salmon is amazingly healthy for you (with loads of protein and omega-3 fatty acids), and if you like salmon even a little, this recipe is a tasty way to prepare it, with a lightly spicy Asian marinade and good grill flavor. In the meantime, our quest for the perfect salmon dish — preferably one that doesn’t taste like salmon — continues.
Category: Main Courses
BBQ Chicken
Barbecued chicken is one of those classic summer dishes that conjures images of picnic-table-meals with cold potato and macaroni side salads and thick watermelon slices for dessert. Bonus points if you are lucky to live somewhere with easy access to fresh, picked-that-morning corn on the cob. Dan grew up in one of those places and fondly remembers corn on the cob and BBQ chicken dinners from childhood summers, not necessarily because of the chicken itself, but because his dad did the barbecuing while he and his brothers got up to whatever summer shenanigans 3 boys within a couple years of each other’s ages are wont to do. Although his family’s version of BBQ chicken is not one he’s ever made as an adult (boiled until fully cooked — took no chances on raw poultry in those days! — then dipped in BBQ sauce diluted with a little beer and grilled over direct heat until the sauce began to burn caramelize), the memories of summers as a kid are happy and good. And now, with this recipe for “foolproof barbecued chicken” from Cook’s Illustrated, he can reminisce on those days while also enjoying flavorful, perfectly-cooked, juicy chicken grilled with a homemade BBQ sauce that has just the right tangy / spicy / sweet ratio. If only we had some farm-fresh, Pennsylvania corn to go with it!
Parmesan Pork
When we think pork, we generally don’t also think about pork pairing well with cheese (unless of course we’re thinking about a cheese plate, in which case there better be some prosciutto on there, alongside a soft and creamy goat cheese and maybe a bit of sharp cheddar.) But when the pork is thinly pounded and the cheese is salty/nutty grated Parmesan that forms a crispy outer coating when the pork is cooked in a skillet, pork and cheese go together pretty well after all. We found this pork recipe in one of our most-used Cook’s Illustrated magazines, “30 Minute Suppers” (Fall 2011), and like how easy and quick the dish is to make with simple ingredients: pork, flour, eggs, Parmesan cheese, panko, vegetable or canola oil and salt & pepper. While not necessary, a lemon/butter or white wine pan sauce might take the pork to a whole new level (but could also take longer than 30 minutes to cook, with greater degree of difficulty if you’re not particularly gifted at making sauces.) This basic version is perfect for a busy weeknight, and when garnished with lemon wedges, fancy enough on its own to not need no stinkin’ sauces.
Pasta w/ Chicken, Spinach & Cherry Tomatoes in Feta Sauce (w/ leftover chicken)
Summer is a good time to cook with leftovers. When the weather is hot and the days are long and activity-filled, it’s nice to have a dinner that is quick and easy to prepare with a protein that has already been cooked. If we grill steak during the summer, we often grill an extra one or make sure they are big enough that we will have plenty left over for steak salad. A pork tenderloin easily creates two separate meals — the first one maybe grilled and served with pico de gallo; and for the second meal we might make pork fried rice. We also love to cook a whole chicken (either roasting it or grilling it, beer-can-style) on the weekend, then transform the leftovers into any number of second dishes, from casserole to salad to pasta. When we recently had some leftover chicken, we consulted one of our go-to quick and easy cookbooks (they have an entire chapter called “Starting with Leftovers”), “The Best 30-Minute Recipe” for a new way to transform cooked chicken. We added kalamata olives to further enhance the Mediterranean flavors from the fresh oregano, feta cheese sauce and tomatoes, and liked how combining the chicken, pasta and spinach made for a single-bowl, square-meal dinner. And with minimal effort involved (cutting up the chicken, blending the sauce ingredients and boiling the pasta), it’s an ideal way to end a hot and lazy summer day.
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Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
Barbecue is a quintessential summer meal. From pulled pork to brisket to ribs, cooking meat low and slow practically defines lazy summer days. While unquestionably worth it, one doesn’t always have the time, inclination or equipment required for some of the more hard-core barbecue recipes (Kansas City-style ribs, for example, can take up to 20 hours to prepare — at least the recipe we used took that long.) Enter the slow-cooker and this recipe. The meat still takes a while to cook (6-8 hours), but needs less tending (just pat it down with the dry rub, place it in the slow-cooker with some onions, add the vinegar sauce, set the cooker on low and let it cook.) Barbecue doesn’t get much easier, and although it won’t have the signature smoke ring and flavor from pulled pork cooked in a smoker, the tender and tangy end result belies the simple preparation and cooking method. Perfect for a truly lazy summer day.
Pork and Black Bean Stew
My mom found this recipe in her local newspaper and shared it with us. It’s one that she has been cooking for her and my dad for many years, from the version that she cut out of the paper. Although we found the recipe online, I love that she also scanned her newspaper version into an email and sent it to me as well, just to make sure the versions were the same (they are), particularly because the print version includes her notes (an underlined notation of “good” and a reminder to use brown rice instead of white.) The dishes we post here are ones we consider “keepers,” in that we will definitely make them again. With its cooked-all-day, but ready-in-less-than-an-hour flavor, this healthy and hearty stew is no exception. Because we use this blog as a virtual recipe box to preserve and catalogue our “keeper” recipes, we usually throw away printed recipes once we’ve written them up here. But sometimes it’s nice to hang on to a physical piece of paper with a recipe printed in old-school newspaper format, especially when it has your mom’s handwriting on it.
Boston Baked Fish
Food memories can be powerful, in terms of a certain dish conjuring thoughts of a place or event associated with that meal, and vice versa. The strength of food memories is no surprise, given the fact that eating has the potential to engage all five senses: taste and smell (obviously); sight (think of a dessert almost too pretty to eat); hearing (just try and resist the urge to watch a movie when you hear popcorn popping) and touch (ever been to a crawfish boil in the spring time?) For Dan, there is a certain fish dish that will always make him think of the time he spent working at an old-school seafood restaurant called Poli’s in Pittsburgh, while attending law school. One of the menu staples at Poli’s — and one of Dan’s favorite things to eat there — was “Boston Scrod,” a white fish (cod or haddock usually) prepared simply with breadcrumbs and butter. While not particularly fond of his time waiting tables at Poli’s, he loved the Boston Scrod and recently found a recipe that is close enough to Poli’s version to conjure images of the unfriendly, elderly clientele who refused to leave a tip one penny over five percent. The dish is ridiculously easy to prepare — melt some butter, add crushed Ritz crackers, top the fish with the butter mixture and bake for about 20 minutes — and is so buttery delicious that even I (a serial fish-avoider) loved it. Although Poli’s shut down before Dan could make it back there for a nostalgic helping of Boston Scrod, now he can take the same trip down memory lane with this homemade version, without ever having to leave the house.
Beef & Broccoli Stir-Fry
Back in the fall, after our summer garden bounty ended, we went to our local plant nursery in search of a vegetable that might do well during the fall/winter season in our area. We planted a couple of broccoli plants, and were quite pleased to see them thrive and yield several harvests in February and March. Because I have the palate of a child when it comes to veggies (a child who hates vegetables), I don’t like cooked broccoli when it has a strong vegetable flavor. For that reason, we usually cook broccolini (when we can find it) instead of broccoli — broccolini has a more mild, sweet flavor than broccoli. It also has thinner stalks and smaller florets and looks like it could be young (early harvested) broccoli, but it’s actually a hybrid of broccoli and Chinese kale. (And neither should be confused with broccoli rabe, which is a leafy green from the same subspecies as the turnip, and isn’t related to broccoli at all. Thus concludes our “The More You Know” PSA, Vegetable Edition.) Upon realizing that our home-grown broccoli was actually broccoli, and that we couldn’t turn it into broccolini simply by picking it early, we decided to use our first harvest in a dish incorporating a sauce, just in case the broccoli had too strong of a veggie taste for me. So we adapted this recipe for “broccoli beef,” stir-fried with an Asian sauce. Turns out that home-grown broccoli has a pretty mild flavor (or at least ours did) that works equally well in a stir-fry as it does simply sauteed with olive oil, white wine, red pepper flakes, garlic and a bit of lemon juice. But stir frying the broccoli with thinly sliced, marinated sirloin in the spicy, tangy Asian sauce was probably our favorite use of our broccoli crop. It was so good that we plan to grow twice as many broccoli plants this coming fall.
Lavash Pizzas
We’ve hardly ever met a pizza that we didn’t like — all different kinds — from homemade, to our favorite local joint for NY-style pies, to a different favorite place for Neapolitan-style pizza, to the deep dish without which our trips to Chicago would not be complete. We eat a lot of pizza, but don’t always have the time to make homemade dough, or the inclination to go out and order pizza from a restaurant. We’ve used the pre-made pizza crusts available from the grocery store (they work especially well when grilled), but were intrigued when we found a recipe using lavash flatbread as the base of the pizza instead of traditional pizza dough. The original recipe (found in Cook’s Illustrated’s magazine “30-Minute Suppers”) was for “buffalo chicken lavash pizza,” which was delicious (chicken cooked in buffalo sauce, then shredded for the pizza topping along with blue cheese, mozzarella, celery and green onions), but the main take-away for us was the technique of turning lavash into a thin, crispy pizza crust perfect for delivering whatever delicious toppings you choose into your pie-hole. Since then, we’ve made several different kinds of lavash pizzas (including a breakfast version), and most recently, we topped the lavash with leftover smoked turkey and other ingredients for a BBQ turkey pizza and our version of a white pizza. No matter the toppings, using lavash is the fastest, easiest method we know for making really good, flatbread-style pizza at home.
Guinness-Glazed Lamb Chops
Every once in a while, we have a meal or even just a bite of something at a restaurant that is so good, we are compelled to try to recreate it at home. I was at a wine tasting recently, and had one of the best bites of lamb I’ve ever had. It was an appetizer of tiny lamb chops that had been cooked in some sort of savory glaze. Usually, the first place we start when attempting a restaurant dish at home is the restaurant menu, which hopefully lists at least some of the ingredients in the description of the food. But, unfortunately, the lamb I had that night is not on the menu from the restaurant that hosted the tasting. Despite that, and the fact that he wasn’t there and didn’t taste it himself, Dan managed to come up with a deliciously similar version, based solely on my feeble description of the dish and his excellent grilling skillz. The best part about these lamb chops that taste fancy enough to be served at an upscale wine tasting? They are ridiculously easy to make at home.