We’re always on the lookout for new flavor combinations to pair with our existing dishes. One of our favorites of late is Zane and Zack’s new Jerk sauce. They often sell out of it, but if you ask at their Ballard Farmers Market booth on Sundays, they will usually be able to bring you a bottle next week. We’ve been brushing it on meats and fish with great results, but our most recent delight has come from tossing cooked chickpeas in the Jerk sauce and a little olive oil and roasting them at 400 for about 30 minutes, stirring once or twice.

We’ve also made roasted kabocha squash seeds with the jerk sauce and both have been outstanding snacks. Just another way to make an easy dish refreshing and new.

Coem back tomorrow for Watermelon Gazpacho!

A quick note on our posting frequency of late… we’ve been busy with canning, a few home improvement projects, and lots of work. We hope you’ll bear with us for another week or so. We’ll be back to our three recipes a week very soon!

Tuesdays are my very favorite day of the work week. I spend the day alone, running, working, tackling laundry, and cooking. This is the day I try to make dinner for my husband, and the day I use to try new recipes, like the red wine caramel that went into my coworker’s birthday apple pie.

Tuesdays are the days I often work with the cat purring on my lap, or with Great Big Sea rocking the house.

This Tuesday though, seemed to fly quicker than most. I looked up and the caramel sauce wasn’t done, the squash wasn’t roasted, and John was due home soon. So I got to work. I roasted a kabocha squash, intending to just soften it enough to easily chop it into cubes, but I got busy with the caramel sauce and it ended up about 3/4 of the way cooked. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but I was going to chop the squash into chunks and then caramelize it in olive oil, then mix it with some beef and beans we’d had the night before.

Since the squash was getting soft, I should have done something different with it. But tired, hungry, and distracted that I was, I just threw it in a pan with the beef and bean mixture, added some tomatoes, and cooked it until done.

It was ugly.

Seriously ugly.

It was orange, and brown, and very mushy.

But it was also delicious.

Comforting.

Almost exactly what I wanted.

All this is just a long winded way of saying that a delicious, healthy, and local meal doesn’t have to follow a recipe. Sometimes you need to be willing to experiment. Sometimes you’ll fail. But sometimes you’ll succeed. I knew that combining kabocha squash, beef, and beans, all of which are rather simple flavors, would likely work well. I knew that the dish would need some bite to it, so hence, the tomatoes.

But my point is that sometimes you need to experiment. Soups and stews are my preferred experimentation vectors. They are generally very forgiving. Start with three or four ingredients. Simmer for a bit. If it tastes good, stop. If it’s not quite there, try some salt and pepper or some seasonings. Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s always a backup plan, and sometimes that plan is takeout!

Happy experimentation.

Simple Salmon with Roasted Vegetables

This is a simple weeknight meal that we’ve made a couple of times in the past few weeks. It’s flexible, easy, and since most of the time for this recipe is the cooking time, which is largely unattended, it’s the perfect dish for busy nights when you need to do some work or house cleaning (or baseball game watching) while dinner cooks.

A few words about the ingredients for this dish. The must-haves are the salmon, the olive oil, and the cherry tomatoes. Everything else is optional and you should feel free to add other vegetables depending on your preferences. Do you like roasted beets? Add them (but be prepared for a very reddish dish). Hate fennel? Leave it out. Carrots, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, garlic… all good. You could probably even make this dish with extra firm tofu instead of salmon. This dish takes about 10 minutes of active work and 40 minutes for cooking. It’s a one dish, one spoon, and one knife meal, making cleanup a breeze.

Salmon with Roasted Vegetables

• 1 pound salmon, with or without skin
• 2 bulbs fennel, trimmed of excess outer leaves and quartered
• 1-2 medium onions, cut into wedges
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, smashed
• 4-5 baby summer squash or 2 full sized summer squash, cut into chunks
• 1-2 cups of cherry tomatoes
• 4 Tbsp olive oil
• Salt and pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 400.
2. In a large baking dish (13x9x2), mix all of the vegetables with 3-5 Tbsp of olive oil. Start with 3 Tbsp and toss well, If all of the vegetables aren’t coated, add another Tbsp.
3. Bake for 20 minutes, stirring once halfway through.
4. Remove the pan from the oven and push the vegetables to one side.
5. Season the salmon with salt and pepper and place it in empty space you made in the baking dish.
6. Return the dish to the oven and bake for another 15-20 minutes, based on thickness of the salmon.
7. Plate a piece of the salmon with two generous scoops of roasted vegetables. Optionally, serve the vegetables over rice.

Notes: This is such a versatile dish. You can use pretty much any vegetables you have on hand, but I urge you not to skip the cherry tomatoes. They soften and infuse the whole dish with such a fantastic sweetness.  You could use full sized tomatoes, but sometimes the skin on them is a bit too thick to be palatable. The flavor of the fennel softens so if you don’t much care for fennel in salads, give it a try here. This dish would be great with tofu if you’re looking for a vegan alternative.

One last tip about salmon: when cooking, if you see the white stuff that oozes out the top and sides of salmon, don’t panic. That white stuff is called albumin and it’s a protein that you see when a piece of salmon has exceeded the perfect level of doneness. It’s edible. In theory, a piece of salmon should be cooked until just before the albumin becomes visible. But, for those of you new to cooking salmon, or those who like their salmon a tad bit more done, just cook it until you start to see some albumin. It’s an easy visual cue that lets you know when to take your salmon out of the oven. As you can see from the photographs, I let our salmon cook just about 2 minutes too long. However, since the center was so thick, that made for a very moist piece of fish with just a tad bit less moisture towards the edges. Since you have a good amount of roasting liquid from the vegetables though, you don’t have to worry about drying out your fish.

Wednesday night, I tried a little experiment. I live-tweeted the dinner I made. I did this for a few reasons, but one of them was that I wanted to show that while I don’t believe that everyone can cook every night, I do believe that anyone can cook any night. I know, that’s a little confusing. You see, now and then around the Interwebs, I see folks discussing whether it is possible to cook dinner every night. Some people feel that it is simply a matter of priorities. If you make it a priority to cook healthy delicious meals for your family every day, then you’ll be able to do it. Other people feel that the ability to do this limited to folks with plenty of resources (money and/or time) or those for whom an adult member of the family doesn’t work outside the home. I’m really in a camp halfway between the two.

You see, I’m super busy. I work a full time job (albeit one that allows me to work from home when I want to) and I run a business. Sure, my business is cooking related, but it is very much a second job as I spend anywhere from 8-20 hours a week on it outside of the actual cooking processes. My husband works full time as well. We also work out for between 60 and 90 minutes five days a week and between 2 and 3 hours on day 6. In short, we’re swamped most of the time. Our clean laundry sits in the laundry basket for a week. Our parking strip is full of dandelions. I have a knitting box full of yarn and no time to knit. But on a busy day, one where we arrived home at 6:15pm, I had a healthy, local, and delicious dinner on the table at 7:30, and had plenty of time in between to clean my stove, clean out part of the fridge, harvest some food from our garden, and work for about 20 minutes searching for canning recipes for this coming weekend.

Can I do this every night? Absolutely not. Tomorrow’s dinner is likely going to be leftovers from Tuesday. Reheating will take 10 minutes. Friday, since I’ll be canning in the late afternoon, I’m betting we’re getting takeout. I still haven’t put that laundry away and I have an iPhone development book staring me in the face and mocking me. But given the following assumptions, I can cook a local meal at least 4 days a week.

1. I have time on Saturday or Sunday to visit a farmers market.
2. I remember to take beef out of the freezer a day in advance of cooking.
3. The dishes get done after cooking so that the next day, the kitchen is more or less clean and ready for prep work.

So, no, I don’t think it’s feasible to cook a fresh meal every night, even for me, an experienced cook. Partially because the cooking process isn’t all you have to think about.

You have planning, and shopping, and making sure that the dishes are done so there’s empty counter space for prep, and making sure that you have the necessary pots, pans, and dishes. Then there’s the prep work, and the actual cooking, and then the cleaning up afterwards. So cooking a single meal requires a lot more time than just the time you spend cooking. If you’re not a confident cook, or have dietary restrictions, or your family hates most vegetables, this can be a daunting task.

In order to help folks become comfortable with some easy, healthy, local meals, over the next few months, I’m going to be live tweeting a meal every couple of weeks. This time it was done on a whim, but next time I’ll give you a few days warning and an ingredient list if you want to play along at home. I’ll tweet the steps in real time, with photos. The recipe will be posted the next day. All meals will have a start-to-finish time of less than an hour and will include at least a protein and significant vegetable component. We’ll get to the recipe in the next post, but for now, here’s the twitter stream from Wednesday’s event.

Live-Tweeting Dinner

Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese

A few months ago, while we paying our bill at Art Restaurant, the host told us about the Celebrated Chefs program. There didn’t seem to be much of a downside. You register your credit card with them, get a cookbook, and whenever you dine at one of the participating restaurants and use that credit card, 5% of your purchase price is donated to charity. We spent a couple of minutes looking through the cookbook and it sounded good enough. Local chefs from the participating restaurants contributed some of their signature recipes. The photos were lovely and the recipes we perused were well written. Five minutes later we walked out with a cookbook and plans to cook from it very soon.

But, alas, as often happens, the cookbook came home with us and immediately got shelved and forgotten about. I pulled it out a few times, and discovered a fatal flaw (at least for cookbooks). There’s no index. Little known fact about me: in a previous life, I wrote four technical books. I know that an indexer is expensive, and so a missing index in a charity cookbook doesn’t totally surprise me, but it does  make the cookbook a little difficult to use. You can’t just pick up the cookbook and see if there are any tomato recipes in it. You need to page through the entire thing to see what recipes use tomatoes. So although the recipes in the cookbook are fabulous, the cookbook is just a bit hard to use.

Oh, and Celebrated Chefs… if you’re listening, I’ll happily index your next cookbook in exchange for a couple of meals at participating restaurants.

I went looking for some soup recipes the other day, and in the soup and salad section, I paused on this absolutely stunning salad from Queen City Grill.  We’ve never eaten there, and after tasting the salad, I’m sorry for that obvious oversight. Their menu is full of fresh, northwest flavors and has a high percentage of local and natural sourcing. We’ll have to head there soon for a meal. Check our notes after the recipe for a few changes we made, simply based on the ingredients we had and could find seasonally.

Watermelon, topped with duck confit

Watermelon Salad with Goat Cheese

• 1 Tbsp minced shallot
• 2 Tbsp champagne vinegar
• 1/2 cup grapeseed oil
• salt and pepper to taste

• 4 thin slices of pancetta, or 1/2 oz of duck confit
• 4 slices watermelon, approximately 3/4 inches thick
• 1 cup frisée or miner’s lettuce
• 8 ounces ripened soft goat cheese, cut into four or eight equal pieces

1. Mix the minced shallot with the vinegar.
2. Pour in the grapeseed oil slowly while whisking to combine.
3. Cook the four slices of pancetta until crisp and drain on a paper towel. The easiest way to cook thin slices of pancetta is on a cookie sheet (with sides). Cook the slices in a 350 degree oven until crispy. Even though the pancetta slices make for the prettiest presentation, you can certainly chop the pancetta and cook it in a pan instead.
4. Remove the rind from the watermelon and cut into wedges.
5. Plate the watermelon.
6. Toss the miner’s lettuce or frisée with the dressing and plate atop the watermelon.
7. Lay the goat cheese slice or slices alongside the watermelon.
8. Top with the pancetta and season with some fresh cracked pepper and salt.

Notes: You’ll probably notice a few key differences in our dish. First, we didn’t have miner’s lettuce, but did have some soft green leaf lettuce from our CSA box. To mimic the dish’s intention as closely as possible I took the very young inner leaves from the lettuce. I plated the watermelon on top of the lettuce simply because it was such a striking color. The last change we made was to substitute duck confit for the pancetta. Unfortunately, we ran out of pancetta (gasp!). But we had that nice container of duck confit in the fridge and the thought of that salty, rich duck was too much to ignore. It worked perfectly. I’ll buy pancetta this weekend from Sea Breeze Farms so I can have this salad for lunches next week, but I think this could also work with some really stellar bacon as well. You need the salty, crispy, decadent fat to foil the sweetness of the watermelon.

Ground Cherries

Ok. Show of hands. How many of you looked at this recipe and wondered either a) why I’m talking about cherries when cherry season is just about over or b) why I was grinding up cherries before putting them into salsa?

If you didn’t raise your hand because you know I’m talking about a little fruit called the ground cherry, well done! You’re obviously a farmers market shopper. Ground cherries are related to the tomatillo. They are sweet but there’s a hint of savory to them as well. Inside the papery husks, you’ll find sweet, firm orange fruit. What struck me about ground cherries the first time I tried them was how tropical they tasted. Since we can’t get mangoes, papayas,  or pineapple here, I’m always looking for ways to replicate those flavors with local ingredients.

It has been miserably hot recently, and I was in the mood for salsa, so I chopped the ground cherries up with a few other random things I had in my fridge and threw the whole thing over a nice piece of halibut. I’ll be making them into pie next.

Ground Cherry Salsa over Halibut

Ground Cherry Salsa

• 1 cup ground cherries, husked and chopped
• 1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped
• 1 mild to medium red pepper, seeded and chopped
• 1 small green hot pepper, seeded and chopped
• 1 Tbsp Champagne vinegar
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
• Salt to taste

1. Mix all of the ingredients in a bowl.
2. Season with salt to taste.
3. Serve over fish, chicken, or with chips.

Notes: Ground cherries are sweet, but they aren’t overpoweringly sweet. In fact, they are a lot like Sungold cherry tomatoes, but with a firmer flesh and a more concentrated flavor. I’m sure you could throw just about any typical salsa ingredient in this recipe, including tomatoes and onions. Like most salsas, the flavors develop even more over the course of a night in the fridge, so if you can, make this a day in advance.

Spiced Tomato Pudding - the bits of pink are the fresh currants

Before this summer, I’d never have thought about using tomatoes in a dessert. I’m not sure why not. They are a fruit after all, and when you can get them fresh and ripe, they are incredibly sweet. Sungold cherry tomatoes, for example, can have a Brix of 12. Really good peaches have a Brix of 17 or so. Brix is the measure of the sugar content of a fruit, taken with a refractometer. The higher the Brix, the sweeter the fruit. Now here’s where shopping locally and in season is very important. A ripe tomato from a local farmers market vendor can have a Brix of up to 10 or so. The hot house tomatoes you find at the grocery store out of season can have a Brix as low as 2-4. So if you’re going to attempt a tomato dessert, make sure and use fresh, in season tomatoes.

For this recipe, I picked up some nice #2′s from Billy’s at the University District Farmers Market. Since the first step of the recipe is to core, peel, and puree the tomatoes, you don’t have to worry about spending the extra money on the perfect, unblemished higher priced tomatoes. You can make the sweetened tomato puree several days in advance to save on time.

Note: This recipe makes use of a slightly advanced technique and unusual piece of kitchen equipment – a water bath and a pudding mold. The water bath is pretty easy. Just use a pan an inch or two wider and taller than the pudding mold. A pudding mold can serve double duty. Use it to make cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. You can use just about any deep metal pan, but I can’t speak for perfectly accurate results without a pudding mold. As a general rule, we try to make sure that you don’t need a lot of fancy kitchen equipment for most of our recipes. But sometimes, a recipe sounds so good, that we’ll break our own rules. This pudding is definitely worth it. If you’re local to Seattle or Bellevue, try checking Goodwill or Tuesday Morning for inexpensive pudding molds.

Spiced Tomato Pudding with Fresh Whipped Cream

Spiced Tomato Pudding, adapted from Cooking by Hand

• 4 large tomatoes, fresh from the farmers market
• 1.5 cups sugar, divided
• 2 large eggs
• 4 Tbsp butter, melted and cooled slightly (plus a little extra to butter the pudding mold)
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp hot water
• 1.25 cups flour
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp cloves
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2/3 cup currants (dried or fresh)
• 3/4 cup walnuts/hazelnuts, chopped (optional)

1. Set a medium saucepan with water over medium-high heat until it comes to a boil.
2. Core the tomatoes and with a slotted spoon, plunge them into the boiling water for 30 seconds to loosen the skins.
3. Peel the tomatoes and puree them.
4. Combine the tomato puree and 1/2 a cup of sugar in a saucepan and simmer on medium until reduced to 1 cup (about 20-30 minutes).
5. Set the sweetened puree aside to cool slightly (or refrigerate for up to three days).
6. Sift the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt together in a bowl.
7. In the bowl of a stand mixer (or a large bowl and a handheld mixer), beat the eggs and the remaining cup of sugar until smooth.
8. Mix the hot water and the baking soda in a cup until dissolved.
9. Add the tomato puree, the butter, and the water/baking soda mixture and mix for one minute.
10. Mix in the flour mixture until combined.
11. Stir in the currants and the nuts (if using).
12. Butter the 2 quart pudding mold (don’t be shy with the butter) and pour the batter into the mold.
13. Set the mold in a large pot and pour hot water halfway up the side of the mold.
14. Cover the pot with aluminum foil or a tight fitting lid and set the water to boil.
15. Turn the heat down enough to keep the water at a slow boil and cook for 90 minutes.
16. Checking the pudding for doneness by inserting a knife or a toothpick into the center of the pudding. If it comes out clean, the pudding is done.
17. Gently remove the pudding mold from the pan and let it cool for 10 minutes.
18. Invert the mold onto a plate (where hopefully the pudding should just pop right out).
19. Let the pudding cool for another 20-30 minutes before serving. The outside of the pudding will be very tacky when you first remove it from the pan but will set up a bit as it cools.
20. Serve warm (but it’s just as good cold) with some fresh whipped cream.

Notes: As I was typing up this recipe, I noticed a small problem. The recipe actually calls for 4 oz of butter, not 4 Tbsp. But I made this twice with 4 Tbsp of butter and honestly, while I’ll make it next time with the full stick of butter, I think it’s a fabulous recipe even with the mistake. The cake is deliciously luscious and spicy. The currants are little surprise pockets of concentrated sweetness. It is perfect for breakfast, or for dessert with some sliced strawberries and whipped cream. From start to finish, including the 90 minute final cooking time, this pudding can easily be made in an evening. I started coring the tomatoes for this latest batch at 5:30 this evening and the pudding was done and ready to be put away (wrapped) by 10:30. Had I not been cooking dinner and writing this post, I could have easily shortened that time by 30-45 minutes.

Farm Fresh Eggs

Edited to add: Yes, I know technically these aren’t hard-boiled eggs, but I titled the post as I did so folks could search on hard boiled eggs and actually find it. Really, my version is easy to peel hard cooked eggs.

Eggs, particularly hard cooked eggs, are an easy and convenient way to get some extra protein in your brown-bag lunches. They’re self contained, travel well, and pack a solid 6 grams of protein in their 70 calorie package. I like to have one after a hard workout (another great post workout snack? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Carbs, protein, and good fats from the nuts make for a great recovery food. Add in some delicious whole grain bread and you’ve got one of the most complete meals you can pack without refrigeration).

But we were talking about eggs, weren’t we?

The biggest problem I have with hard boiled eggs is that they are darn hard to peel. Inside the shell is a thin membrane that sticks to both the egg white and the shell after the egg is boiled. There are tricks all over the Internet for cooking eggs. Almost all of them recommend old eggs, which I always faithfully used, buying eggs weeks in advance from Skagit River Ranch or Stokesberry. Some have you cook the eggs with a teaspoon of vinegar in the water. Others have you place the cool eggs in cool water and bring the water up to temperature slowly. Still other recipes have you put room temperature eggs into simmering water. Old eggs, shocking boiled eggs in ice water… even cooking them twice (Julia Child’s method). I’ve tried all the tricks. Julia Child’s method came the closest to perfection. Unfortunately, it also took the longest to execute. Boiling, chilling, boiling again, chilling again… I bought new knitting needles in the foolish hope that I’d have time to make socks this year and I haven’t even had time to take the needles out of the package! I don’t have time to cook and chill and cook and chill just for some hard boiled eggs.

I just resigned myself to a life without deviled eggs. After all, a few chunks out of the hard boiled white doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of a hard boiled egg. But still, the egg shells taunted me. Every few months I’d take an egg out of the carton, look at it longingly, dream of the tray of spicy deviled eggs I’d always wanted to bring to a party, and then sigh and crack the egg into a skillet instead. Well, until this weekend when my friend MT casually mentioned the secret to easy to peel hard boiled eggs.

Do you want to know the secret? I’ll tell you.

You don’t boil the eggs. You steam them.

Yep. That’s the entire secret. Take the eggs out of the fridge about 20 minutes before you start to steam them so that they come to room temperature. Plop them in a steamer basket, make sure there’s a good amount of water in the pot (just to the bottom of the steamer basket), and steam the eggs, covered, for 25 minutes or so. Cool and then refrigerate.

So there. That’s the secret. The next party I have to go to, I’m making deviled eggs.

If you’re interested in making jam this year, or canning tomatoes, peppers, salsa, or even drying/dehydrating some fruit for winter, have we got a deal for you. Tonnamaker Family Orchards has a new 10lb club where they’ll sell you (on average) 10 lbs of various fruits and vegetables over the course of the next couple of months at greatly reduced prices.

What sorts of savings can you get? Well, how about 10lbs of peaches for $1.75/lb. 10 lbs of sweet peppers for $2.50/lb. 10lbs of apples for $1.50 and 10lbs of Asian pears for $1.50.

Just download their subscription form (link below), fill out what you want, and return the form and payment to one of Tonnemaker’s booths at the local farmers markets. They’re at the University District Farmers Market, Queen Anne Farmers Market, and West Seattle Farmers Market to name a few.

Subscription Form 2010

While browsing Slashfood today, I came across an alarming story. Pigs, cows, and chickens aren’t the only feedlot residents these days. Bison,  the wild meat prized for its lower fat and cholesterol and slightly gamey flavor is now being found in feedlots. When grass-fed bison is compared to traditional feedlot (corn-fed) beef, the numbers are stellar. Bison has fewer calories, fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. But look at the numbers. Look closely at the chart. That’s grass-fed bison compared to corn-fed beef. So what happens when you start feeding bison corn? Well, I’m not entirely sure actually. I did a few hours of research and I couldn’t find any nutritional information on corn-fed bison.

But let’s consider grass-fed vs corn-fed beef.

According to EatWild, grass fed beef has less than 3 grams of total fat per 3oz serving while grain-fed beef has more than 8 grams. For that same 3oz serving, you can be consuming 50 calories less by choosing grass fed than grain fed.

Now I’m no scientist and I’m no vet. I don’t know how a bison’s meat will react to a diet of corn, but they are ruminants, just like cows. So switching their diet to corn is bound to have some sort of side effects. So if you’re looking at wild game like bison, venison, or elk to lower your carbon footprint or save on some fat and calories, make sure you know that meat was 100% grass fed and is hormone and antibiotic free.

Know where you food comes from.