Blueberry Salmon Avocado green salad

An ample salad for a crowd to get a taste. This is a scaled up and tossed version of a composed salad I did last year.

First allow me to review my Master Salad Schema:

• Fresh greens
• Vegetable(s)
• A fruit
• A meat
• A nut, toasted
• A soft to medium cheese
• Grated Hard cheese(s)
• A small amount of dressing
• Fresh Ground Coriander

Depending on what is in season and what is on hand I vary the details and try to fill out the other choices to balance. In this case I used:

• One head each of red leaf, green leaf, romaine lettuce
• Two carrots, scrubbed, chopped, soaked in white balsamic vinegar
• Fresh blueberries, and sliced avocado
• Smoked Salmon (skinned, flaked, no bones)
• Toasted pecans coarsely chopped
• Fresh lemon curdled cheese
• Grated Parmesan and Hirten Hard cheeses
• A couple tablespoons of dressing (rice wine vinegar, a splash of apple cider vinegar, a little water, orange juice, 4 drops of orange essence, micro-planned ginger, roasting salt, hazelnut oil, walnut oil, olive oil, a little sesame oil)
• Fresh Ground Coriander

Toss everything but the hard cheese and coriander with the dressing. Then put in presentation bowl and top with grated cheese and coriander. 

Pan Fried Cod with Lime sauce and Lemon

I have been trying to eat more fish. Cod seemed like a good place to start. I started with a recipe from sippitysup.com. I have since tried it again without the brining step. The brining did add something. But in a pinch, better to get dinner to the table and it can be skipped.

Brine the fish for 1 hour in 6 cups iced water and 1/4 cup coarse salt.

Rinse and dry.

Dredge the brined then dried fish with seasoned flour about 1/4 cup.

Set the oven to 200 degrees to uses as a warming drawer. Place serving platter in the oven.

Fry the fish presentation side down in a pan with olive oil and butter over medium-high heat. It will take less than two minute in to get some nice browning. 

Flip the fish and insert an instant read probe thermometer. Place this lemon slices on top.

I love having a probe thermometer with a temperature alarm. Make sure the probe goes sideways into the middle of the fish and not up and down (harder to get an accurate measurement).

Pull from the heat when it hits 118 degrees (it will continue to cook with the carryover heat). Place the fish in the warming drawer. Reserve the pan drippings and fond for a sauce.

I used half a bottle of Mike's Hard Limeade to deglaze the pan over high heat, scrapping all the lovely cooked bits off the bottom of the pan. Reduce the sauce then take off the heat and add a Tbs of butter and swirl in.

What to do with the half a bottle of limeade that's left over? 

Sauce the fish with the lemon slices and serve.

Definitely an approach I will use again and again.

Make Sushi Party -- Norimaki

In this third installment of the Sushi Party recap we look at what I always think of when people talk about sushi, norimaki. Seaweed wrapped around sushi rice surrounding some good stuff.

Salmon Blueberry Salad

Had an interesting group of ingredients on hand when making a salad. I kept wondering if it was going to be discordant but when I tried the ingredients together in my mind, it seemed like it would be worth the risk.


I'm glad I did, for it was quite a tasty salad.

• Fresh greens
• Fresh blueberries
• Smoked salmon
• Crumbled blue cheese
• Diced carrots in balsamic vinegar
• Grated parmesan cheese
• Toasted pecans
• Orange ginger dressing
• Fresh ground coriander 
• Sliced avocado 

The blueberries and avocado provide some nice sweetness, the cheese and smoked salmon some umami, the nuts and carrots add some crunch.

Pasta Sauce with sardines

 After reading Michael Pollan's "Food Rules", we have been wanting to eat more low-on-the-food-chain fish. This is completely new to both of us so we have no idea where to start. I bought a tin each of sardines and of herring.

Our first effort has been to make pasta sauce with the sardines. We basically used the Fix-it-and-forget-it recipe for italian sausage sauce, but used minced sardines in place of the sausage (and frozen tomatoes in place of the canned diced tomatoes). Freezing the tomatoes whole made it very easy to skin them once they defrosted in the fridge.