Yearly Archives: 2011 - Page 7

Pacific Sweet and Sour Salmon

Posted by on April 10, 2011 30 comments

You’ve just come home from work, you’re tired and hungry, and would like to eat in 20 minutes. How do you make a meal that’s easy and quick, but new and different?

The solution is to fry a meat and boil a starch, but use a tasty sauce to give variety to this most easily-cooked meal. One of our favorite sauces is something we call Pacific Sweet&Sour Sauce.

The Sauce

The essential ingredients are rice syrup for sweetness, lemon juice or rice vinegar for sourness, tarragon, rosemary, and garlic. An optional ingredient is any kind of chili powder for spiciness; we used the Vietnamese spicy sauce at top – this one happens to be Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce and is made from chili, salt, garlic, and distilled vinegar.

Of course you can substitute: basil works well as a herb, and coconut milk is an excellent addition to the sauce. Fish sauce gives it a more Vietnamese flavor.

Dice the herbs and set them aside; mince the garlic and mix with the sweet, sour, and spicy ingredients:

The sauce is ready. We used about 1 tbsp rice syrup and juice of a full lemon.

Pacific Sweet&Sour Salmon

Removing the central bone from the salmon steaks speeds up cooking significantly, and finishes the meat when the skin is cooked to just the right crispiness. Here we’ve filleted, and put salt and pepper on, two salmon steaks:

We put a bit of coconut oil in the pan and cooked at medium-high heat.

When the color has changed about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the steaks, which may take 3-4 minutes, they’re ready to flip. After flipping cook another 2 minutes and add the sauce:

With the sauce in cook another 1 minute on one side, and flip again to finish for another minute. Add the herbs in this final minute:

Be sure to keep all the sauce when you transfer to a serving plate:

Pacific Sweet&Sour Pork Bellies

We like pork belly a lot: it is a tasty, fatty cut of pork, and we like the natural flavor better than processed bacon.

If you’re nervous about timing, you don’t have to cook everything together: you can pre-cook the meat, then add it back to the sauce.

Here’s an example. After cooking pork belly slices, remove the meat and add the Pacific Sweet&Sour sauce to the pan oil:

After a minute of heating and stirring, add the herbs:

Return the meat to the pan, mix, and serve:

Pacific Sweet&Sour Beef Liver

We find this sauce works very well with beef liver too:

Shou-Ching, who doesn’t like the taste of beef liver, is happy to eat this.

If you really dislike the taste of liver, you can further remove the liver taste by boiling the beef liver slices briefly before putting them in the pan.

Conclusion

This sort of meal is easily cooked in 20 minutes or so. Alongside the meat, we prepare a starch – usually rice cooked in our rice cooker or warmed in the microwave (one batch lasts us 2-3 days), or potatoes or taro boiled or re-heated in the microwave (again, we prepare enough for 2-3 days) – and serve assorted vegetables – for us, usually various flavors of kimchi and seasoned seaweed. Kimchi and seaweed require no cooking.

We’re having Pacific Sweet&Sour Mussels tonight, with coconut milk in the sauce. Create your own variations! They’ll all taste great.

Creamy Steamed Egg Soup

Posted by on April 3, 2011 9 comments

This is a sort of hybrid of an omelette, the steamed egg custards which are popular in Asia, and a soup.

It is a good for busy families because:

(a)    it is quick and easy to make;

(b)   it can be eaten at any meal – breakfast, lunch, or dinner; and

(c)    it can satisfy a diversity of tastes, since each family member can choose a personal set of ingredients and cook the meal in his own bowl.

Ingredients

Here’s a sample set of ingredients:  eggs, cream, and bone broth (for a great broth, get bones with as much fat and collagen attached as you can!); scallions, tomatoes, and shrimp.

The volume of the cream and broth should be equal to the volume of the eggs. Water or milk can be substituted for broth if it is unavailable. Other ingredients we frequently use are shiitake mushrooms, onions, smoked gouda or pecorino romano cheese, bell peppers, bacon, meats, and fish. Not shown are herbs and spices to taste.

Start by mixing the eggs, cream, and bone broth:

Pour these into a bowl through a strainer. This breaks the egg white up into tiny pieces, mixing it into the fat and broth and preventing chunks of uncooked protein from appearing in the soup.

Then, mix in the other ingredients and spices to taste:

While you’re doing that, start a little water boiling in a wok:

You’ll need a steaming tray to put in the wok; this elevates the bowls above the boiling water.

If you have a large pot with a steaming basket, that will work equally well. We used the wok because it has a glass cover and we can take pictures as it cooks.

It comes out looking like this:

And here it is served:

You want to cook just long enough – 5 to 10 minutes depending on the size of the bowl – so that protein is cooked.

We’ve tried cooking this in the microwave, but it doesn’t taste as good: the egg comes out tougher.

Buffet-style family dinners

If not everyone has the same taste in food, set out ingredients buffet-style and let them build their own meal. Here are a few alternative ingredients:

Our wok fits three soup bowls:

This is what the finished product looks like:

Individual bowls take about 5 minutes to cook, one large bowl about 10 minutes.

Accompaniments

For complete macronutrients in one meal, potatoes or sweet potatoes with butter or sour cream, or rice with seasoned seaweed, and vegetables such as kimchi can be served alongside. We buy kimchi at an Asian supermarket on weekends and it relieves us from having to make vegetables during the week.

Conclusion

Steamed egg custards are very popular in China, Japan, and Korea, but they are generally made without cream or broth – just eggs, water, and salt. This particular version is our own invention, and we think the bone broth, the cream, and the delicate texture of the steamed egg make a delightful combination.

Pesto

Posted by on March 27, 2011 38 comments

Pesto is a classic Italian sauce that originated in Genoa. The traditional ingredients are basil, crushed garlic, grated parmigiano or pecorino cheese, pine nuts, and olive oil.

It’s traditionally prepared with a mortar and pestle (thus the name), but we use a food processor. We also vary the ingredients from time to time.

The nice thing about pesto is its versatility: it can flavor a lot of Perfect Health Diet foods. Like a good poet, pesto makes the familiar new.

Pesto with Rice Cakes and Shrimp

Here are the ingredients for a traditional pesto: grated cheese, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, and basil.

Pine nuts will usually taste better toasted. You can buy them pre-roasted, but if you buy raw pine nuts it’s not hard to toast them yourself. Heat a dry pan, then turn the heat off and add the pine nuts. Stir until done. Careful, they can burn quickly.

The basil takes up too much space for our food processor, so we put the basil and garlic in first for pre-shredding:

Then add the other dry ingredients, with some pepper:

Mix, adding olive oil to the food processor until it has the desired consistency. The finished product:

The sauce is now ready. Here we put it on some rice cakes and shrimp. Rice cakes are usually found in the frozen foods section of Asian supermarkets. Look for rice cakes that have no wheat (which is sometimes added to help the cakes stick together). Remember that rice cakes cook very quickly – 1 to 2 minutes in boiling water. When they float, they’re done; be sure to quench them in cold water to stop them from overcooking.

Spreading the sauce:

Ready to eat:

Macadamia Pesto with Buttered Potato or Liver

This one is similar but we used macadamia nuts in place of pine nuts, and included a bit of lemon juice. Macadamia nuts are lower in omega-6 than pine nuts:

Here it is in the food processor with most of the oil in:

Here it is with boiled potatoes and butter, for a sort of pesto potato salad:

Here it is with boiled liver:

Boiling liver removes a lot of the flavor, and adding substantial amounts of a pesto may make it palatable to those who dislike the taste of liver.

Conclusion

Any traditional food can be made Perfect Health Diet-compliant by swapping out ingredients. Pesto is pretty healthy to begin with, but replacing pine nuts with a low-omega-6 nut can make it even better.

Staple foods like rice, potatoes, and beef liver can get tiresome if they’re always eaten the same way. Luckily, traditional cookbooks are full of good sauces that vary the flavor of familiar foods. Be a poet in the kitchen, and look for flavors that can make the new familiar and the familiar new.

Steak Diane (Ribeye with Cream Sauce)

Posted by on March 20, 2011 22 comments

Ribeye steak is a staple in our house; we eat it almost every week. Its low omega-6 content makes beef, along with fish like salmon, our favorite meat. Ribeye is a fatty cut, which fits Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

Given how important it is in our diets, you might think we’d have a lot of fancy recipes; but simple grilled or pan-fried steak is highly satisfying, and also very quick. We’ll usually have a simple seasoned grilled steak, or pan-fried steak with a simple sauce, along with vegetables and a starch on the side.

Although our steaks are usually simple, I think it’s worth a post to show what we do. We would be curious to hear what sauces our readers like on steak.

Pan-Fried Steak in Cream Sauce

This is better known as Steak Diane, after Diana the Roman goddess of the hunt; it is a simple recipe such as a hunter might use.

Here’s what we typically buy:

These are regular grain-fed, not grass-fed, steaks; grain-fed is cheaper and fattier, both of which we like, and the omega-6 content is reasonably low even in grain-fed beef.

We eat toward the lower half of our recommended protein range, which translates to between 0.5 lb and 1 lb (0.4 to 0.8 kg) meat per day. So this $20 package represents a 2 day supply of meat for 2 people. At $5 per person per day, it’s quite affordable. Certainly cheaper than restaurant meals!

Here are a few ingredients for the sauce:

Butter, cream, lemon for juice, rosemary, garlic, and bay leaves. The bay leaves are rather old and brown, but might as well use them up.

We start with some coconut oil, rosemary, garlic, and bay leaves, and two steaks seasoned with salt and pepper.

We brown them about 1 1/2 minutes per side at medium to high heat:

At that point we pull them out, carve them into smaller sizes, and return them along with the butter to the pan:

After another 2 minutes per side, the steaks are ready to remove from the pan. We then use the pan residue to make a sauce.

Normally we might add mushrooms, onions, or other vegetables to the sauce, but today we were pressed for time and just added cream and some lemon juice to the pan. It looked like this at first:

Stir it at low heat and remove as soon as ingredients are mixed; the sauce looks like this:

Note: Don’t eat the bay leaves! They flavor the sauce, but the leaves contain toxins. We removed the bay leaves before adding cream to the sauce.

We always have some rice around – we run the rice cooker once every 3 days or so – and some seasoned seaweed, kimchi, and baby carrots for vegetables when we need them. So if we’re pressed for time and don’t feel like cooking plant foods, dinner will look like this:

(Kimchi and seasoned seaweed not shown. We also put the sauce over the rice.)

Table-grilled steak

If we’re even more pressed for time and would like to relax in our living room while cooking – maybe to watch a movie or television show – then we’ll grill our steak at the table.

Cooking at the table is a tradition in Asia; many restaurants have grills built into the dining tables so that diners can barbecue their food.

The easiest way to do this is to buy an electric table grill. We got ours for $20 at an Asian supermarket. Amazon has some fancier models:

Here’s the steak cooking:

On our table grill, the heat is lower near the edges than in the center. So we usually need to pull the steak when the center part is cooked, cut off the edges, and return the undercooked edges to the grill:

Here’s the steak fresh off the grill:

Add whatever plant foods you like! We’ll typically do bell peppers as here, onions, portobello mushrooms, or asparagus.

It’s hard for a meal to get easier to prepare than this. The table grill is easy to clean also – both the grilling surface and a pan to catch drippings pull out and clean easily.

Steak Diane with Gordon Ramsey

Here is Gordon Ramsey cooking essentially the same meal: