Category Archives: Sauces - Page 2

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.

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.