Coconut Poached Salmon

It’s been 4 days of alone time for me. Okay let’s be real I haven’t been alone for very long in the last 4 days. I’m typically a pretty busy person and it seems while Anthony is away that hasn’t changed. I went to a Cabi clothes party (very cute clothes, but way too expensive for me. I’m a firm believer in buying cheap clothes so that I don’t have to keep them for years!), dinner with friends at The Crab Shack (I had the clam bake), more dinner with friends at Beale Street (pulled pork sandwich), and then helping friends move. I got home Saturday night (after helping with the move) and needed to cook something for just me. The itch to cook was there and when the itch happens I must cook (simply because it doesn’t happen often and I wouldn’t want to pass up the chance to blog something).




I was pretty intrigued with what I was going to be cooking, salmon poached in coconut milk. Anything coconut just makes the salivating start. Poaching is something I don’t do very often. I’ve poached eggs just the one time for this blog and I’ve poached chicken for a soup that I make a lot. But I’ve never poached fish. I’m totally in love with the concept! Poaching means (in The Hesitant Cook dictionary): Letting a protein boil/simmer in liquid of some type and it not getting all dried out.


This Rachael Ray recipe was pretty easy to follow. As is typical, I forgot to buy something, in this case a lime. Oh well you can’t expect me to be on top of everything all the time. I also did not make this entire recipe because I was not in the mood for watercress. There is a possibility that I will make this again next week with the watercress, although by then I might find another way to cook salmon (I have one fillet left in the house. If you have a good way for me to cook it let me know.) Back to the recipe, you boil the chicken broth until it reduces by half. At that point you add the coconut milk, lime juice (which I did have on hand), lime zest (which sadly I didn’t have) and basil. Add the salmon and poach it for about 10 minutes. I’m not good at telling when salmon is cooked and I figured it wouldn’t dry out using this method so I poached it for the full 10 minutes. Meanwhile I used some of this rice (I’m not ashamed, I can’t cook rice!) and added some coconut milk to it and heated it on the stove.


The salmon and rice were both done and plated when I remembered that I still had to make the sauce! Oops! Luckily I had heated the plate in the microwave so my food stayed warm. The watercress part of recipe was throwing me off track and I thought I was finished. I brought the poaching liquid to a boil, dissolved the cornstarch with cold water and added it to the liquid. I whisked it until it was thickened and then poured in onto the salmon and rice.


Final Product: 

    

          (sorry my pictures are going to be sad since 

                      Anthony has the good camera!)

This was delicious. I ate the whole thing and I didn’t even realize I was that hungry! The fish was very moist. There was a flavor to it that I can’t describe, sorry I tried to come up with the word while eating it but I couldn’t. It was salty and a little sweet. Poaching fish is the way to go! I was very impressed with how moist the salmon turned out. I’m an over cooker and typically my salmon is on the dry side. This method of cooking is going to be something that I do more often. I encourage everyone to try it out. Even non-cooks like me can do this!


Now if only I could figure out why my grocery bill was eighty dollars! I’m only one person this week, how in the world could I have bought $80 worth of groceries? No meat was bought, no cleaning products, no shampoos or anything like that. Also I only bought ingredients for 4 dinners. Thinking back on what I bought I still can’t fathom why my bill was so high. One portabella and one eggplant couldn’t have done so much damage. It baffles me. Completely. Looks like this weekend I am going to the public market for my vegetables and seeing if that makes a difference. I’ll post a blog about the experience and let you know what I discover!


Tomorrow's blog post:  Pineapple and Jalapeno Pizza



Healthier Sesame Chicken

Chinese food just doesn’t taste as good if you cook it at home.  Plus it makes your house smell like sesame oil for awhile.  Those are the two facts that I had stuck in my head when I attempted to make a healthier version of sesame chicken that I found in Food Network Magazine.  So going into this I knew this wasn’t going to be the fried, breaded, so yummy sesame chicken that I order from New Fong Kitchen (our local Chinese takeout). 

The first bit of confusion came into play when I noticed that the recipe asked for the snow peas to be trimmed.   I had to Google trimming snow peas, having never done that before.  What I learned was there is some sort of string like bit that is holding the pea together and people said you should remove them on both sides.  There is debate about whether both sides are necessary.  I did my best but it was hard to get that little stringy bit off.  Sometimes it would break and I would just leave it half there half not there.  My thought was as long as these peas are cooked well you can probably just eat the whole thing.  Peeling both sides off seems silly because the whole thing will fall apart.  This is still a mystery to me; if anyone knows anything about trimming snow peas please give me some pointers!  

Now that the snow pea trimming hurdle had been tackled (albeit not very gracefully) lets move on to the rest of the recipe.  First step (this happens before the snow pea trimming, but is not nearly as interesting) is marinating the chicken for about 20 minutes in a mixture of sesame oil, soy sauce and honey.  

 

Once your chicken is marinated you sauté it (do it in two batches so there is enough room in the pain for the chicken to cook properly) until it’s cooked.  The recipe says until it’s browned but you can’t see the color on the chicken underneath all that brown sauce, so just cut a few pieces open to see if it’s done.  Another thing about this recipe that I didn’t like was once the chicken is cooked you transfer it to a plate and then you are supposed to wipe out the pan.  The pan was covered in sauce and super hot so I got Anthony to help me.  This part is ridiculous though.  If I were you I would just use a new pan, you shouldn’t have to wipe pans out while you are cooking.  

The next step is heating up the scallions, ginger, and garlic and then while you are doing that you are supposed to whisk up a sauce containing chicken broth, cornstarch, sugar, rice vinegar, chili paste, and soy sauce.   I read ahead in the recipe and decided to make this sauce while the chicken was cooking.  I don’t like to leave garlic unattended over heat because it tends to burn.  You add the sauce to the pan and stir until it’s thickened.  Meanwhile you can steam the snow peas as you stir the sauce for a few minutes.   Once the sauce has thickened stir in the chicken until heated. 

             

I made basmati rice to go with this because it’s the only rice besides instant that I had.  Cooking rice is the pits.  I just can’t get it right at all.  It was mushy and not very appealing.  When will I ever understand how to cook rice correctly?!  

Final Product:  

This was a flavorful (I might use a little less sesame oil next time) dish.  The rice was a disaster and the snow pea trimming was a pain in the butt, but other than those things this dish was easy to make.  Make this if you have a craving for Chinese, but don’t want all the calories. 

There has been a ton of life going on over here.  I haven’t had any time to cook, which means no material to blog about.  But…there is a challenge ahead of me.  My husband has gone off to Peru (for 20 days) and left me to fend for myself and I can’t afford to eat take-out every night.  So can I come up with meals for one person or will I just give up and eat frozen meals?  The challenge is on!

Coconut Vegetable Curry

This post will be kind of lame. I didn’t do a lot of cooking the last 4 days. I was supposed to share with you the pork roll sandwich picture, but we had an issue with the pork roll. We bought a roll from Wegmans , but the slices Anthony cut from the roll were so tiny! Question for the Jersey people reading this, was that always the case little bitty slices, because that's not what I remember?! We went back to Wegmans yesterday and the pre-sliced is much bigger than the roll slices. What’s up with that?! I did have Anthony fry me an egg and some pork roll for breakfast yesterday. I’m okay with the pieces being smaller for breakfast, but not on a sandwich. Three of those tiny slices barely filled the Kaiser roll we had it on.

Not sure who was watching the show America’s Next Great Restaurant, but sadly Spice Coast (an Indian fast casual idea) didn’t win. I was pulling for it, because I would eat there a lot! It was between Spice Coast (Indian flavors), Brooklyn Meatball Co (meatballs), and Soul Daddy (soul food). Spice Coast would have been the only place I could eat at more often. I have nothing against meatballs or soul food (I love both a bunch!), but that’s not the type of food I can eat often. Indian is! (In case anyone is wondering Soul Daddy won! Congrats to Jamawn Woods! ) So strangely enough I made a vegetable curry last night, the night that Spice Coast lost. I love Indian spices! I’ve even added curry to my tomato sauce before. Yum!

The actual name of the recipe is Indian Coconut Curried Vegetables. Please don’t judge me when I tell you that I had Anthony chop the vegetables. I’m slow and I just wanted to get the cooking over with and Anthony is so fast at chopping vegetables! Not to mention that cooking should be a family activity right?! So the veggies were prepped: carrot and zucchini sliced, cauliflower cut, green beans snapped (is that what you call that snapped? I did the snapping!), onion, garlic, and ginger chopped. I didn’t buy a chili pepper, because I already had chili paste. I put the onion, garlic, ginger, and chili paste in my little food processor and made it into a paste basically. Put this mixture in a skillet with some oil and added the spices:  coriander, cumin, curry, and turmeric and heat it for a couple of minutes. Then I added all the vegetables and the coconut milk. It says to use 1 cup of the coconut milk, but I added a whole can and added some more of the spices in case the milk diluted it. You cover this and let it cook for 20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

                                    (I just love the color of curry dishes!)

I made basmati rice and heated up some naan bread to go with the veggie curry.  Overall this meal was super simple to make! The hardest part is chopping the veggies. The result: ah not so great. It was actually quite bland. I don’t think this is due to me adding a little more coconut milk than asked for since I added more of the spices. I’m not sure what the problem with this recipe is. The only thing I can come up with is to add more salt than the ½ a teaspoon it says to add and maybe even more of the spices. Crazy to think with all those spices we still ended up with a pretty bland main dish. Anthony said it needs chicken, but I’m trying to have as many meatless meals as possible. Although I’m sure it would taste better with chicken in it! I’m actually willing to try it with chicken just to see if it will up the flavor.

Not sure what will be on the menu for this week. I didn’t plan ahead. I wanted my meals to be a surprise this week. I need some excitement in my life, so I’m living on the edge. Yes, for me not having a menu for the week is living on the edge. I’m sure some of you do this all the time, but I’m a planner!