A Fresh Way with Salmon

The Eating Well Rush Hour Cookbook
Editors of Eating Well
Eating Well Books (1994)
ISBN 1884943063

Somewhere (where?) I saw this book recommended then bought myself a second-hand copy since I frequently like recipes from Eating Well magazine. The book is organized into seasonal menus. When Ed asked for salmon for dinner, I found this nice menu, with Salmon on a Bed of Lentils (p207), Spinach & Citrus Salad (p208), and Cranberry-Pear Clafouti (p208),  planned it for the evening after shopping.

The whole menu takes about an hour to prepare and comes with a handy timetable for getting it all done. For this particular menu, you aren't rushed, but there are no "blank spaces" where you can have a rest or set the table. Nothing hectic, you just keep at it, step after step.

The lentil and salmon dish is rather French; I've made something very similar from a French cookbook. It's very simple to prepare. You sauté some shallots and garlic; add some chicken stock, lentils, a clove-studded onion, thyme, and S&P; simmer till the lentils are about 10 minutes from being done. Then add finely chopped turnip and carrot and cook till these are done. Finally put the salmon on top, steam-poach for a few minutes, and serve.

The go-with salad is also very nice. I might do this again with arugla/rocket/rucola, which would be just as good. Along with the greens, there are red onion slices that have been soaked in water to soften the taste, sections of red grapefruit, and a dressing of grapefruit juice, olive oil, grainy mustard, honey, and garlic.

And we finished off with a lovely clafoutis, using a winter pear and some cranberries, both roasted with some sugar before assembling the clafoutis. I did cut the sugar back on this recipe, using only 1/4 cup (rather than 1/3 cup) with the roasting fruit and two tablespoons (rather than 1/4cup) in the clafoutis batter.

Judging by this menu, this is a promising book, one I need to spend a bit more time with in the near future.

This post is shared with November's Cook Your Books challenge at Kitchen Flavors.

Ligurian-Style Pasta Sauce with Raw Tomatoes, Olives, Capers, and Anchovies

Marcella Cucina
Marcella Hazan
Harper Collins (1997)
ISBN 0060171030

Marcella Hazan's recent death was a stimulus to add some of her recipes to the menu plan. I've used this book quite a lot, so it really doesn't qualify as a seldom used book, but it's been a while since I cooked from either of my Hazan books, so it seems appropriate to post.

Made with raw tomatoes, this dish is really like a tomato salad served on pasta. You start by chopping together some black and green olives, capers, and anchovy fillets. Then you peel and seed a mess of tomatoes (just a bit of tedium!) and cut them into narrow strips. Mix these all together along with some julienned basil, marjoram or oregano, minced garlic, and parsley. Add salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, and olive oil, toss everything together, then let the sauce sit for at least an hour, stirring occasionally. That's a salad, right? My sauce sat only for the time required to boil water and cook the spaghetti. It's hard to imagine it getting better.

The instructions say to assemble the sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Since you're instructed to toss the spaghetti in the same bowl, small will definitely not do. It took the middle-sized bowl of the 3-bowl pyrex set to hold the sauce for a half recipe; the smaller bowl would have been too small. I put the pasta back in the pasta pot and did the tossing there.

Because of the tomato peeling, this is decidedly not a quick dish to make, but since the sauce can be made well ahead, it could make a nice company dish.

This meal in grateful memory of Marcella Hazan and the pleasure she has brought to the cooking and eating in our household.

This post is shared with October's Cook Your Books, where you can find lots of intriguing dishes folks have been making from their cookbooks.

Peach, Almond, and Cardamom Clafoutis

The French Market Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes from My Parisian Kitchen
Clotilde Dusoulier
Clarkson Potter (2013)
ISBN 9780307984821

Shortly after a friend remarked how surprising it is that there are many vegetarian French people considering how well they cook veggies, I got a notice of this book about to be published and knew I needed a copy. I've enjoyed Dusoulier's blog, Chocolate and Zucchini, as well as her first cookbook, for many years now.

This new book is arranged by season, making it easier to use what's in the market right now. When I came across this recipe for a claufoutis with peaches, I knew it was something I needed to make with the end of the summer bounty.

I first made this early in the month. It was very tasty but the recipe has a number of problems. My 8" square dish was very full of peaches. A clafoutis is typically not so dense with fruit. this mean that the dish was full almost to overflowing with the batter was added. In addition, my clafoutis baked for 50min (40min, the max time specified, plus an extra 10min) and was still runny in the center. It needs maybe 60-70min. I used the weights rather than the cup measures for the flours and sugar. 85g of almond flour (I used ground almonds, very common in the shops in France) was more like 1cup, rather than 2/3cup. (I didn't find it grainy at all.)

Like most clafoutis, this is fairly easy to assemble, especially if you have help to slice the fruit, and dirties only one bowl beyond the baking dish, so the clean-up staff is happy. I put the bowl on the scale and measured in the almond flour, all-purpose flour, sugar (less that asked), cornstarch, and cardamom (from a jar). Off the scale, I stirred in the eggs, then the almond milk. Then poured the batter over the fruit and put the pan in the oven. Feeling posh, we served it with a bit of vanilla ice cream.

Tonight, having some plums that were slightly under-ripe, I gave it another try. This time I used half the fruit, only about 500g (or 1#) rather than 1kg. Bingo, the claufoutis was not so dense with fruit and the dish was not overflowing. (Probably even less fruit could be used, so that the slices are only one layer deep.) I used only 80g of the sugar and added cow's milk rather than almond milk. I cooked it for 65min and it was perfectly done.

This is a nice recipe to have around when you have fruit needing to be used. Dusoulier says it's good for those peaches you get that never seem to want to ripen.

This post is shared with September's Cook Your Books.

IHCC: August Pot Luck

Between kitchen renovations and the zucchini glut from the garden, there's not much serious cooking going on here right now. But today was shopping day, and shopping day means fresh fish. What better way is there to cook fish than Indian? A quick trip through Madhur Jaffry's books came up with quite a long short list of fish-for-dinner recipes.

Using up bits of garden bounty, I served the fish with Pan-Grilled Zucchini (At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, p173) and Fried Aubergine (Eggplant) Slices (Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking, p99), both of which I've made before. The zucchini is pan-fried (you could also pan-grill it) then sprinkled with a squeeze of lemon then some salt, freshly ground black pepper, ground roasted cumin, and cayenne. The eggplant is tossed with salt, turmeric, cayenne, and freshly ground black pepper, then pan-fried and served with slices of lemon. I've not done this yet, but I next time I'll cut the eggplant slices a bit bigger and add just a bit of oil with spices, then pan-grill or broil them.

For the fish dish, I finally settled on Grilled or Bhuna Fish Steaks from Foolproof Indian Cooking (p44), using some salmon fillets rather than swordfish (or other) steaks. You make a lumpy sort of paste of grated ginger, crushed garlic cloves, garam masala, ground cumin, turmeric, ground mustard, cayenne, lemon juice, salt&pepper, and maybe a bit of water. Spread this on the fish and let it sit while you get everything else ready. Then just pop it under the broiler or on the grill till it's done.

Visit this week's I Heart Cooking Clubs to see what's turned up in this week's pot luck. I'm also sharing this with the newly discovered Cook Your Books, where I'll try to share monthly something cooked from a seldom or never used cookbook. Since this fish dish is the first I've made from Foolproof, it qualifies.