Fast Food, Super Fast Food, and Lightening Fast Food

We have a few cookbooks geared toward speed, and it is a whole interesting sub-genre, as I mentioned in the last post. The sort that is called, “Ten Minute Meals” or the like generally make liberal use of ingredients we don’t really use here, like canned cream of mushroom soup or seasoning packets or the like. Not to be a snob or anything – we just can’t. But I would like to discuss the three books on our shelf that are specific to quick cooking.

If you look at my blog background, down in the left background, you’ll see the book, Twenty-Minute Menus by Marian Burros. I bought this a million and six years ago, one of my first cookbooks, when I was a single nurse working in an NICU. I had a co-worker and dear friend who brought inspiring meals to work every evening, and I wanted to learn to make something, but my priorities did not include being in the kitchen. Hence the selection of this title. It was a random selection, so I was fortunate in selecting a good author. There are a few recipes that are good from that book, but the one that became a family staple is her recipe for 5 Spice Chicken. Who doesn’t need a 5 Spice Chicken recipe, right? Oh. Vegetarians. OK, but the rest of us need one! Those of us who are paleo throw it on a bed of greens, everyone else on rice. Perfect vehicle for soooo many vegetables lightly steamed and stirred in. Leftovers very lunchable. This is a good example of fast food, too, and making the spice blend oneself allows for slight tweaking over the years until it becomes a unique family blend.

Twenty minutes? Well, yes, I suppose, but only after we’ve made it innumerable times. Which is the point with most of these books. I’m sure the author clocks in at twenty minutes, but these chefs have knife skills and often have high pressure kitchen experience behind them.

Which brings me to Exhibit B, Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Oliver's Meals in Minutes: A Revolutionary Approach to Cooking Good Food Fast . If you know us in real life, please don’t bring up this cookbook title in Clara’s hearing :-). She really hates how the instructions are written in this cookbook. He has set up the instructions to get the complete meal to the table simultaneously, with everything warm that should be warm. So he might have you chop the onions and garlic for one dish, and set it to a low temperature, then tell you to combine ingredients for another dish and put them in the refrigerator, then come back to your first pan, add chicken broth, then chop something else. What drives The Patriarch batty about the instructions is the lack of actual times or frequently measurements. “Add oil to the pan and cook while you chop the broccoli” is not my husband’s friend. We all do get it. Especially after watching episodes of the show that went with the book on youtube, this is all meant to be enabling and instructive on how to throw together fresh, whole ingredients to make a quick meal.

Do I recommend the book anyway? Wholeheartedly, and both Clara and The Patriarch agree. Despite the fact that it annoys them both, they agree that the recipes really do produce some special food, and in a reasonable timeframe. Also, the flavors are at times a departure for us. Here is an example; we had this last Sunday. This is “Tasty Crusted Cod”, and the crust on the fish is an unusual (for us, anyway) combination: fennel seeds, garlic, anchovies, sun-dried tomatoes, Parmesan, fresh thyme, rosemary, and basil, and a fresh red chile. We all bit into it and went, “Hunh” but that slowly turned into, “This is something that tastes really different for fish”, into, “I really like this!” And quick? Yes, quick. Clara and The Patriarch served it with asparagus and some lovely quick-marinated, pan grilled shrimp:


The third book that needs mentioning is Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food: 350 Recipes Ready-to-Eat in 30 Minutes . I have discussed this book in the past. This one strikes me as a goalpost. He has a kitchen garden and his approach is the head-to-the-garden-and-the-market-and-cook-what-is-fresh approach that I think of as very European. It was much easier to cook this way when I lived in Germany – I could take a walk, not very long, through the village and pass the bakery, the butcher, and in summer the outdoor produce market, otherwise a small grocer. Here in suburbia, in our climate, this type of cooking is really only practical in, say, July through September. Still – very good recipes and we’ve never made a thing from it that we didn’t like.

Lightening food is what is grabbed on the way out the door if one has not planned ahead! I wanted to mention this, as we all have our standby grab food, but The Patriarch has found a nice one. His standby has been to take a tortilla and put Run Down, a Jamaican standby, into it. However, he has gone Paleo so tortillas are out. He does the bed of lettuce thing. The new grab food is courtesy of Costco, which now carries Bear & Wolf brand wild Alaskan salmon in a can, shown here from Amazon:
 

What a resource! We buy a big “Spring Mix” plastic tub, which is organic and pre-washed, and he grabs his glass container and throws in a bed of spring mix, a can of salmon, and a handful of seeds, primarily sunflower seeds. Voila! Lunch! In about 3 minutes :-).

There are so many variants of seeds and nuts and dried fruit that make good out-the-door grabs. My sister does something that I’ve stolen, which is to have a line of quart Ball jars each with a different type of seed or nut or dried fruit. Each person can grab a little bowl if they’ll be home and mix what they like, or a little bag when heading out the door.

I suppose this is sort of an endless topic, isn’t it? Just a few thoughts from the front :-)





       

Shrimp and Cellophane Noodles

This one is from next week’s menu, as I failed to note exactly when the leeks from my Azure Standard order would be arriving before scheduling them into this week’s menu. Oops. So you’ll be seeing “Asian Style Ravioli with Coconut Curry” next week – had to switch. And although this is a “Wild Card Wednesday” dish, it was done on Monday.

Cellophane noodles are a good option when grains are not one’s friend. They’re still a starch, yes, but they’re made out of bean starch or sweet potato starch. We had some with sweet potato starch, and seaweed-derived salt. They need to be soaked for about a half hour first for maximum yumminess:

All our big bowls seemed to be in use, so I used a wok

This dish is out of Around My French Table. It had a large collection of ingredients, but wasn’t a particularly difficult dish to prepare.

Because of Clara’s reaction recently to sesame oil, we made two separate woks, one with, one without. As with many dishes, the key to this was cutting, dicing, measuring, and prepping everything beforehand. Once the woks were fired up, everything moved super fast and we were glad to be prepared.

There was a general agreement that this preparation was very “different”. We all had complicated reactions to it, neither “love” nor “hate”. If you have this book, or have it from the library, try the dish out – it’s a really unique combination of flavors and we’re all glad to have eaten it. However, it doesn’t seem to be one that anyone will request on a regular basis.

What was I Thinking Doing Salmon and Lime Again?

You’d think, when choosing new menu items, I would’ve remembered the recent lime-laden salmon debacle . . . but no, I was all, “Doesn’t that recipe look good?”

Good thing it was good. Not spectacular, but both solid and quick! I recently scored a couple of Nigella Lawson books at a thrift store, which was quite the exciting moment as I’ve never seen a Nigella in the wild ;-). This one I almost passed by. My edition is called “Forever Summer” but the US edition is this one: Nigella Fresh . Nothing grabbed my attention as I flipped through it. But then a quick look-up on the phone, and I noted the insight from an Amazon reviewer that Nigella’s books in general are carb-heavy, but that this one is more useable on a low carb diet. Hmmmm.

So this is her “Marinated Salmon with Capers and Gherkins”. Quick little marinade in lime, oil, salt, pepper. The salmon was supposed to be cut very thin and eaten raw, but we weren’t quite that brave. The Patriarch oh-so-carefully sliced the fish lovely thin:



Then kinda forgot to be delicate in the pan, so it broke up. OH well. The marinade was poured on the fish, then capers, sliced baby gherkins, and chives sprinkled on top. Nigella suggested pumpernickel bread as an accompaniment, which would’ve been good. Also a herb-y dill based bread would have been nice. We had some olive bread, so our gluten-eaters had that.
This went together really quickly! The capers and gherkins toned down the lime for us, which is kind of odd when you think about it.  

Not Our Cup of Salmon

So “sweetheart” and I did our salmon dish on Monday, cooking from Staff Meals from Chanterelle . This is a very classic butter sauce with lime – and with all of the butter and cream in this sauce (2 sticks of butter per 4 salmon pieces), you would think this would taste hugely rich and indulgent. but it was very, very lime.




I didn’t reduce the sauce far enough, so it was very liquid, but I think the flavor was where it was supposed to be. We all decided, though, that these flavors were not a way we like to enjoy our salmon.





Still, I’m glad we tried this classic sauce – we all appreciate testing something new.




 

Salmon en Papillote and Gougères

For this “Sweetheart Sunday” my sweetheart did “Salmon en Papillote with Tarragon” from Kitchen Simple: Essential Recipes for Everyday Cooking while I attempted gluten free “Cumin and parsley-flavored cheese gougères” from La Tartine Gourmande: Recipes for an Inspired Life . Both of these books I have home from the library.

I say “attempted” gougères, since we haven’t finished this week’s grocery shopping yet – haven’t made it to our natural foods store – and therefore I was missing the quinoa flour that  Béatrice Peltre uses in her gougère recipe. I googled about a bit and used the flour blend that Erin Swing at “The Sensitive Epicurean” recommends in her gougère recipe. Worth checking out, as she’s quite thorough in her instructions; here’s a link to that post. Other than the flour sub, I followed the recipe in the book. Oh, and I was out of cumin seeds so I subbed ground cumin, just reduced the amount and added it into the flour rather than topping the gougères with the seeds.

Both authors recommended working quickly once the process started, so I had my complete mise done. Also weighed ingredients, as gougères are fussy, especially gluten free gougères.



Milk, salt, pepper, and butter are brought to a boil, then the flours are added and the mixture stirred vigorously until it pulls away from the side of the pan:




Then eggs are incorporated one by one, at which point the dough is pliable:




The cheese and parsley (and I also did the cumin here) is stirred in. It is piped onto parchment paper (I used silicone sheets) and topped with more cheese (I used gruyère throughout):



And into the oven. The problem with gluten-free gougères is that they want to puff in the oven then deflate, and mine were no exception. Fortunately, they still taste delicious, even if they resemble cheese cookies on the plate!

Meanwhile, the Patriarch was busy with some fancy fish work. After cleaning and patting the salmon steaks with sea salt and pepper, he used twine to tie them into medallions, then topped each with fresh tarragon and pieces of butter. He then sprinkled the top of each with white wine:




Then painted the parchment with egg whites:

 
The individual steaks were each wrapped into their parchment packages and done in the oven for 20 minutes. They were very, very moist and the flavor was just excellent. Quite a delicious meal.








 

More Mixing Up of Themes

For “Sweetheart Sunday” this week, I’d asked the Patriarch to pick up whatever fish looked fresh. He snagged some Red Snapper, and I looked through “Eat Your Books” for a recipe that looked good and featured stuff in our fridge. Oddly enough, that was a dish from Marcella's Italian Kitchen . Odd because “Marcella Mondays” have been “Patricia Wells Mondays” so far! This dish is called Filetti di Pesce al Vino Rosso (fish fillets in red wine). It was a bit different in technique; several things I’d never done.

Boiled little whole onions, then browned them in butter and olive oil:




Threw in diced carrots and celery:

 

. . . and cooked covered until tender and browned. Fish was dredged in flour (used coconut flour to make paleo-friendly) and browned:




The vegetables were returned to the pan, wine was added and reduced by half:




Then the fish were returned to the pan and cooked through.

This made a thoroughly non-photogenic dish, sorry!




But very delicious. The fish was perfectly cooked through but tender, and as Marcella says in her note about this dish, “enveloped by the fine, fragrant vegetable bouquet”. Some sort of salad on the side depending on the season, and you’ve a perfect fish dinner.