In the (salmon) pink

I remember to the day(s) when salmon became a staple of our family diet.  It was July of 1980, and we visited my sister-in-law in Alaska.  One day she bought salmon for dinner, and showed me how to cook it (a film of mayonnaise over the top so it wouldn't dry out under the broiler).  This was a new concept to me -- I'd never seen salmon in our grocery stores, and had eaten it only in restaurants.

The salmon was wonderful, of course, fabulously fresh, only a few miles from its fishing grounds.  It was expensive but worth it.  We had it a couple of times during our visit.

When we came home to the landlocked Midwest, we stopped at the grocery on our way from the airport and to my amazement found gorgeous salmon at the fish counter -- at half the price we'd paid in Anchorage!  

Seems that the fishing season had gotten delayed by some ugly disagreement between fishermen and government, and now there was such a backlog of fish in the big salmon ports that airplanes were taking off every three minutes, 24/7.  You could barely give away the fish, hence our bonanza at Kroger; apparently even stores that had never carried it before couldn't refuse.  And it must have been popular, because it's been there ever since.

We bought and ate lots of salmon for the rest of that summer, and forevermore.  I've learned to prepare salmon in many different ways -- broiled, pan-sauteed, baked -- and with many different flavor accents.  But in recent years I've become far more picky about the variety and provenance of my salmon.

We try not to buy farm-raised salmon; it tastes bland and insipid, and we worry about the potential for environmental degradation from the farm pens, not to mention the potential for disease in the closely crammed fish population.  But this year we've been blessed with what seems to be a bumper crop of wild-caught sockeye, more delicious than we remember from previous years.  

I don't know where they come from -- probably Alaska -- or how long we'll enjoy this season's catch.  But we're loving it while it lasts.

Leftovers -- batting 1.000

I always like to do things with leftovers other than just stand there and eat them from the plate, sometimes with the refrigerator door still open.  That's so trashy.  But sometimes my concoctions turn out better than usual.

Last week we had a butternut squash, which I cut in two and baked in the oven.  We ate less than half of it with dinner, leaving a lot of leftovers.  My first thought was to use the rest for risotto, because we hadn't eaten rice for a while.

But as I started to bring out the things for dinner, I was reminded that we had half a red pepper in the fridge, not sweet enough to eat raw.  And that we had a tray full of small red tomatoes, picked just before the vines got taken down for the year.  They had been slowly ripening on the kitchen table for a week, but definitely showing their survivor status.  They had hard dark blotches and tough skin, and inside they weren't the true red of a legitimately ripe tomato.

Sounded like both these red things wanted to become part of the risotto.  I cut up the tomatoes, discarding most of the skin and cutting away some unappetizing parts of the insides.  Cooked them up in a hot pan with olive oil, letting them brown (heck, even a bit beyond that) and then adding marsala to deglaze the pan.  After they had cooked for a while, turning dark brown, I decanted them and sauteed the peppers in the same pan, along with garlic, decanting them as well when they were done.

By this time the vegetable count was getting pretty high, so I took only half the squash.  As the rice cooked away (click here for the basic risotto tutorial), I mashed up the squash and added it to the bubbling pan.  When you add raw bits of squash to risotto they retain their shape and crunch, but if you add cooked squash, it almost dissolves into a rich, creamy orange sauce, which was the mood I wanted now.  Just before serving, I added the tomatoes and peppers along with all the brown liquid that had accumulated in the bottom of the bowl.

The risotto was wonderful, the best I've cooked in months.

But there was still squash left.

Plus some leftover mashed potatoes from an intervening dinner.  Why not put them together for another leftovers du jour?

I mashed up the rest of the squash, added it to the potatoes, and mixed them up with two eggs.  Sauteed a half an onion, then added the vegetables for a frittata/potato pancake.

Some black pepper and a touch of nutmeg tasted good.  I thought of grating cheese over the top, but it seemed like overkill.  The squash gave the frittata a nice warm glow but if you hadn't known that was the secret ingredient, you probably wouldn't have identified it.

Should I quit while I'm ahead and stop cooking leftovers for a while?  All I can say is that our fridge currently holds none and we are feeling exceptionally well fed.  

Rice cooker epic fail

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to try making steelcut oatmeal in my rice cooker, supposedly a foolproof method.  I had a different result.

I measured out my regular quantity of ingredients: 1 cup oats, 4 cups water.  I usually make this in a saucepan somewhat smaller than my rice cooker bowl, so I thought it would work out OK.  But when you cook it in a pan, you watch and turn the heat down when it reaches a boil.  The rice cooker knows better, and just boils away till it thinks the food is done.

Unfortunately, as the oatmeal boiled, it boiled right out of the cooker.  Yuk.

I wiped up the mess and somehow finished cooking the oatmeal, which never achieved the proper texture.  Too bad I wasn't doing collage that day, because the goo was a wonderful paste, very difficult to get off the counter even with serious tools.

I don't know whether this was my fault for using too much oatmeal, or whether it happened because the cooker stayed too hot too long.  Also don't know whether I'll even bother to try again.  Steelcut oats take about 45 minutes to cook and I like to make four servings at a time (on subsequent days I heat them in the microwave).  Don't think it would be worth the time and trouble to make smaller batches in the rice cooker, since I can easily make four servings in the good old-fashioned pan.

Rice cooking -- without any hard work

So I made snide comments last week about people who can't cook rice.  In the spirit of improving everybody's lives, let me talk a bit about the helpless cook's best friend -- the rice cooker.

You've probably seen rice cookers in Asian buffet restaurants, big industrial models that do 30 or 60 or 100 cups at a time.  They're available for home use too, in any size appropriate to your family.  My cute little cooker produces two big servings at its smallest quantity, and goes up to six or seven at maximum capacity.

You measure out some rice into the little cup, then fill up the pot with water to the line.  If you used one cup of rice, fill up to "1" and if you used two cups, fill up to "2."  I usually do a can of chicken broth instead of water, which brings the liquid level up above the "1" line, so to compensate I use a bit more rice.  Add a bit of butter or olive oil, and in return the cooker will produce a nice browned crust on the bottom.

After several years of just cooking rice, I've learned to experiment with adding new ingredients as seasoning (one of my favorites is salsa), although I haven't yet gotten to the point of using the cooker to make things like chili or stew.  I have also gotten good results by replacing some of the rice with other rice-like substances such as orzo, quinoa or lentils.

I like my rice on the wet side, like risotto, so often when the cooker flips over to "warm" I'll add a little boiling water from my electric kettle, stir it in, and cook a minute more.

My cooker also includes a steamer basket so you can cook your broccoli or whatever at the same time as your rice, without throwing them all into the same pot.

Probably the greatest rice cooker aficionado is Roger Ebert, the former movie critic (Siskel & Ebert) who took a blog post and expanded it into a book.  His theory is that you need no other cooking mechanism to achieve nirvana -- "the Pot" can do everything.  He endorses its use in the office, in the dorm, in the attic.  I haven't read the book but I am persuaded that I should be more adventurous in my cooking adventures.  My next experiment, following Ebert's lead, will be to make steel-cut oatmeal in the cooker.

With this handy kitchen appliance -- mine cost considerably less than $20, as I recall -- you could theoretically live your life without a stove.  Not sure I want to go that far, but I'm intrigued by how far I can push its capabilities.

Dinner from the past

As frequently happens in the afternoon, I asked my husband if he had any brilliant ideas for dinner.  Was there anything in particular that he would love?

And to my surprise, he suggested -- eatmore!

Eatmore was one of his mother's regular dinners, consisting of ground beef, tomatoes, noodles, and other ingredients that hadn't lasted quite so strongly in memory.  We'd discussed this dish in the past, and I had recalled one of my mother's regular dinners, known as "goulash" but bearing no resemblance to any goulash you would find in Hungary or any cookbook.  Indeed, our "goulash" was very similar to his eatmore -- ground beef, tomatoes, elbow macaroni.

Both eatmore and "goulash" were swimming in a lot of tomato broth.  My mother-in-law would often siphon off the broth and serve it as a separate soup course, thus enabling the main course to be served on a plate.  By contrast, my mother's goulash was served in bowls (I think I'm remembering right) and you slurped up the broth with a spoon.

I used to hate goulash night.  Not that it tasted bad, but I didn't like that juice.  It made the whole entree seem insipid and washed out.  On goulash night I would volunteer to serve out the plates, giving my own plate as little of the juice as possible. 

My husband, on the other hand, thought the broth was wonderful.

When he expressed the surprising desire for eatmore it was even more surprising that I said why not -- the first time in 42 years of marriage that I had done so.  I asked whether eatmore ever included bell peppers (we owned two big red peppers that were perilously near the end of their shelf life) and he said he thought it did.  Since this was a nostalgia trip, I asked whether it included onions (he thought yes) and asked him to find the closest possible noodle from our pasta shelf.

I found a pack of already cooked ground beef in the freezer, which made life much easier.  Cut up the peppers and an onion, added a fresh tomato that was also in dire need of being eaten plus a can of diced tomatoes.  Set it all to cooking.

Next question: what seasonings were used in eatmore?  He searched his memory and thought none.  Which is exactly what seasonings were used in "goulash."  But that sounded inadequate, so I took the liberty of adding some garlic and some marsala wine to wash out the tomato can. 

I'm sure both our mothers would have cooked the pasta in a separate pot, but I almost always cook pasta in with its sauce.  Fewer pans to wash, and the pasta absorbs good flavor instead of just serving as a neutral base.  

Old habits die hard.  I served up my husband's bowl with lots of juice, but kept mine as dry as possible.  He loved his.  I thought mine was insipid and washed out.  Maybe it was the peppers -- plenty of them, and so sweet that they dominated the dish.  (Probably my mother-in-law would have used green peppers; maybe they would have tasted better.)  Maybe it was the memory of "goulash" hanging over my head.

But at least one of us was really happy!

Grocery store arithmetic

So how many three-pound bags of carrots do you think people bought?

Rice cooking -- without all the hard work (!)

Prowling around in the middle of the grocery the other day I found this product -- ready-to-eat, just-warm-up rice!  It comes in a little plastic dish, to go in the microwave for two minutes.

The label reads, "We understand cooking rice can be a chore, that's why we have done all the hard work for you.  Rice so good, you will never need to cook it from scratch again."

This made me laugh.  Cooking rice is so far from being a chore that I can't conceive of the two ideas in the same universe.  With a rice cooker it's totally foolproof, as well as endlessly flexible to add ingredients and variations on the theme.  Even without a cooker, plain boiled rice is pretty simple, as long as you can use a measuring cup and multiply by two (or three if you like brown rice).

But I'm willing to admit that there are probably plenty of people out there who can't deal with this "chore," and for them the cute little dish full of rice is probably an appealing buy for those times when they absolutely have to pretend they know how to cook, and don't mind paying $1 a serving, compared to 8 cents or less if the rice comes from a bag.

What intrigued me was the corporate info on the label, indicating that the rice comes from the UK.  A google expedition revealed that the company is apparently headquartered in London but owned largely from India, a venture started 25 years ago by Indian farmers who wanted to get into the European market. They grow the rice, but process it in the UK to qualify for lower import duties.

Veetee has been selling microwave rice in Europe for some time, both in groceries and to restaurants, but has only sold in the US for a few years.  Which goes to prove that not all the technological "advances" in overprocessed food for lazy or clueless diners come from this side of the ocean.