A Delicious Surprise: Greek-Style MahiMahi with Toasted Orzo with Saffron & Fennel

I think this is more than once I've said that my proficiency with fish is lacking.  One week I knew I wanted to make fish, but I wanted to try something new.  So I did what I always do in this situation and turned to my back issues of Gourmet (RIP) and found a rather interesting recipe.  It sounded interesting because it paired fish with cheese.  For some odd reason, fish and cheese just doesn't seem appetizing.  I mean, I love tuna melts, which pairs fish with cheese.  I also greatly enjoyed tuna-noodle casserole when I was little, which also paired fish with cheese.  I see, now, that both of these examples use tuna paired with cheese and not other kinds of fish, which is where it's left me feeling rather iffy.  I can't think of any other examples.  But, it sounded really good and I loved the sound of the side dish, but I'll get to that later.

I took a leap of faith in Gourmet's test kitchens and chefs and decided to give this a try.  I was pleasantly surprised when I went to have a taste and it was delicious.  The cheese, which is feta, actually wasn't that powerful and, when paired with lemon, mayonnaise and dill, it doesn't get in the way of the fish.  In fact, that's another issue I had with this recipe beforehand, which was baking the fish covered in mayonnaise.  For some odd reason, that seems weird to me.  I think it's because I can't pull mayonnaise away from its parts.  Eggs and fish?  I just can't visualize that tasting good, but, like I said, I was pleasantly surprised with this fish.  It had a ton of flavor and the fish was extremely tender.  In the end, I really enjoyed the dish a lot and will definitely make it again.

Like I said earlier, one of the reasons I wanted to make the mahimahi was because of the side dish:  toasted orzo with saffron and fennel.  I, for one, love orzo (my mom is not a fan; she expects rice, but it's pasta!).  It's pasta you can easily eat with a spoon.  I've only made it a few times, but this was one of the first times I made it with an actual recipe; I wasn't flying by the seat of my pants.  I also love fennel.  I'm a huge fan of black licorice and anything anise-y.  I usually make my Christmas biscotti with more anise than necessary just because I love that flavor.  I was really pleased with how this side dish came out. It had a great flavor and wasn't super heavy, like rice tends to be.  The flavors were really fresh and light and went perfectly with the fish.

Oh yeah - the mayonnaise sauce on the fish:  I would eat it with a spoon - so delicious!

Way Better than Boca: Homemade Veggie Burgers

Remember when the Food Network showed cooking shows?  Well, it feels lately that the network has been overrun with food competition shows.  Granted some of them are very good; I'm a huge fan of Chopped, actually.  Anyway, there were my favorites, like Everyday Italian, Nigella Bites, and Good Eats, which now can only be found at odd hours of the morning on Sundays.  Very rarely did I ever pay attention to the vibrant host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives - yes, he DID have an actual cooking show before they just let him eat on camera - Guy Fieri.  In all honesty, he's kind of a tool and I really don't care for him all that much, but I happened to be bored one afternoon and home and watching, as one often does in these situations, the Food Network and I saw an episode of his cooking show.  He had two guests on, his mother and his sister.  His sister happens to be vegetarian and so Fieri's show centered around her recipe for homemade veggie patties, or burgers.  They're awesome, as you can see depicted by my empty plate.  I managed to scarf down everything before I remember to take a picture of my plate all done up!

Now, I love beans and these veggie patties are all about beans.  There are 3 different kinds of beans in these patties with very different flavors and textures.  Another thing about this recipe is that it contains a heck of a lot of ingredients; 21 to be exact.  You certainly can't say these veggie burgers lack any kind of flavor at all and surprisingly enough, even with 21 ingredients, it isn't too big or muddled.  You do taste each spice and flavor and they end up being really delicious.  Since we've had these (first time I made these was more than a year ago), every time I've eaten a boca- or gardenburger, I'm horribly disappointed.  Plus, both of those patties are full of fillers like rice and bread (you'll notice the main filler here is rolled oats with only a little bit of bread crumbs, to hold everything together; you definitely don't taste either of these fillers, unlike the rice in gardenburgers); there's really no substance at all and they're rather tasteless.  I honestly think that prepared vegetarian or vegan foods are the words most processed foods and contain as much or maybe more chemicals than all other non-vegetarian processed foods.  These homemade veggie burgers are tasty, delicious, nutritious and easy to make.  They're great with sweet potato oven fries, which I spray with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, pepper and cayenne with a little bit of brown sugar.

Just remember:  to make this meal a complete protein, make sure to pair with a whole grain (we served the burgers on whole wheat buns)!

Oh yeah, I wanted to comment on the funky measurements below.  The first time I made these, I had to keep a conversion chart handy, so I knew how many of each item I actually needed.  I'm a fan of volume measurements (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc) and not weight, especially since I don't have a kitchen scale.  I have a strong feeling that since Fieri's shtick is that of a bachelor, he has a shot glass or jigger handy from his bar and uses that for measuring out liquids.  Anyway, believe me when I say that the measurements here really don't make a huge difference.  You will, though, end up with a mishmash of half-open cans of beans.  I usually end up making some kind of chili soon after making these burgers, just to use up the beans and not let them go to waste.

Light & Refreshing: Grilled Chile-Lime Salmon

I remember when I found this recipe.  I knew I wanted grilled salmon.  However, since my fish-cooking knowledge is rather limited, I wasn't sure how to season the salmon.  At the time, I had a handful of limes on-hand from another meal I had made recently and I didn't want them to go to waste.  When I searched for "grilled salmon" on epicurious.com (I love epicurious.com because they have all the recipes from pretty much all recent issues of Gourmet, RIP), it yielded a whole slough of different recipes and I couldn't really get into any of them.  I was definitely looking for a recipe which was simple and quick, but, of course, tasty.  One recipe stuck out above the rest:  grilled chile-lime arctic char.  I had had arctic char before and I remembered it was very similar to salmon; same fatty and pink fish with similar flavors.  It helped that the recipe included some substitution options at the bottom, including swapping out the arctic char with salmon.  Perfect!

One thing I look forward to during the summer is asparagus.  Yes, and lets get this out of the way to get our giggles out beforehand:  asparagus makes your pee smell.  In some ways, I find this reassuring that my body is working the way it should.  But yeah, depending on the asparagus, it can be rather embarrassing in mixed company.  However, when it's just Marshall and I - who cares?  So, Marshall and I made a trip to our local farmer's market and picked up some really awesome, super thin, asparagus - totally perfect for grilling.  I simply drizzled them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and they went on the grill until tender.  You'll also see a tiny pile of sautéed spinach on my photographed plate.  This did not appear on our plate with leftovers, but I had some baby spinach I bought for my sandwiches the week before and I wanted to use it before it went bad.  I really love sautéed greens.  The spinach went into a pan with olive oil and chopped garlic.


All in all, it was a satisfying and light meal, perfect for a hot summer evening!

Success through Failure: Homemade Pizza

Marshall loves pizza.  I like pizza, but Marshall loves it.  It's one of those foods he could eat all day every day without ever getting tired of it.  I can only eat pizza when I'm in the mood for pizza.  Now, show me something like Japanese or sushi or Chinese or Mexican - I can eat that nonstop.  We all have our go-to food and pizza is a big thing for Marshall.  A couple of years ago, he was on a homemade pizza kick and so for his birthday he got a pizza cookbook, a pizza peel, and a ceramic pizza stone.  After our first foray into making our own pizza dough, we broke our pizza stone.  According to the almighty Alton Brown, the way to get a good crunchy-but-chewy dough, is to heat up the oven really hot and then make a steam bath at the bottom of the oven, so it's not a super dry heat, but it has a bit of moisture to chewy-up the dough.  Well, this made our pizza stone crack right down the middle.  Who knew?  We tried again, but we both agreed it seemed like too much work, even if it was rather tasty.

Fast-forward to the present time, I kept hearing from my mom and my sister how easy it was to buy the raw pizza dough from Trader Joe's to make homemade pizza.  This sounded great because the most time-consuming part of making pizza is getting the dough made.  This cut out that almost full day of mixing, kneading, and proofing before you can even think of eating it.  We got the dough.  It seemed a little more wet than than we had expected.  So, we thought we'd add a little flour to it and knead it.  It still was super sticky and not like the pizza dough we had worked with before.  We both worked to get this dough into a pizza shape.  Once shaped, we piled on the toppings.  Both of us love pizza with lots of toppings:  sauce, cheese, pepperoni, sausage, peppers, mushrooms, onions, and olives.  We get ready to slide it off onto our [metal] pizza cooker, which had been sitting in the oven getting nice and hot and the pizza won't slide off the peel.  That peel had cornmeal and flour and we were both stumped as to how it was still stuck.  With the oven wide open and all the 500F heat escaping into the kitchen, we grabbed all the spatulas we could find to get the pizza into the oven.  We finally did and this is what we ended up with:

Yeah...we ended up with a very ugly, half-assed calzone, rather than a pizza.  Granted, it tasted really good, but when you're looking for pizza and this is what's on your plate, it's rather disappointing.


Marshall really wanted to get this pizza right, though, so he dug out our copy of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food (2004) and looked up the pizza dough recipe we had used long ago.  He prepped the dough:  mixed it, kneaded it and proofed it.  Everything was going well.  We learned from our original failure and when it came to topping our pizza, we scaled things back a bit.  This time we went with only a few toppings:  sauce, cheese, spicy Italian sausage and bell peppers.  It stretched correctly and wasn't sticky.  It slipped right off the peel into the hot oven and we finally got a pizza.  It was delicious.  I like Brown's pizza dough, which is the thin crispy type of pizza dough and not thick at all.  There is a bit of chew, but it's not too chewy either.  It was apparently too delicious to photograph and we devoured it before we could snap a photo of its beauty.  Just imagine a lovely pizza topped with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, crumbled hot Italian sausage and green bell peppers - delicious!


We can only learn from our past failures.  If we don't fail at least once, how would we know how much we've learned?  I've had those nights were dinner just didn't go right at all.  The recipe wasn't written well or I was too tired and misread a step.  I remember one night trying to make miso soup all from scratch, even down to the step of making my own dashi.  I ended up with a kitchen full of random packing and bits of chopped ingredients scattered about and a soup in a pot that just didn't look right at all.  It was just enough to push me over the edge and I dumped everything and we ordered take-out.  A few weeks later, I tried again and it came out like it should have.  Granted, I don't think I will attempt to make it all again, unless I was truly into it, but the point was I dusted myself off, got back up and tried again.

Here's to more learning experiences!  :)