Category Archives: I Cook, Too

Some of my favorite recipes.

Quick Dill Sauce

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Good on salmon.

Everyone knows what it’s like to be at the right place at the right time. It’s when special things happen.

We were at the right place — Mike’s mom’s apartment — at the right time — when a neighbor came by with vacuum-sealed packages of freshly frozen salmon. The neighbor and her husband had just returned from a trip to Alaska, where her husband had gone salmon fishing. He’d had 50 pounds of salmon shipped home. Evidently, their freezer wasn’t big enough to accommodate it all.

The salmon looked beautiful and was frozen solid. She was gracious enough to give us three packages of it — enough to feed six people. We stopped off at the local supermarket for a cooler bag and stored the fish and some ice in it for the trip back to Arizona.

One piece remained pretty much frozen solid. The other two were defrosted, but very cold. We had one for dinner last night and will probably eat the other tomorrow.

During dinner last night, Mike said it might have been the best salmon he’d ever had in his life. I certainly can’t remember having any salmon that was better.

Fresh Dill WeedTo go with it, I wanted to make some dill sauce. Dill goes really well with fish, especially salmon. A nice sauce would be a change in the way we usually eat salmon — just grilled with salt, pepper, and lemon. I asked Mike to pick up a packet of Knorr dill sauce mix at the local supermarket. As might be expected, they didn’t have any. They didn’t have any fresh dill, either. So Mike came home with a squeeze tube of “dill blend.” I read the ingredients. Dill was one of them. I couldn’t pronounce many of the others. But, in an effort to make the best of a not-perfect situation, I set about finding a dill sauce recipe that I could make with what I had in the house, which did not include cream, sour cream, yogurt, or anything resembling cream.

I tracked down a recipe that used mayonnaise. We had some of that. Although the recipe didn’t sound very enticing, we had plenty of dill blend to spare and I figured it was worth a shot.

Here’s the recipe as I modified it:

  • 3/4 cup mayonnaise. The original recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, which was way too much for my taste. (Keep in mind that when I was a kid, I wouldn’t touch mayo. I was an adult before I started using it (sparingly) on sandwiches.)
  • 3 tablespoons lemon juice. That seemed about right, even with less mayonnaise.
  • 2 tablespoons dill weed. The original recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon, which wasn’t nearly enough. I assumed the recipe called for dried dill weed rather than fresh (my preferred type) or “blend.” I just squeezed in a bunch of the green stuff Mike had brought home and added more, after stirring, to get the right color. I wanted to be able to see and taste the dill.

Combine all ingredients, mix well, and refrigerate for an hour. I think the hour is very important if you’re using dry dill weed, as it will provide enough time for the oils in the mayo to hydrate the dill and release its flavors. If you’re using fresh, chop it up before adding it. And, of course, if you’re using tubed “dill blend,” the flavors have already been released in the factory, where some of them may have remained, along with that fresh dill aroma.

The resulting mix reminded me a bit of tartar sauce (which is another thing I only recently started eating). But it tasted very good with the salmon. I’ll make it again with the real deal dill sometime in the future.

Or maybe I’ll just make a proper dill sauce with the right ingredients next time.

Mango Chutney

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One of my favorite condiments.

Up until about 15 years ago, the only time in my life I’d ever had chutney was back in my college days. I was dating a guy with rich parents and they ate well. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we’d get to go with them. There was an Indian restaurant right off Second Avenue in the Sixties — my brain is saying 62nd Street, but I really can’t be sure. That was my introduction to Indian food, including curry, tandoori, poori, and mango chutney.

I liked what I ate. (That is the story of my life, isn’t it?)

Years ago, I ran across this recipe for mango chutney and figured I’d give it a try. It was easy enough to make and the pint yield held up remarkably well in my refrigerator. I mean really well. We were still eating it two years later with no sign of it going bad. I guess it’s the vinegar.

What’s this good on? My favorite is pork tenderloin. You grill up the tenderloins whole, then slice them into 3/4-inch medallions. Spoon on a little chutney and let the hot pork and cold tanginess of the chutney roll around in your mouth a bit before you swallow. Heaven. Good with a salad that has some kind of mildly sweet dressing, like a raspberry vinaigrette or honey mustard.

Here’s the mango chutney recipe:

Ingredients:

  • 1 pound mango, coarsely chopped. I use the frozen cubed mango and chop each cube into 4 or 6 pieces. It sure beats peeling and slicing fresh mango and I bet no one can tell the difference when it’s done.
  • 1 cup golden raisins. You can use the regular kind if you can’t find goldens.
  • 1 cup packed brown sugar. This is an excellent recipe for using up brown sugar that has solidified in an improperly closed bag. But fresh brown sugar won’t hurt it.
  • 3/4 cup vinegar. I use white vinegar.
  • 1 jar (2-7/8 ounces) crystallized ginger, finely chopped. I don’t know what kind of jarred ginger they’re talking about. Here on the edge of nowhere, I can get crystallized ginger in a little 3-oz bag. Close enough.
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped. I chop it really fine.
  • 1 teaspoon salt. I probably put a little less than that.

Instructions:
Place all ingredients in a sauce pan and heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 45 minutes or until slightly thickened. Remove from heat, cool. Place in a sealed container — a canning jar works well for this; I avoid plastic for anything I want to keep long term — and store in refrigerator. Serve with pork (as discussed above) or Indian curry dishes.

I should probably mention somewhere that this doesn’t really smell very good while it’s cooking. After all, you are cooking vinegar. Not worth leaving the house for, but certainly not something you’d cook up when you’re trying to fill the house with nice aromas.

If you try this recipe and like it, please do let me know. Also let me know what else it’s good with. The only reason it lasts so long here is that I only eat it with pork — and I’m the only one in the house who does!

Oat Muesli

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A recipe from the Westin Bay Shore, Vancouver, BC.

I like cereal for breakfast. But I don’t like heavily processed cereals with a lot of mystery ingredients and sugar.

So when I was staying at the Westin in Vancouver last week, I decided to give the muesli item on their breakfast menu a try. One taste and I was hooked. I had it every morning of my stay. And on the last morning, the waitress offered the recipe.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (not instant)
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 cup raisins (they used golden raisins)
1/4 cup canned peaches, drained and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 cup (or more) half and half or milk
2 cups fresh fruit like bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries

Instructions:
Mix the first five ingredients in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate overnight. In the morning, right around breakfast time, the oats should have absorbed all of the half and half or milk. In fact, if the resulting mixture is too dry, you can moisten it up a bit by adding more half and half or milk. The raisins will be plump, too. Dish out the mixture and top with the fresh fruit. Enjoy!

One note here: The recipe I got called for a mixture of cream and whole milk. That’s half and half, isn’t it? The waitress also said you can cut calories and fat by using just milk. If you do this, use whole milk — I don’t think lowfat milk would make the result as creamy and rich.

“Quiche”

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A side dish that turned into a main course.

We were going to have steak for dinner. Mike had bought two “beautiful” (I haven’t seen them) rib eyes at Albertson’s on his way home on Wednesday. I needed to make something to go with them and I didn’t feel like a trip to the store.

One thing we always have a lot of these days is eggs. With 8 hens, we normally get 5 to 7 eggs a day. Alex eats an egg every morning and sometimes Mike will have 2 or 3 (they’re generally smaller than average). And I’ll have 1 or 2 once in a while. Otherwise, we wind up giving quite a few away. Basically, if you hand us an empty egg carton, you’ll get it back a short time later with a dozen eggs in it.

I thought about that Bisquick quiche I used to make and tracked down the recipe in my stack of clippings. The recipe called for only 3 eggs; I wanted to use more. And the recipe said nothing about vegetables; I had a bunch in the freezer that I wanted to use up. So I improvised. The following is my approximate recipe; it actually turned out quite good. And when Mike got home with a headache, we had the quiche for dinner so he didn’t have to go out in the heat to grill the steaks.

Ingredients

  • 5 eggs. Remember, mine are small; if you buy large or jumbo eggs, 4 would probably be enough.
  • 1/2 cup Bisquick
  • 1/4 cup melted butter. The recipe called for 1/2 cup, but I think that’s too way much. It makes the final product greasy.
  • 1/2 cup milk. The recipe called for 1-1/2 cups, but I wanted to get rid of eggs, not milk.
  • 2-3 cups frozen (or fresh) chopped vegetables. I used asparagus, chopped spinach, and a potato/onion/pepper blend. I let them defrost for about a half hour on the countertop before I mixed them in.
  • 1/2 cup shredded cheese. The recipe calls for a full cup, but I thought that was too much. Also the recipe calls for cheddar, but I didn’t have cheddar so I used Havarti with dill.

The recipe also called for bacon, but since we were going to eat it with steak, I left that out.

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, beat eggs.
  2. Mix in the Bisquick, melted butter, and milk. Stir until blended.
  3. Add the vegetables and stir well.
  4. Pour the mixture into a lightly greased pie pan. (I used olive oil spray to spray the bottom of the pan before I poured the mixture in.)
  5. Sprinkle the cheese over the top of the mixture.
  6. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes at 350°F. Quiche is done when it begins to brown and crack along the top.
  7. Eat while hot.

The magic of this recipe is that the Bisquick automatically creates its own crust. And, between the olive oil spray and the butter in the mix, it did not stick to my glass pie pan. It made a nice meal.

Vichyssoise

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Another cold soup.

Mike and I got on the cold soup kick the other day when I made gazpacho. We decided to try a few different cold soups for dinner, leaving the big meal of the day to lunch time (when it really should be eaten).

So I got online and did a Google search for cold soup recipes. I wound up on a page at allrecipes.com with a list of cold soups. I printed off a few recipes that sounded good. But the one I decided to try first was for vichyssoise, a leek and potato soup. The recipe was submitted to the site by Derek Parker and had a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

The soup was quick and easy to make. I followed the recipe quite closely and was rewarded with an extremely tasty soup. We had it for dinner last night and I just had a little post-lunch snack of some more.

If you try this recipe, serve it with a crusty bread, like a loaf of French bread. That’s the only thing it needed to make a perfect summer meal.