Creamed Spinach with Bacon (and fried fish)

I love to not drive whenever possible, and the long holiday weekend was a perfect time to just walk places and be very slow paced. One such walkable visit included my friends' new bookstore, Moon Palace Books (I did some shelving - check out the alphabetized fantasy section!) behind Peace Coffee on Minnehaha. The creamed spinach recipe I made is from the Smitten Kitchen blog - and she actually just published a cookbook. They have it at Moon Palace Books if you want to take a peak - it looks really good.

Another local visit for the weekend was Everett's grocery store (38th and Cedar) for some fish. Everett's sells frozen Pike filets (and walleye) - as well as lots of other sort of Scandinavian fish varieties that are just not all that common elsewhere. The Pike is pretty cheap at $6 a pound, and the walleye is about twice that. Both are caught in Canada.

So, those two adventures lead us to today's post of fried Pike and Creamed Spinach! I have never had creamed spinach before, and I am not sure what quite possessed me to suddenly want some, except that I had a package of frozen spinach in the freezer and the cold weather usually makes me want more cream whenever possible. My Charming Companion made the Pike exactly as if the pike were fresh and we were camping as outlined here. Meanwhile, I was sauteing onions in butter and stirring in creamy substances to make this tasty side dish. I modified the Smitten Kitchen recipe below:

Creamed Spinach (serves 2 large portions or 4 very small ones!)
1 10 oz package frozen spinach
1/4 + c heavy cream
1/4 c coconut cream (the thick part of the coconut milk when it is separated - regular coconut milk would work too)
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 T butter
1 t coconut flour
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
Salt and Pepper

1. Cook your spinach as instructed: mine was to add the spinach to a cup of boiling water and simmer, covered, for 8 minutes. Drain the cooked spinach when finished, pressing it through a sieve to get as much liquid out as you can.

My very poor quality photo of lunch!

2. In a medium saucepan, melt butter, then add onion and saute on med-low heat until translucent (about 5 minutes). Whisk in the coconut flour, stirring constantly to thicken the butter/onion mix just a bit. Add cream and coconut milk/cream slowly, whisking while you go. Add spinach, nutmeg, and salt and pepper. Stir while the mixture thickens and cooks down a bit - just a few minutes. Serve right away, or reheat when ready. It's very tasty topped with some chopped bacon!

*For a VEGAN version of this dish, just use all coconut milk, omit the coconut flour, and instead of nutmeg, use 1/2 t ginger, and  a dash of cumin. It tastes delicious.

Tilapia

My favorite new fishy discovery is tilapia.  I can't believe it took me so long to try it.  I have never been a big fan of cod and a couple other types of white fish, so I thought it would be in that same taste category, but it's not.  It is so much tastier, at least to me.

I'm sure you can get really fancy when preparing tilapia but my favorite thing to do is pan sear it with butter and lemon juice.  It's easy, light, and flavorful.  Plus, the other bonus about fish is that it cooks very quickly, so if you are hungry, it won't take long to get this yummy meal on the table.

I like to pair my fish with a green vegetable.  In the picture I have the stems from some baby bok choy sautéing next to the tilapia.  This was a good combination.  I have also done green beans recently since I have been getting some really beautiful beans from my garden.

Ingredients:
1-2 tilapia filets
a few lemon slices
1 Tbsp butter or ghee
sea salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Heat some of the butter or ghee in the pan.  Put the rest of the butter on the fish along with salt and pepper.  I like to slice the lemon and lay it on top of the fish as it cooks.  The lemon flavor slowly infuses, and then I squeeze the lemon on top right before eating.  It only takes 5-7 minutes for the fish to cook.  If the fish is larger I flip it over and cook both sides, but if the fish is thin this isn't necessary.  The crispy edges are especially tasty.

Enjoy!

Citrus and Spice Salmon

Citrus and Spice Salmon
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4 cloves garlic minced

3 shallots or half and onion, minced

2 TBL fennel seed, crushed or ground

zest of one lemon and one orange

juice of one orange and half a lemon

2 TBL chopped fresh Tarragon, or ½ TBL dry

1 TBL ground black pepper

2 tsp chopped thyme, or 1tsp dry

½ tsp cayenne pepper

3TBL oil of choice

salt

Combine all of the above in a bowl,

then place 1-2 lbs of Salmon filets in a baking dish (I use the amounts above for 1 lb, although the recipe says they are for 2-2.5 lbs, cause I like spice!)

spread mixture on top.

Bake covered for 25-35 mins, to your desired opaque-ness.

I have also grilled this skin side down outside with success, in case it is too hot to turn on the oven :)

I enjoy serving with mashed potatoes and a nice green veggie from my CSA box.

 Sorry I don't have any photos....

Fish!

Cooking fish seems a bit daunting - probably because I just have not done it too much. But I love fish, it is fast to cook, and Coastal Seafoods is even closer than the grocery store, and well, why not just give it a try.  Also, it turns out Coastal has sales pretty much every weekend on something or other, which provides some guidance on the wide array of fish and seafood options (you know, beyond my fave scallop option).

So, I tried two different fish recently: Monchong (white ocean fish from Hawaii) and Walleye. I was pretty impressed with myself - not there is anything difficult about this cooking - but they both tasted totally delicious!

Monchong (or any white ocean fish like Seabass or Halibut)
I didn't measure here - and of course it will vary according to how much you make, but the basic method is to saute the fish.

1) Heat olive oil or ghee/butter in a cast iron pan, and when it is hot, place the fish in the pan.
2) Cook for about 5 minutes and then flip the fish/pieces over. Stick in a preheated 400 degree oven for 5-7 minutes.
3) Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with tomato parsley sauce (below).  Enjoy!  So easy.

Sauce/Topping: Mix diced fresh tomatoes, chopped fresh parsley, fresh squeezed lemon juice, olive oil, basil (fresh if you have it, i only had dried), and salt. Capers would be nice in there too if you've got them. Yum!

Walleye
Walleye is a bit more fragile, so after some consult with My Charming Companion (aka fish cooker extraordinaire), I decided to bake the fish and not attempt to saute or fry it at all so that the pieces would stay together and look nice. Baking these fish was SO easy and delicious.

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2) Melt butter (at least 4 T - enough to coat the entire fish) in a shallow baking dish, and swirl in 1-2T fresh lemon juice.
3) Dip the fish in the melted butter/lemon (and flip it over so it is coated). Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
4) Bake for 20 minutes.
5) Serve sprinkled with almond topping (see below!) *Parsley would also be good on this too!

Almond topping: Chop 1/4 c. of almonds into small, split pea size pieces. Melt 1-2 T coconut oil or butter in a small saucepan on low heat. Saute almond pieces until browned. I turned the heat up a little at the end to get them dark - but watch them closely!

*So this is not the fish I cooked because the almonds are not on there, but it is essentially what mine looked like. Mmm.

Camping delicacies

I went camping last weekend near the boundary waters and ended up having some really good food despite the complications of needing to plan meals that did not need refrigeration and were not overly heavy. It's a different kind of food planning - I am more used to bike touring where you can bring cans of things, or pick up stuff along the way. So, in the hopes of spurning a new category on WFDM, I am sharing some of my camping food highlights. Note photo here of "the cooking area" - a grate that was used more as a table, and a lovely view!

I have to say, the total topper of a meal resulted from the final fish catch of the trip - it was so good I will literally try to recreate this at home: fish curry. Before leaving, I packaged up 3/4 c. of basmati rice mixed with 1 t. of curry powder. Another baggie with dried coconut and raisins also came along (to add to the rice with some ghee towards the end of cooking), and a package of Kitchen of India's "ready to eat" fish curry paste. This curry sauce was amazing - spicier than any packaged sauce I have ever had, super easy, and with all whole ingredients and nothing weird. AND, there was a little sauce left over - which made a great addition to pasta sauce the next day.

Pasta and sauce: Mixing the aforementioned left-over curry sauce, an onion and 3 banana peppers (that all made it to day 4 unscathed!) and a small can of tomato paste with some spices and water (oregano, pepper flakes, dried onion, garlic) turned out great. It topped GF pasta* that can be cooked in only 8 minutes.

*The pasta actually is a potato pasta, and we ended up saving the water to try making some sort of horchata type beverage for the day's canoe travel (thus increasing water consumption - the water tasted a little weird - and also relieving the need to dump starchy water anywhere). The experiment was surprisingly successful: left over pasta water plus most of a can of milk, honey and stevia (or whatever sweetener) all shaken up in a nalgene. It totally tasted like horchata, though i would bring cinnamon for it next time.

Other items of interest:
My Charming Companion made Ghee before we left, which is a process of heating butter so that it separates, leaving a more solid, buttery, rich product that can go without refrigeration for up to 3 months and is very good for cooking at high temperatures. See how to make it here. We fried fish in it, added it to rice and porridge...it was aces. The photo here shows it going on a fry pan. Ghee = Delish.

I am new to the world of fishing and preparing fresh fish, and we forgot to bring a corn meal/GF flour mix to fry the fish in. We did have some buckwheat flour (originally for pancakes) that we used instead, and did some frying in that with lard (another fat that stays solid without refrigeration). Whatever flour substance, I am bringing something along for fried fish next time.