Miso-Roasted Salmon Salads 3

Miso-Roasted Salmon Salads


I’ve been really into miso lately. Until about a month ago, I had never had it in anything other than miso soup, which I’ve always found to be kind of plain and boring. Miso paste, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. It’s flavor is difficult to describe, but if you’re familiar with the term “umami” this is it. It’s very rich and complex, a little salty, and almost nutty. It might sound silly, but the flavor feels very full and round in your mouth. If you haven’t tried it, you really should! It’s a great way to elevate a few simple ingredients and transform them into a spectacular dish.

Smoked Salmon and Potato Frittata 4

Smoked Salmon and Potato Frittata

Lately, I’ve been using up a lot of my culinary creativity on freelance projects.  One of my favorites are these potato and smoked salmon pancakes with creamy dill sauce that I created for Eat Better America last month. I ate them every day for a week and still wasn’t tired of them. They were crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside, and the smoked salmon went perfectly with potato.

When I found myself with extra egg whites after making a batch of grapefruit curd the other day, I decided to make a frittata using the same flavors as those pancakes. While it was a little less elegant than the potato pancakes, it was just as luxurious. Plus, it was quick and easy – a combination that can’t be beat!

New England Clam Chowder 5

New England Clam Chowder

Like a lot of people, I re-committed myself* to eating healthier and losing a few pounds in the New Year. Unlike a lot of people, I won’t attempt to live off of cold salads and clear broths. It’s winter, people! I want comfort food – and lots of it.

This milky chowder filled with meaty bites of bacon and the subtle spice of Old Bay and peppery parsnips is what I consider the ultimate winter meal. The combination of smoke and cream reminds me of curling up in front of a fireplace while fat snowflakes fall outside. Close your eyes when you eat it and you can almost hear the bells of a horse-drawn carriage being pulled down the road.

Cajun Jambalaya with Okra, Andouille and Shrimp

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The other day, I was thinking about the way I used to eat. Back when I was in college and shortly after I graduated. Let’s just say it wasn’t very healthy or very delicious. Looking back, I think there was a period of time where I just completely forgot that I knew how to cook a decent meal. Plus, I couldn’t really be bothered. Like a lot of people, I had the misconception that cooking a real dinner out of real ingredients would be too expensive and take too much time. So we’d boil a box of pasta and mix it with a jar of sauce and some sausage. Or we’d try to be “healthy” and make a chicken stir-fry, but we would totally ruin it by using store-bought marinades that were loaded with sugar. For a special treat, we’d buy a box of zatarain’s mix and make jambalaya.

I don’t miss the other stuff at all, but I do kind of miss the jambalaya. And with Foodbuzz pledging to donate $25 to the Greater New Orleans Foundation (helping fishermen who were effected by the oil spill and their families) for every Gulf-Inspired post this weekend, it seemed like the perfect excuse to make it. Of course, I wasn’t going to resort to using a box – I know better than that now! (And a quick look at the back of the box confirmed my suspicions — 21% of your RDA of sodium? MSG? Sodium dioxide?? No thanks!) No, this jambalaya is 100% real food and 100% real flavor. Sure you have to spend a few minutes chopping vegetables, but other than that it really isn’t any more difficult or time consuming than the boxed stuff. And the final product is so much healthier and so much more delicious that there really isn’t any excuse to take “shortcuts”!

Looking for more Gulf-inspired flavor? How about a nice, steamy bowl of gumbo? Gumbo is very similar to jambalaya, but it’s prepared as a soup enriched with a roux. In gumbo, the rice is cooked separately from the other ingredients and added in the final step instead of cooking along with everything else and absorbing all of the flavors.

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Click to get the recipe for Cajun Jambalaya with Okra, Andouille and Shrimp –>

Linguini with White Clam Sauce

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I remember for a while when I was young, we had linguini with clam sauce fairly often. I don’t know if the traditional dish had a surge of popularity in the 80s-90s or what. A Google search really didn’t provide me with any information on that. Anyway, we ate this stuff a lot when I was a kid. And then it sort of disappeared. To be honest, I totally forgot that it ever existed. Then, a few weeks ago, Shawn and I went out to a seafood restaurant. As we stood up to leave, I saw that one of the people at a table near us was eating a big bowl full of pasta with clams. It looked so good! The memory of white clam sauce came flooding back to me, and I knew that I would be making it in the near future.

When I sat down to try to create my recipe, a funny thing happen. I thought, “But clam sauce comes from a can!” and I got a little confused. Those of you who know me, know that I would never eat sauce from a can, so this really made me laugh. Of course you can buy a canned version of the sauce, but why do that when it’s so easy to make from the simplest ingredients?

Really, this sauce is super simple to make and requires little more than wine, garlic, onion, and parsley. I did use some canned baby clams in their juice but, looking back on it, fish stock would have worked just as well to thin out the sauce. This linguini and clam sauce doesn’t take long to make at all, and the use of fresh ingredients results in a dish that tastes so much better (and so much less salty!!) than anything you can get from a can.

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