Not Your Mama's Salmon

I don’t know about you, but I grew up abhorring salmon. My mom may not admit it, but she is a binge-eater like I am. I’m not referring to a true eating disorder; instead I’m taking out those individuals who can eat the same meal over and over again without growing tired of it for months. Even years. Since I was a young child, I’ve binged on countless meals. I’m sure my mom could recall more of these items than I can. However, in the 26 years I’ve known her, I can only name one that she keeps coming back to: SALMON. My mom has eaten salmon, nearly every day that I can remember. And this is nothing to scoff at! It’s no secret that salmon is one of the best things that you can eat. It’s good for your skin, your hair, your blood pressure, not to mention, your waistline. BUT, as a child, I grew to detest the smell of salmon. I could smell it before I sat down for dinner. I could smell it in our house on the weekends (being heated up in the microwave for lunch!) Ugh, just the idea of salmon until my early 20s made me want to gag. Blah! However, as I grew older, my friends introduced me to more and more things (sushi, especially) and my taste for salmon slowly began to change.

Within a couple months of meeting Evan, we began cooking more frequently together. One night we decided on baking a filet of salmon and making garlic mashed potatoes from scratch. I knew little about salmon except that I enjoyed eating it raw from time to time, and couldn’t understand why anyone would ever choose to reheat it in a microwave (such a foul smell!). He surprised me by making a glaze. Didn’t most people just lightly coat this pungent smelling fish in salt, pepper and olive oil?

In a saucepan, my dear boy combined orange juice, brown sugar and a finely diced habanero pepper. He let it simmer wildly on my stovetop for longer than I would have normally allowed. But I trusted him. So I let it boil.

He reduced it down to a gooey paste that smelled sweet, yet disastrously spicy (my favorite!). At this point I could tell, I didn’t need to worry about the result…

So here it is… the salmon glaze recipe that we’ve spent a while refining…

1 large sheet of aluminum foil
1 ½ to 2 lbs. salmon filet (please don’t buy farm raised if you can avoid it)
2 cups + of orange juice (preferably no pulp)
Juice from 1-2 fresh squeezed oranges (tangelos are great for this application)
2 generous handfuls of dark brown sugar (the more the merrier!)
1 super finely diced habanero pepper (2 if you’re like us!)
a couple splashes of soy sauce
1-teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
1-tablespoon honey (optional)

1.    Fold all four edges of the foil to create tiny walls on each side, to prevent any of the glaze from leaking out. Coat the bottom of the foil in PAM or olive oil to keep the salmon from sticking. Place your salmon filet on the top of the foil’s center.

2.    Preheat your outdoor grill to medium.


3.    Combine orange juice and fresh squeezed orange juice in a medium saucepan and bring to a low boil on medium high heat. Add brown sugar and diced habanero peppers at your discretion while the juice simmers.

4.    Cook for 20-25 minutes while the juice reduces down. Continue to add idems slowly as you cook: salt, pepper, honey and soy sauce. Taste carefully as you go, as the glaze is super hot!


5.    Once the glaze has become a sugary, thick, gooey consistency, remove it from the heat.

6.    Use a brush applicator and apply the glaze generously and evenly to the raw salmon filet. Once the filet is coated, place the foil in the center of your pre-heated grill.

7.    Cook salmon for 14-20 minutes depending on your preference (rare or less rare).  Reapply the glaze 2 times while the salmon is cooking.


8.    Remove from grill. Let cool for 3-5 minutes. Serve with garlic mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus!

Enjoy friends! If you need clarification on any of the steps, please ask ☺

Fiery Prawns with Fried Rice and Orange Beef

Greetings For the Love of Food Followers! It’s been awhile since we last updated you all on our most recent cooking endeavors, so let’s get down to business! We love Asian food! It’s delicious and full of bold flavors. It’s also surprisingly easy to cook at home. With the right equipment and ingredients you can make the best Asian food in the comfort of your own home and you can tweak to suit your taste. Before we get into the orange beef and prawn fried rice that will make your taste buds jump for joy let’s talk first about some things you should have in your kitchen before you try this at home!

First and foremost, you need to get a WOK! Simply put – they are amazing. You can deep-fry, stir-fry and steam meals in them! You don’t need the most fancy wok out there. I think ours was twenty or thirty bucks.  The most important thing is seasoning the pan correctly. Seasoning pans is a whole other blog post so we won’t get into too much detail, but if you’re curious, you know how to contact us! So we now have a wok getting HOT on the stove. A few other things to have handy for making some delish Asian grub are: wooden utensils for the wok, sesame oil, soy sauce, corn oil, sesame seeds, sugar, and last but not least, corn starch! Again, if you have any questions about why you want any of this stuff around, reach out to us. We love talking shop when it comes to cookin’!

Fiery prawns with fried rice and orange beef. Let’s do this! The fried rice is really easy, and in our opinion, it is better than any take-out fried rice we’ve ever had. We cheat a little bit, but who cares? That’s the fun in cooking if you can’t use shortcuts to make good food even easier. Our shortcut? Uncle Ben’s Boil-in-a-Bag White Rice. This stuff makes perfect rice every time! Not sticky, perfectly cooked and it takes 12 minutes. So boil up a couple bags of the rice and let it cool a little bit. While the rice is cooking, get your veggies ready. In our fried rice we like some carrot, yellow onion, garlic and scallions. FYI, scallions are green onions. We would also add some celery and peas, however, Emily is none too pleased with these additions. Give the veggies a nice, small dice. Get the wok nice and hot and add in some oil. Peanut or vegetable oil is the best as you want to cook on really high heat in a wok and these two oils have a high smoke point (the smoke point of an oil is the temperature at which it will start to smoke, or burn). When using high heat you want an oil with a high smoke point. When the oil is hot, dump in the diced vegetables and stir-fry ‘em up. Stir-fry isn’t just called stir-fry for fun. STIR THEM! Don’t just leave them sitting there poaching in oil. Get that wooden spoon working and keep things moving. When the vegetables are starting to cook through, add 2-3 eggs that have been beat up. Think scrambled eggs here; it’s the same principal. Push the carrots, onions and garlic to the side and scramble up the eggs. Oh! We forgot to mention, don’t add the scallions when you stir- fry the veggies, save them for the end. We’re super organized as you can tell! Where were we? Ah yes, now you should have some tasty veggies and some scrambled eggs working in the wok. Get them all mixed up and add the rice! Just dump in the cooked rice and start stirring! Mix it up really well. The idea here is that you are actually frying the rice, hence “fried rice”. Now to make it have that awesome fried rice flavor we add in a few more necessary ingridents. Soy sauce, a pinch of sugar, salt, pepper and if you are really bold, a splash of Siracha sauce. We don’t ever measure this stuff out, instead we just add how much we want or think should be added. Rachael Ray refers to this method of measuring as “eye-balling it.”  If you want blander, less sodium fried rice, just add a little. If you want some bold flavorful fried rice, add more! Pretty easy concept, right? The other thing you can add a small amount of for additional flavor is sesame oil. If you have good oil, a little goes a long way. Lastly, mix in the scallions about a minute before you pull the wok off the heat. Fried rice is done, and set it aside on a dish.

Now, for the prawns. This couldn’t be easier. Get some nice, clean prawns and take their shells off, but leave the tails on! They make for a pretty presentation. Wipe out the wok (be careful not to burn yourself!), crank the heat back up, put in a little more oil and toss in the shrimp. Stir-fry them until they start to turn pink, then squeeze in some Siracha sauce and a tiny bit of soy sauce. Keep stirring until they are cooked and then set them aside. Fried rice with fiery prawns on top, done!

Now, on to the orange beef. We wanted to cook this because we both get so annoyed when our employees come back from their lunch break with orange chicken from Panda Express and rave about how good it is. So gross! That stuff is nasty! So we decided to make a version of our own. And yes, we made it with beef instead of chicken. Why you ask? Because we like to challenge ourselves to see if our ideas will turn out the way we envision them! And what we found this time, was that orange beef is actually pretty easy to make, and so good to eat! Cut up some good steak into bite sized slices. For this application we prefer to use NY strip steak or some tri-tip steak. Tri-tip is cheaper, but NY is better! Put your slices in a bowl and add some salt, pepper and corn starch, then mix it up so all the meat is evenly coated. The point here is to get rid of the moisture from the meat. When you are cooking on high heat moisture is the enemy! The corn starch dries up the meat and makes it a little crispy when you stir-fry it. After you prep the meat, you then move on to get the orange sauce ready. All we did was squeeze a few ripe oranges into a bowl, added some soy sauce, a couple cups of orange juice, a dash of sesame oil, salt, pepper, and Serrano chilies (you want to thinly slice up the Serrano’s for this use). Push the beef to one side, get the wok smoking hot and dump in the sauce. Let it boil and get crazy! You want to reduce this down so it gets thick and bubbly. Once it starts to reduce down, you can then mix in the beef. After it cooks for a few more minutes together it’s pretty much done! If you did it right the beef should be tender and moist and the sauce should be thick and sticky and tasty like real oranges with a kick. Screw that garbage, wannabe Chinese food you get at Panda Express. This took 20 minutes and tastes way better. Plus, you know exactly what ingredients went into it! No MSG, no weird trans fat, no gross, stray hair that you have to pull out. Just perfectly cooked, homemade healthy food. Check out the pic to see how we plated it all up! For garnish we used the scallions on top, some orange zest and a few sesame seeds. One final comment before you dig in…use garnishes that have something to do with the dish. Okay, now enjoy it! BOOM!

Love, Evan & Emily

Steak & Potatoes Done Right!

Meat…beef…steak…rare. Insert manly grunt here. Or several grunts. What better all-American meal than steak and potatoes? Simple yes, but so many things can still go wrong and ruin a beautiful thing. I’m not saying I’m an expert by any means, but I do know how to do a good steak. Here are a few things I’ve learned after years of grilling, broiling, and pan-frying delicious, rich and succulent cuts of beef.

I think for my first post on our awesome foodie blog I should take a few steps back first and explore how I came to be so familiar with the grill. We were sophomores, maybe juniors when Eric and I first started exploring the FOOD Network. Late nights falling asleep to Bobby Flay’s pompous banter, our favorite Mr. Brown lecturing to the science of cooking or maybe watching Moriomoto mop up kitchen stadium’s floor with his opponent as he turned the nights secret ingredient into a culinary masterpiece. Whatever it was, we decided the key to happiness at that point in our lives was meat. To be specific, it was usually a t-bone or rib-eye steak. And as emerging men leaving our adolescent shells the BBQ was the obvious cooking medium of choice. Again, insert manly grunt here. So there in a nutshell was the beginning of my fascination with not only steaks, but the wonderful cooking method that is the BBQ.

So this was the inspiration for tonight’s meal. What should we make? What sounds good? When in doubt…grill up a steak! The only problem, like so many times in life something unexpected arises and changes your plans entirely. Half way through cooking our corn on the cob on the grill it happens.

“Honey, um, I think we are out of propane.” No! Two gorgeous steaks sitting on the counter adorned with delicious olive oil, salt and pepper, and some fresh thyme. No grilling tonight. Sad face. The only problem is, we still have to eat and there is no way I’m going to let 2 wondrous NY strips go to waste. It’s time to pan sear...

So we couldn’t grill them, so what? There is more than one way to skin a cat, or cook a steak in this case. So pan searing it was! Now let’s get into the good stuff. What have I learned from my years of cooking dead cow? First off, let the meat come to room temperature! Don’t take cold meat out of the fridge and throw it on a smokin’ hot grill or pan. Imagine what it feels like when you put cold hands under warm water, or dip your freezing feet into a hot tub. Tingly numbness. That’s what the steak feels like. Let the meat come up to room temp before you even THINK about cooking that bad boy! Secondly, cook steak hot and fast. You can make several   relationship jokes here if you would like, but it’s true. Hot and fast. Thirdly, let it rest. Walk away. Leave it alone! When you stop cooking the steak to your desired doneness walk away. Go read, clean up the kitchen, prepare you dessert, something! Just don’t mess with the meat for at least five to ten minutes. Trust me. If you don’t believe me, look up the science behind it but I’m telling you rested meat is delicious juicy meat.

Now that we have the steak wrapped up, lets hit the menu tonight, leave you with a few pictures and call it good.

Main course: NY strip steak marinated for an hour or so with salt and pepper, olive oil and fresh thyme (I love thyme because it is both earthy and fresh at the same time. Hard to find that combo anywhere else). The topping as you will see in the picture is brown cremini mushrooms sliced and sautéed in butter, olive oil, garlic and more thyme. When they are almost all the way cooked, crank up the heat and add in a few drops of soy sauce and about a cup of half and half. Reduce it down until it looks thick and delicious. Apply generously to the top of your perfectly cooked steak!

Potatoes and corn are pretty straightforward. Get some new potatoes, quarter them lengthwise, or hotdog style, as I like to say; toss them in oil, salt and pepper and you guessed it, more thyme. Roast in oven at around 400 degrees and finish with some grated parmesan. The corn is even easier. Foil. Salt. Pepper. Oil. Cook. Done.

Enjoy our dinner tonight! Comment on what you think about it, or if anyone has any other ideas on how to cook this stuff. The point of this blog is to share our ideas and get ideas from others. So have at it!

We will post desert tomorrow ☺

Evan + Emily
Boom!

Balsamic Breakfast Tower

When we woke up this morning, we wanted to make breakfast at home, but none of our standard fall-back ideas seemed interesting enough or even worth the effort. I began rummaging through the fridge in search for produce that needed to be used as soon as possible. I found one large tomato, half of a white onion and a Zip-Lock bag full of fresh basil that I clipped from my parents beautiful vegetable garden when we were over at their house for dinner last night. I decided I was going to take a risk, and it was very probable that we would need to find something else to eat after my cooking endeavor turned out to be unsavory…

In a large skillet, I started to fry hash browns over medium-high heat. In a second smaller skillet, I added olive oil and added the white onion that I’d just sliced. After browning the onions, I removed them from the heat and set them aside. I then reduced the heat and added two thick slices of fresh tomato that I had just coated in olive oil, kosher salt and ground pepper. I let those cook. After the hash browns were cooked and browned on both sides, I removed them and added even amounts to two small, round dishes and pressed them firmly into the bottom of the dish in an attempt to make them into hash brown patties. I set them aside to let them cool. After reducing the heat in the larger skillet, I cracked and carefully place two eggs inside, making sure to keep both egg whites separate. 

I then flipped the small dishes containing hash brown over onto two separate plates. I added the grilled onions to the hash browns, and then the fresh basil on top of that. I then place a thick slice of tomato to each tower, poured a small amount of balsamic vinegar and olive oil over each and then finished off each tower with a sunny-side up egg.

See for yourself!