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Posts tagged ‘seafood’

Apr 14

Lemon-coconut salmon and asparagus grain bowls with pink rice

Between work, teaching, and all the various tasks that come along with expecting a new family member in, oh, four months, I haven’t had a lot of time lately to cook creatively and try out new recipes. Even this one isn’t particularly new – more like a new combination of things I make fairly regularly. But I’m feeling pretty inspired by the spring produce starting to trickle in, and I’ve been trying to eat more fish lately (baby, your brain is going to be so powerful!). When the seafood counter was out of my favorite lake trout fillets we decided to splurge on a piece of wild Sockeye and go with that instead, but I prepare trout and salmon pretty much interchangeably, so either would work in this recipe. All together it was a pretty perfect spring dinner, healthy and flavorful and reasonably quick. There are a few good cooking lessons to be learned here (especially in cooking the fish – my all-time favorite, go-to method), so I’ll take each component one at a time and add some helpful notes!

Lemon-coconut-salmon-grain-bowl

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Dec 19

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Chile: The Food

After Argentina, we spent five days in Chile before flying up to Peru. To get there we took an 8-hour bus over the Andes, slowly climbing up the range and plummeting back down the western side. The ride was full of breath-taking scenery and included a more literally breath-taking trip down La Caracol, perhaps the most frightening-looking strip of highway I’ve ever seen:

lacaracol

That’s no guard rails, no shoulders, sheer-sided highway, as seen from the second story of a bus. Whew.

In Chile, we spent three nights in Valparaíso, a beautiful but somewhat rough-edged seaside town and UNESCO World Heritage Site. The town itself is famous for its cultural atmosphere – music, art, and poetry – as well as for its major port and its beautiful beaches. After Valpo we spent two nights in Santiago, Chile’s capital and main metropolitan center. Santiago was far more bohemian than we expected, especially because of the neighborhood we stayed in, and overall we were pleasantly surprised with how much we liked it despite it being such a large, bustling city.

beach (1)

correo_central

fence

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Nov 12

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Prince Edward Island clam dig

We ended up in Prince Edward Island (PEI) at the tail end of their tourist season, a busy clamoring of folks from all over the world filling the island’s beaches and restaurants and historical attractions from late June to mid-September. The tourist information office immediately on the other side of Confederation Bridge, the 8-mile behemoth linking the island with continental New Brunswick, informed us that much of the island’s services and attractions would be shut down by now, with whatever little was left shutting down after Thanksgiving (celebrated in Canada almost 6 weeks before the one in the United States).

pei_fields

But while we did find an island much quieter than it would have been a month before, we still found ourselves surrounded by the beauty, the bounty, and the culture of Canada’s smallest province.  Eager to engage ourselves in the island’s incredible array of agricultural and culinary activities, we signed up for a clam dig organized by a local tourist group specializing in hands-on culinary and cultural experiences. We were attracted to the idea of harvesting our own meal – an activity that inevitably makes the resulting food far more delicious – but also to learning a new skill, one that has fed PEI residents throughout history. Read more

Mar 6

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Braised tuna roast with capers and tomatoes

Cooking something from each of our 45 (and counting) cookbooks is not going to be one of the easier tasks on my Food List 2011. Don’t get me wrong, we have a great selection of cookbooks and many of them are likely to stay on our bookshelf and put food on our table forever. But in the age of the internet, it’s often much easier and faster to find recipes online than it is to find one in a cookbook. Additionally, I spend more time reading food blogs than I do reading cookbooks, which means I come into contact with more recipes (and those recipes usually have photos, which also makes it more likely that I’ll make it). Read more