Grilled Salmon With Tokyo Teriyaki Barbeque Glaze
After the stuffed mushroom debacle last week, I decided to choose a bit simpler recipe this time, and something I am pretty familiar with. I have made a very similar salmon dish to this, but the marinade here includes a couple of additional ingredients that make it extra delicious: meat and sake.
The first step was to cook the ingredients for the marinade. This included beef, ginger, garlic, sake, soy sauce, etc.
After cooking, the marinade is strained and cooled, and the salmon takes a bath in it for half an hour. I got some amazing looking wild-caught king salmon from Mollie Stones that cost an arm and a leg so I was expecting it to be pretty tasty.
I don’t have a grill, but my stovetop has an awesome cast-iron griddle in the center of it that I used for cooking the salmon.
I also cooked up some rice and used some of the extra marinade to cook some veggies on the side (which turned out a little too well-done but still tasty).
Luckily the salmon turned out perfectly done - the outside looks a little burnt but that char just adds to the flavor. The marinade has a really savory - I hate how everyone says this now, but - “umami” flavor that is garlicky and slightly sweet. Yum!
Bienville Stuffed Mushrooms
This week I found some nice looking “stuffer” mushrooms at Safeway, and found this recipe in my cookbook which also makes use of more shrimp stock. Perfect! I am a big fan of stuffed mushrooms and this recipe sounded great to me, with yummy ingredients like oysters and bacon. Unfortunately they didn’t quite turn out as planned.
I’ll start with the part that *did* turn out awesomely. The recipe calls for 2 oysters for the stuffing, so I decided to get them from Anchor Oyster Bar, and why not just get a dozen so Joe and I can practice shucking them? I don’t remember the actual names of the oysters, but one type is from the west coast of Canada, and one is from the east coast of Canada.
We’ve never shucked oysters before so this was a new adventure. You really do have to use quite a bit of force to shove the knife in there, so we used a towel and oven mitt to protect our hands. Luckily there were no accidents and we got better at the shucking as we went along.
These turned out great: cold and fresh and ocean-y. We ate them with just a squeeze of lemon.
On to the main course: The mushrooms are topped with breadcrumbs, and I got this lovely loaf of sourdough from Thoroughbread, my favorite local bakery. Just look how pretty it is!
I food processed the bread to create crumbs and prepared a bunch of other ingredients for the stuffing.
One of the things that made this stuffing sound so good was the addition of bacon, so I spent some extra cash and bought a pack of Niman Ranch Uncured Maple Bacon which is expensive but I think it’s the best bacon I’ve ever tasted. Here’s a pic of the ingredients all cooking on the stove. Looks great so far!
After cooking all this stuff I food processed it, scooped it into the mushroom caps, and topped them with some of the sourdough bread crumbs. These look yummy! My mouth is watering!
And, one of the finished mushrooms. MMM! That looks delicious! What could have gone wrong?
Well. I followed the recipe exactly, and I dunno if it was a typo or if Mitchell Rosenthal likes his food REALLY spicy (and Joe and I like spicy food)…but it calls for 2 tablespoons of “Town Hall Spice Mixture” which is mostly cayenne pepper. Uh-oh.
The mushrooms were edible, but unfortunately the spiciness overwhelmed all those other awesome flavors that were in there. And, let’s just say one probably should not eat like 5 of these in one sitting if one does not want to get an achy tummy. I’ll have to watch out for any other recipes in the book that use that dang spice mixture.
Sauteéd Scallops with Spiced Couscous and Preserved Lemon-Curry Sauce
For my second recipe in my “Cooking My Way Back Home” cookbook project I chose something else that used shrimp stock, since I had so much left over from the first recipe. I actually made this a couple of weeks ago, but because I was so busy with TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) stuff I didn’t get the post ready until now. So hopefully I can remember enough of my process :)
The first thing I did was chop up and prepare a bunch of the ingredients, and start making the curry sauce. This was really fun and interesting since I’ve never made curry from scratch before.
The finished sauce after straining was a really pretty golden-yellow color:
Next I blanched the mustard greens (first time blanching as well!) and prepared the couscous. Luckily my boyfriend Joe made some preserved lemons a few months ago so I was able to use those. Man, I love how pearl couscous just looks so cute.
Then I made the fennel salad, which was just thinly sliced raw fennel with olive oil, lemon, salt & pepper. I think maybe all my photos are too close-up, sorry about that. I’ll try to mix it up more next time.
I got some really nice looking big scallops from Safeway (hey, sometimes they have decent stuff and they’re cheap).
I then cooked the scallops in a hot pan with a small amount of olive oil- I made a mistake here by cooking them all at once, which I think lowered the temperature of the pan/oil and as a consequence they didn’t caramelize very well. They still tasted good, but I think if I just cooked 2 at a time they would have turned out better. Funny, the angle of this picture make it look like I’m cooking miniature scallops in a miniature frying pan. :D
The finished dish was super tasty and pretty! The couscous and curry went really nicely together, with a balance of savory and slightly sour from the preserved lemon, which contrasted the sweetness of the scallops. The fennel salad created a fresh, crisp texture contrast to the dish. This dish took a long time to prepare, but it was worth it and I am really happy with how my stuff has been turning out so far. :)
I’m back from TCAF! I had an awesome time hanging out with all my old comic buds and meeting some new folks. This time I brought Joe also to share in the fun times. The first day I didn’t sell too much, but on the second day I did pretty well. I want to give myself the goal of creating something new in time for TCAF next year… that gives me a WHOLE YEAR! Surely I can come up with something in a year, right?
