Cooking Therapy

For a long time, I have been able to gauge the stressfulness of my day by the complexity of the recipe that I create when I get home. There is a direct correlation between the amount of chopping, stirring, braising and general work involved in a recipe and the amount of *stuff* that I have endured during the day.

So bear that in mind when you hear what we had for dinner last night. I wanted to have salmon again. Salmon is a good reliable fish that has its own nice flavor but doesn't tend to overpower anything with its presence. Essentially, you always know that you are eating salmon, you just don't have to have it beat you in the skull with its presence. 

Of course, being that I live in the overfished and polluted waters of the San Francisco Bay area, I have to rely on buying either farmed salmon or alaskan salmon...either of which is fine for my purposes (as I usually like to do some sort of sauce) and the fact that I don't care to spend half my paycheck for the honor of purchasing a "wild" salmon fillet. 

I was looking for contrast and something different (that involved lots of prep and chopping...it was indeed one of those days) so I started out pouring a little olive oil into a shallow pyrex and then loaded the oil with a lot of salt-free cajun-creole spice, lime juice and no-salt and garlic powder. I then lay the fillet skin-side up into the pyrex and let it sit for awhile so that it would soak up the spices and get well coated with a thick layer of the stuff.

Before removing the fillet, I heated a little salt-free butter in a saute pan, making sure to let the pan get very hot before removing the fillet and placing in face down in the saute pan. I let it sit there for about 5 minutes, the intent being not to cook it, but to sear in the cajun/creole spice layer and blacken it. I then pulled out the fillet and placed it skin-side down on a baking rack and shoved it into the over to bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. The top was a nice evenly seared black.

I then diced some pineapple, mango and raspberries into small pieces and marinated them in a tiny amount of lime juice and balsamic. While the salmon cooked I prepped some brown rice with salt-free chicken bouillon, a generous amount of fresh cut herbs, mushrooms, no-salt, crushed garlic and scallions.

When the salmon was done, I removed it and layered the pineapple-mango-raspberry mix on top, and then served it with the rice and some sautéed spinach. The contrast of the cajun-creole and the sweet topping worked nicely, bringing out a savoriness in both that didn't hide the salmon, just perked it up.

So enjoy the fruits of my lousy day.

The Snapper Experiment

OK, salmon is all well and good, but it was time to branch out. This no-salt regime has given me a real challenge and, while it is fun, it is also a little dangerous. Albeit not running fullspeed down a heavily wooded hillside dangerous, but more, "you really going to eat that?" dangerous. I mean, it's still just food right? Pretty much normal, American style food...nothing too outrageous like fried grubs over a mud-wasp pate. 

Still I am breaking out of my own rut here and venturing into semi uncharted waters, at least for me...hence the snapper. Red snapper is a lovely dense fish with a mild natural flavor and a toughness that can stand up to a lot of different cooking styles. It takes flavor pretty well, especially when you let that flavor ride in on the acid in lemon and/or lime juice.

I started out with a light wheat-flour and herb dusting and a quick sear to brown the outside. Then I put it into bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. A couple days before, we had gone to a Mexican restaurant where we had salmon with a salsa on top. It was nice and I wanted to try my hand at something similar.

I chopped tomatoes and avocado, and then made a marinate of freshly chopped basil, oregano, garlic, lemon thyme and green onions. I added some red and mild yellow peppers along with no-salt, seasoned pepper, olive oil, lemon and lime juice and some balsamic vinegar. I mixed all of that with the tomato-avocado mix and let it sit while the snapper baked. 

When the snapper was done I spooned the tomato-avocado mix over the fillets and served with some slices of fresh pineapple and a light side salad. It was pretty tasty, though the balsamic did lend a sweetness that wasn't particularly to my personal taste. Next time I would probably cut back a little on the balsamic and maybe kick of the heat a little with some spicier chilis.

Next stop, everyone's dreaded vegetable, brussels sprouts. My mom hated them so I never had them growing up, but I am going to try and Italian style saute. Wish me luck.

Piccata Sauce

Sure you are thinking, chicken, veal or salmon piccata is not what you would consider the most healthy type of sauce, and , of course, you would be right. BUT ITS SOOOO GOOD. But the one thing about Piccata sauce is that it really doesn't call for any extra salt, it's really just white wine, butter and lemon, and of course capers which we'll get to later. So, white wine and lemon are relatively salt free, actually lemon and wine are pretty salt neutral (unless its lousy wine, and why are you cooking with rotgut anyway?)

So the problem really is the butter, and yes, you do need butter to make a real and decent piccata sauce. So I have always used a high fat content butter to make the sauce, usually the Challenge European Style butter. The high fat content in the butter is what makes the sauce set up so nice and creamy and ...well delicious. 

But, I had always seen the Challenge European Style butter come in two forms, salted and UNSALTED. Bingo! I went to the store and checked and the unsalted type lists 0mgs Sodium on the label, so I grabbed me some and headed home.

The first time I tried it was in a Sole Dore. It worked well so I figured that it would have to work for the Piccata, and if push came to salty shove I could always compensate with the no salt to bring up the flavor. I was excited.

The keys to a good piccata sauce is timing and courage. Timing in that it must be given a chance to reduce properly, and courage because you have to be willing to hang in there to the last possible moment of perfect silky smoothness before the entire sauce breaks and you have a clear lemony butter sauce that just looks pitiful and embarrassing.  So the challenge was on.

1/3 stick of the butter, the juice of one lemon, and a bit of wine...how much is a bit? depends on your mood and your proclivities, you decide, but it is essential that you get enough in there to impart that certain wine essence as well as allowing the alcohol in the wine to dissolve off, and in the process impart it's alchemical magic to the remaining ingredients. Throw them into a sauce pan and turn up the heat. Piccata needs high heat and a lot of stirring, constant stirring, especially while the sauce is boiling. The more stirring the better the sauce. The only problem that this presents is that anything else you may be cooking will have to wait. Piccata demands attention like an ADHD child with a flamethrower...you have to watch it all the time or else your house is toast and your sauce is devolved into burnt separated butter that your guests will politely thank you for before they surreptitiously spit the offending morsels into their napkins.

If you are like me, you cook restaurant style, fast, clean and on time. Everything comes out at the same time which requires planning and timing. I braise and bake the chicken breast first, then while it is baking I prepare the vegetables and rice, or salad (tonight was a lovely avocado and tangelo mix with a homemade (salt-free) vinaigrette...mmmmm.)

So, like Hitchcock making a movie, I did 90% before I even turned on the oven...OK, I turned on the oven to heat it up, but while it was heating I prepped the herbs and veggies, poured the wine, butter and lemon into a saucepan...and dropped the chicken breasts into the ziplock of wheatflour and herbs. The veggies were then mixed with the herbs and oil and a touch of vinegar and set aside, the chicken was braised on some high heat and then moved onto a roasting rack and shoved into the oven for 30 minutes, and the sauce, well it would have to wait.

See, the waiting is where the courage comes in. You can't make piccata sauce ahead of time, it has to be last minute, coming to creamy life at the last instant as the oven timer goes off, the vegetables are reaching saute perfection and everything is coming together like a hippie harmonic convergence. Miss a beat, get a phone call, start a fight with your girlfriend and you might as well let the ADHD kid have his way with the flamethrower.

Well, aside from doing some double handed work with stirring the sauce and sauteing the vegetables, everything came together just fine.  The sauce set up perfectly, smoothing into that pale yellow ambrosia that just coats the chicken lovingly, and avoids running too far away across the plate. I mean who wants slutty sauce that just slides up all over everything. You want sauce with dignity, restraint and class. The vegetables have their own identity and while they may speak highly of the lovely piccata sauce, they don't care to just jump into the rut together unless they are properly introduced. 

So what of the capers? Well, there is no avoiding the sodium in capers because of the brine that they are pickled in, but you can reduce the damage. Pour a handful into your palm and then rinse them in the tap before you add them to your sauce (and piccata is just not piccata without capers). At least by rinsing you remove the excess brine-sodium clinging to the little peppercorns. They still get to impart their tangy comment to the sauce, while overall the dish was flavorful and low sodium. 

The Discovery of Hidden Sodium

To start with, it is very difficult to find any packaged foods that are not packed with ridiculous amounts of sodium. Sometimes the amounts are so ludicrous that the labels have to fraction down the displayed amounts so that they don't make people start weeping in the aisles of Safeway. This fractioning down is done cleverly by the use of "per serving" listings. So that nice can of Campbell's Tomato soup that says it has 800 mgs of sodium per serving seems high, but semi-tolerable until you read the fine print and find out that Campbell's believes that you can get 2.5 servings out of one can, which translates to that little can actually having 2000 mgs of sodium (800 x 2.5=2000). The USDA recommendation for daily sodium intake is 2400 mgs (usually these USDA recommendations are listed right on the label as well...convenient huh?)

So when my girlfriend was recently told to go onto a No-salt diet, we faced quite a challenge, one that re-ignited my interest in cooking. I am the first to admit that I have a "salt-tooth" big time. But I also love my girlfriend so I set out to see what could be done. First stop, the grocery store.

There are actually a lot of salt-free spices in the supermarket. I found  Italian, Mexican, Cajun/Creole and poultry seasoning mixes all salt-free. In addition I discovered crystallized Lime, cumin and chili powder. 

I was very excited. Suddenly there was a whole world bursting open to me outside of my safe little realm of salt, garlic, basil, oregano, lemon and seasoned salt...oh yeah, and pomegranate (more on that in posts).

OK, so what to cook first?