WFMW- Teriyaki Salmon, Meatballs

This is for a food-themed Works for Me Wednesday. If you've been looking for good dishes with five or fewer ingredients, click on over there and enjoy the links. I'm sure I'll be printing a bunch of new stuff for my kitchen binder tonight.

Here's mine:

1. Teriyaki Salmon
Ingredients:
Salmon fillet (steak would work, too)
Soy Sauce
Mirin*

Line one of those shallow square brownie-type pans with tin foil.
Pour the soy sauce and mirin together at a ratio of about 1:2. So if you pour 1/3 cup of soy sauce, use 2/3 cup of mirin. Put the fish in the prepared dish with the marinade. You want just enough liquid to wet the whole fish and have a nice little pool around it, though while you marinate more's okay. If you have a very big fillet (like one of them Costco half-a-fish fillets), you'll obviously need more.

Let the fish marinate for anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple hours. Pour off most of the liquid and leave just enough juice for that little pool we mentioned. Cover the top with foil, too.

When you're ready, heat your oven to 375 and cook about 15 minutes. Remove the top foil and cook another 5-15 minutes, until the fish flakes when you poke the thickest part with a fork.

OR lightly oil your grill and cook the salmon there. You can even use some oiled foil in the grill if you like- of course, you won't have the little pool here, though.
*Mirin is a sweet Japanese cooking wine available in most grocery stores, but if you don't want to bother (even though it's totally worth having some on hand) I think you could improvise with cooking wine and a few tbsp brown sugar instead.

2. Lunch Party Meatballs
1 Big Bag Italian Style Frozen Meatballs (those Costco suckers work great)
1 Medium (10 oz or so) Jar Grape Jelly
2 Jars 12 ounce Chili Sauce (a ketchup-like substance found in the ketchup aisle)

This recipe is eminently half-able, and as far as I can tell the proportions aren't super critical anyway. I've even heard tales of folks using Ketchup instead of chili sauce and adding a few spices (cayenne? garlic salt? chives? probably.) with some success.

Put all the above in a crock pot. Cook for about 4 hours on low, stirring once or twice. Remember, don't open the pot more than that lest lots of the heat escape.

These are super popular at baby showers, pass-a-dish parties, and the leftovers (if you have any) are good for sandwiches or on rice. Put out some fancy toothpicks and cute napkins and you're good to go.

The Hoods are here!

Toby loves his hoodies. Not the hip shirts with hoods you see on all the young doods and petty criminals, no those I don't like because of the miniscule teeny wee chance he may catch it on something. You've seen The Incredibles?
Remember her rant re: capes? Nnnno hoods. Too dangerous, dahling.

Ennywho, the hoodies I mean are strawberries! Mount Hood STRAWBERRIES!! I can type it loud because he's sleeping, this human who once burst into tears of longing when we drove past a large strawberry billboard. As you can imagine, we don't mind an obsession with healthy and affordable finger fruits but we still regularly spell rather than utter the word "berry" unless we have the goods to represent.

So today we bopped up to the library to pick up some books on hold (one on the creative disciplines and another on creative discipline. It's where we at.) and zipped over to the farmers market across the way. I am using fun verbs because actually we schlumped our sweaty cranky unpleasantly clinging way over there, wilted little pasty white family that we are. It's hotter than Wil Smith's abs here today. I am running the A/C with wanton fiduciary abandon. Whee.

So we picked up the 1/2 flat and tried to hoof it back to the air conditioned marvel of diesel sucking engineering in a manner that would get us there very quickly but would not cause my inner thighs to spontaneously combust. It's like the running-in-the-rain dilemna, but lamer. It's similar to that walk we all do when trying to score the next spot in a line without looking like a pushy jerk: casually, coincidentally, noncommittally swift.

I believe it was worth all the dehydration just to see the look on his red stained gob. I refrained from yelling, No no no, you don't just hork it down! But realized one animated movie reference per day is enough. Besides, they are sooo horkable.

Cream: Good

I am making this recipe, which I found at Epicurious, my favorite recipe site:

Cream Cheese Ice Cream (Gourmet Magazine, August 2003)

Active time: 5 min Start to finish: 2 1/2 hr (includes freezing)
Makes about 1 qt.

8 oz cream cheese, softened

1 cup milk

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

3/4 cup sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup heavy cream

Preparation

Blend cream cheese, milk, lemon juice, sugar, and salt in a blender until smooth. Transfer to a bowl, then stir in cream. Freeze cream cheese mixture in ice cream maker. Transfer to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden, at least 2 hours. Let ice cream soften 5 minutes before serving.

So, if you don't hear from us for more than a few days, assume our arteries have clogged and hardened and we have developed instant diabetes from eating- or perhaps even smelling or looking at- what is essentially hunks of sweetened, frozen cream cheese with berries on top.

Thanks for dinner, sweetheart.

Behold, a quiche I made for dinner.







Sadly, it tasted like dirt. Not figuratively. What would make a spinach/mushroom/onion quiche taste like dirt? I don't know if it was the spices (they were all the dried variety and are probably real real old) or some terrible mishap at the cheap frozen spinach plant. I'm just hoping none of us end up on House or Medical Incredible.

Also, note the time on our handy stove clock. We are finished eating a good bit before J was usually even home from his previous job. Shall we celebrate with some mud pie?

Mmmmm... Protein....

I made these biscuits this week and they're super yummy yet require only commonly on-hand ingredients. They are a great way to use one of those two-for-one cottage cheese sales and reheat nicely, too.

Two tips:
1. I think next time I'll reduce the butter because that is a ton of butter.
2. When you go to mix in the cottage cheese, you might as well say to heck with it and mush it all up with your hands. It needs lots of squishing to combine at all and you're going to get messy trying to get them on the cookie sheet anyway, so just imagine you're the foley artist for a horror movie and get in there.

COTTAGE CHEESY BISCUITS
2 cups all purpose flour
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, cut into 1/4 inch pieces
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 16-oz. container low fat cottage cheese

Preheat oven to 450. In a large bowl place flour, salt and baking powder. Stir until combined. Add butter and mix until it becomes the size of small peas. Add the cottage cheese and stir until just combined.

Using a large soupspoon your already gunked-up hands, glob onto a non-stick cookie sheet in about 8 piles. Bake until golden, about 12-15 minutes. Serve immediately, because they'll be all melty and yummy in the inside.

These are great with soup or salad, keep nicely in the fridge and are eminently nukable.

She cooks, she cleans... she snores.

I've always done things in semi-obsessive spurts, which is fine as long as it's a hobby or you're twelve years old. It gets more embarrassing now that I have responsibilities beyond myself and, say, a dog. For example, I'm supposed to keep a house not only in order, but arrange it thoughtfully yet casually and always with a hint of hip irony so that every room reflects who we are inside (geeze thanks, Oprah, HGTV, a million bloggers and apartment therapy).

Meals are more difficult because they require preparation and constant forethought. They should be provided with thought to the habits you want to cultivate for the rest of your kid's life- that's right, this is the first arena in which I have already begun to do things because they are easier, even though I don't like them. Lately I've been seen popping Cheeze Dogs (I am not kidding) in the microwave, genuinely happy that Toby at least remembered to say Weenah, Pweeeez. The word "weiner" and the weiners themselves introduced themselves to us at a certain Montana Toddler Spa, but I ain't gonna lie and say I wouldn't have given them to him myself after seeing him polish them off his plate and ask for more. He's at that stage where he wants only one thing (mostly) for a few days and then, when you're in the groove and on board and have laid in a nice supply he changes his mind. It's frustrating to prepare what he loved every bit of yesterday only to have him leave it and beg for something else. We don't really give in to that within the course of one "meal", but once he goes tepid on something he sticks to it.

J's new job means we actually have the ability to eat dinner together, all at the same time and place, without waiting to eat until 8:30pm. I find myself suddenly unprepared and frozen (ha! because we heat up frozen chemicals for dinner! ha!) in the spotlight, even though I used to fancy myself a proficient enough cook: I even enjoyed it. Now it seems like such a challenge to get real food together and to remember that potatoes are not a vegetable.

In Japan, my closest friend was also into cooking and she knew all the Japanese veggies and such, so we often collaborated in her kitchen, spending hours over a bottle of wine and a mess of impromptu ingredients. That is my favorite kind of cooking, and life.

Nowadays I'm fairly convinced that both in my cooking and in finding some ridiculously small shred of balance to cling to, I am in need of better recipes. I want somebody else to show me what to do, tell me what works. Should I keep trying to sub with all the groups in town or focus on my chamber music and teaching? Should I scramble to get more on my career plate or just let it go for a few years and try to practice consistantly without immediate goals? Should I finally try cooking those wheat berries I bought months ago from the bulk section at Winco or just fall back on 10-minute couscous with parmesan (again)? Is bagged salad really going to give us all cancer of the butt and turn everyone's farm into a Walmart parking lot?

You see the connection, no? Failure in one area, slippage in some part of my duties as a Miriam and I feel like it is all about to go. I literally end the day feeling lame unless I can get it all in the air at once, and that just isn't happening very often. If I cook up a storm, I don't practice enough. If I take Toby for a fabulous park-filled walk, I nap through the precious bathroom cleaning appointment. And then it's suddenly 9pm and I'm kind of full and grumpy and sleepy and several other of the dwarves, and I just want to curl up with some crosswords and go to bed. Who goes to bed that early? (Hi, Mom!) I guess the great meandering pregasaurus does, that's who.