Three Dinners: Vegetarian, Fish, Meat

As you can see…the first week of cooking has been filled with a variety of recipes. I love to experiment with new recipes but also love the old faithful. We also really like interesting and different flavours…No plane jane food here! For our first home cooked meal in our new digs, we decided to go with a favourite of both of ours. Tofu almond butter curry with coconut rice and roasted brussels sprouts. I can almost hear you meat and potato eaters out there groaning in disgust, but trust me, this meal is delicious. If you think you don’t like tofu…you’ve never had it stir-fried until crisp and doused in a rich and flavourful almond butter curry sauce. This recipe came to me courtesy of a very good friend, who also happens to lean more towards being vegetarian. She got the recipe from The Big Carrot, an organic grocery store on The Danforth in Toronto.  The coconut brown rice and roasted brussels sprouts really compliment this main well so I encourage you to try all three together.

Tofu Almond Butter Curry (Adapted from The Big Carrot)

Sauce

1/4 cup almond butter

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 tbsp curry powder

Mix all sauce ingredients together

Stir Fry

1 bock extra-firm tofu, cut into 1 inch pieces

1 tsp dried rosemary

1 red onion, sliced thin

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 carrot, grated

1 head broccoli, finely chopped

1 red pepper, thinly sliced

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 small head kale, shredded

Heat wok over medium/high heat and add a little oil. Stir fry tofu until nice and brown on all sides (you need some patience for this) and then add to bowl with sauce and toss gently to coat.

Add onion, garlic, and rosemary to wok and stir fry until starting to brown. Then add red pepper, carrot, broccoli, soy sauce, and 2 tbsp water and mix together. Cover and let cook about 5 minutes or until soft. Add kale and 1/4 cup of water and cook until kale is softened. Add sauce with tofu and mix to combine.

For the rice, I just take brown rice and cook it in coconut milk with a little salt in a ratio of 2:1, liquid: rice. Basically one can of coconut milk topped off with a little water is enough for 1 cup of rice. If you shudder when you hear the word “brussels sprouts,” you must be remembering your moms plain, steamed, and overcooked sprouts (my apologies if your mom did not serve you these). Mine are roasted until they are caramalized and salty and delicious. Just cut your sprouts in half and toss with a little oil, salt, and pepper and roast in a 400 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes until nice and brown. Is this not the perfect plate or what???

The next night we were in the mood for fish. Found some really good looking salmon and made another classic recipe from my favourite cooking magazine, Cooking Light. This miso marinated salmon is really delicious. If you haven’t cooked with miso before, it’s kind of the texture of peanut butter, with  a salty/savoury flavour. It really adds a nice dimension to your sauces/marinades. Here’s what it looked like in my grocery store.

Miso Paste

This recipe would also be  delicious on trout, chicken, and now that you are all tofu lovers…tofu!

Miso Marinated Salmon (Adapted from Cooking Light Magazine)

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tbsp miso paste

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp water

4 pieces of salmon

Mix all ingredients together and pour over salmon. Broil for about 10 minutes until cooked through and nice and brown on top.

To serve with the salmon, we had leftover coconut rice. So, I morphed it into a coconut fried rice by sauteing some onion, carrots, and mushrooms and mixing it with the rice, some soy and hoisin sauce. For a “no recipe” dish, I was pretty proud of myself. It turned out quite nice and went really well with the salmon. So cook extra grains…you can always turn them into a new dish the next day.

So, we’ve satisfied the vegetarian and fish cravings, but we also do like our meat now and again in this household. I’d say we generally eat meat 1-2 days/week which is a lot less than I used to. But for some reason, we were both craving not just any meat, but RED meat. We had a beautiful piece of lean shoulder steak in our fridge.

I decided to not use an old-reliable but branch out to a new recipe…And Anna Olson came to the rescue again (in case you forget, she gave me the vegetable tart recipe…read the blog!)

While Adam was eating it he proclaimed “this is a keeper!” And I concur! http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Main/Beans/recipe.html?dishID=10901 The only change I made was to use black beans instead of adzuki beans (because I’ve really never seen those in my grocery store before!)

Grilled Shoulder Steak. Medium Rare

This recipe again features miso so if you were thinking what the heck you would do with a whole package of miso? Well, now you have two recipes to use it with.

Well, I’ve been doing all the talking lately. Tell me, what have you cooked this week??? I’d love to hear!

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