June 9, 2019 New Recipe Brunch – Chicken Sausage, mint, dill pickle, hard boiled egg, and red onion Flautas. Dinner – Teriyaki Cedar Board Salmon with Stir Fried Chinese Cabbage, squash, mushrooms and onion

June 9, 2019  New Recipe Brunch – Chicken Sausage, mint, dill pickle, hard boiled egg, and red onion Flautas. Dinner – Teriyaki Cedar Board Salmon with Stir Fried Chinese Cabbage, squash, mushrooms and onion

Suzette and I both had an extremely difficult workweek last week.  It took concentrated rest on both Friday and Saturday night to recharge our engines.

But this morning the engines were recharged and the effect was a tsunami of cooking.

Tropical Fruit Salad

While Suzette was still asleep at 7:00 I made a tropical fruit salad with one small papaya cubed, one medium pineapple cubed, four cubed mangos, and four oranges sectioned plus juice of two limes.

After I finished the salad I ate some with yogurt and granola and a dash of milk.

Mint Jelly - the First thing Suzette made was mint jelly while I was cutting fruit.  She went to the garden and picked a basket full of mint and boiled it in water to extract the mint flavor.  Then she added sugar and a 3 oz. package of the liquid pectin, lemon juice, and two drops of the green food coloring we bought at Walmart yesterday.  She had washed an assortment of jars and lids from the basement in the washing machine to steralize them yesterday.  She poured the jelly into the jars and voila we had a number of jars of lovely lime green mint jelly.

 

Mint jelly

Sausage stuffed Flautas

Then Suzette tested a new recipe from Bon Appetit .  A large spinach tortilla spread with a lemon juice and yogurt mixture and filled with sautéed chicken, feta, and spinach sausage, hard boiled egg slices, chopped red onion, diced dill pickles, and chopped fresh mint and the rolled closed and sautéed in the cooking fat from the sausage.  It was super delicious.  The original recipe as you see uses merguez (spicy lamb sausage) but we bought chicken feta sausage on sale for $2.99/lb. at Sprouts yesterday. Suzette hard boiled 8 eggs, two for the sausage flautas and 6 for pickling.

The flautas would not stay rolled. Suzette simply sautéed the tortilla side of one and we rolled the other one in another tortilla. When they were both sautéed to a bit beyond golden brown we put them on plates and I poured the last of three bottles of white wine for Suzette and the last of the French rose’ for me and we each carried our plate and glass to the garden table under the gazebo and ate brunch.  The garden was particularly lovely today with columbines, roses, and lavender in bloom.

The spinach tortillas

 

The tortilla smeared with lemon yogurt sauce topped with sautéed chicken sausage

                                                        The chopped mint and red onion

 

The egg slicer

                                                    The red onion and diced dill pickle

The egg slices applied 

 

All ingredients added 

 

The final sautéed one that became unrolled 

 

A side view of the final flautist

After brunch Suzette picked a handful of radishes that we washed and I sliced along with a cucumber and a carrot and added to our bowl of Japanese pickles.

 

Suzette then looked in the fridge and decided to make the gluten free mandarin orange cake, so she simmered the clemintines/mandarin oranges in water.  Then she removed the seeds and puréed them and stored the purée for cake prep later in the fridge.

Then Suzette made pickled beets. Suzette peeled and I cubed three large red beets.  Suzette covered them with water and cooked them until tender.  Then she drained spend reserved the liquid.  She measured the liquid and added an equal amount of apple cider vinegar and the added ½ cup of honey to the liquid plus five cloves.  She then put the beets in one jar and the six eggs in the other jar and filled both jars with the liquid.

Teriyaki Sauce
I then made teriyaki sauce by heating 1/3 cup each of soy, Aji Mirin, and sake and adding 1 T. of sugar until the sugar dissolved. I let the teriyaki sauce cool.

Gravad Lax

I then rinsed and dried the two salmon filets we bought at Sprouts yesterday and cut two portions that were of equal width with the Pyrex baking dish I intended to use to make Gravad Lax.  I estimated that the two filets weighted slightly more than 3 lb. so I increased the amount of sugar and salt slightly from ½ cup of sugar to 2/3 cup and the 2/3 cup of salt to ¾ cup.  Then I crushed 1 tsp. of black pepper corns and mixed them with the salt and sugar.  I then went to the garden and picked a large handful of dill weed.  When I returned I laid a layer of dill weed in the bottom of the Pyrex baking dish.  Suzette then helped me by pouring the dry mix onto the outer skin of one of two matched salmon filets.  I lay the outer skin side down onto the dill in the bottom of the pan. We then ladled dry mixture onto the inside of the filet I laid in the Pyrex baking dish.  Then lay lots more dill weed on top of the first filet, the inside .  We then spooned dry mix on the inside of the second filet and lay it on top of the first filet, inside side down.  Finally, Suzette spread the rest of the dry mix over the skin side of the second filet and I lay the rest of the dill weed on it, covered it with Saran and placed a brick on top of the top filet and the whole Pyrex dish and fish affair in the fridge to cure.  You can marinate from 18 to 48 hours. I decided to marinate this batch for 24 hours.

Luckily I awakened at 1:30 a.m. and met that schedule.

Here is a picture of the marinade before and after the flip.

I put the four pieces of salmon left after cutting the two nearly filets of nearly identical length as the Pyrex baking dish into a gallon freezer bag and Suzette poured the teriyaki sauce into the bag and coated them and put the bag into the fridge.

Clafoutis fruit

I next prepared the cherry filling for the Clafoutis I intend to bake tomorrow.  I watched the Championship game for Country EUFA between Portugal and The Netherlands.

I pitted the 2 lb. bag of cherries we bought at Sprouts yesterday for $2.49/lb.  then I sliced each cherry in half and added cognac and Grand Marnier and orange peel and orange juice to the cherries to brandy them an covered the bowl with Saran and put them in the fridge.

 It was after 3:30 of 4:00  and I was tired so I showered and shaved and lay down and napped until 5:15.

When I arrived at Suzette in front of the TV watching the news at 5:15  we decided to cook dinner early since we had not eaten since brunch.  The teriyaki salmon was on the menu.  We discussed a vegetable and agreed that I would stir fry the remaining Chinese cabbage she grew in her garden at the Center for Ageless Living in Los Lunas.

Stir fried Chinese Cabbage and Cedar Plank Grilled Teriyaki Salmon

I chopped about four oz. of yellow onion, 1T. of garlic, 1 ½ T. of ginger, I Mexican Squash quartered and sliced, I sliced two large mushrooms, and finally the cabbage separating the green tender leaves from the dense white stalk parts.  I also opened a small can of bamboo shoots cut into threads.

While I was chopping Suzette cut two pieces of cedar plank to fit the four pieces of salmon and soaked them in a tub filled with water to water log them.

We decided that we would start each of our dishes at the same time, so after I put 2 tsp. of cornstarch, 1 T. each of Chinese Cooking wine and soy and 1 tsp. of sesame oil in a bowl with 3 T. of water, I turned on the heat under my wok and Suzette placed the salmon on the grill and the race was on, but it took longer for the salmon to fully cook so I was able to manipulate the sauce at the end a bit.

I heated about 2 T. of peanut oil.  Then added the bowl containing the squash, onion, white cabbage stalks, ginger, and garlic and stir fried that for five to ten minutes.  Then I added the bamboo shoots and stirred them in with a few dashes of sesame oil, a tsp. of sugar and a tsp of salt.  After a couple
more minutes, I added the mushrooms and green cabbage leaves.   I the stirred the seasoning sauce to emulsify it and poured it into the wok and turned the mass of ingredients with four flips, one for approximately ¼ of the whole each flip.  Suzette came in and said it would be five more minutes before the salmon was ready.

I like my salmon seared, but Willy and Suzette like their salmon fully cooked.  Luckily, when fully cooking salmon on a cedar plank there is still enough teriyaki sauce penetrated into the fish that it is very tender.

When Suzette brought the salmon in on a large baking tray, I turned down the heat and she plated a pile of vegetables on a plate with a piece of salmon on top.  Suzette has really developed a artistry for posting food, in my opinion.  Here is a photo.

We opened a bottle of 2017 Mohua New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, which is my current favorite New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. It is rated 89 points by some and 91 by others.  At $12.00 at Costco it is a buy.  It is infinitely better than more expensive choices like Kim Crawford.

We ate and watched the elaborate Tony Awards presentation with live performances of several shows and songs, while flipping back and forth to game six of the Stanley Cup finals between Boston and St. Louis.

I was thrilled when Heidi Schreck was nominated for best actress in a play for her play, “What the Constitution Means to Me” because we had seen it with Luke and Melissa during our last visit to NYC in April.

I loved the play and her almost one woman performance.

Willy arrived around 8:30 after soccer and ate what is now his favorite meal.  I joined him, eating the last of the vegetables and another piece of salmon.  The two salmon filets cost $38.00 at $7.99/lb.  we had a fabulous dinner with about ½ and the other half will provide Gravad Lax for the next few months.

Bon Appetit