September 9, 2020 Lunch – Shrimp, Fish, and Fishball Noodle Soup. Dinner Baked kombucha Squash Stuffed with Sausage, Pecans, raisins, red onion, garlic, red bell pepper topped with a Mornay Sauce and tomato slices

September 9, 2020 Lunch – Shrimp, Fish, and Fishball Noodle Soup. Dinner Baked kombucha Squash Stuffed with Sausage, Pecans, raisins, red onion, garlic, red bell pepper topped with a Mornay Sauce and tomato slices

One of main purposes of this blog is to inspire you to shop, grow your ingredients, and cook creatively.  As you will see the two main ways we do that is to think about menus as we shop and to pick ingredients that can be added to PPIs to create new dishes.  The other way is almost foraging, to pick the bounty of nature as it presents itself and combine those natural ingredients with store bought ingredients that fill our normal larder to create new interesting dishes.  Today’s meals illustrate both approaches.

For breakfast I toasted a thin slice of bagel and spread it with goat cheese and lay thin slice of onion and Gravad Lax on it.

I try to include a lot of fish in my diet and every other day usually eat smoked fish for breakfast alternating on the other days with yogurt, fruit and granola.

Yesterday I went to Talin and bought frozen fried fish cake balls and a fresh red snapper.  We steamed the red snapper last night and had ½ of it left.  

So today with the city still in the grip of the cold front I decided to made a hot noodle soup to use up the remaining 2 cups of crab stock and some of the delicate cooked red snapper. I tried to create a fish soup flavored with fresh fish, not any dehydrated dashi, as I do usually.

I filled a 2 quart pot 2/3 full with the crab broth and water and then added a cube of Pho seasoning, about 1 ½ T. of cooked red snapper and four frozen heads on shrimp. I then added a bundle of fresh egg white wheat noodles, a bundle of dry bean thread noodles and a small handful of raw rice vermicelli noodles.  I then went to the garden and picked a handful of fresh arugula, Chard, and kale leaves and a stalk of tarragon.  I de-stemmed the leaves and added the leaves to the soup. I wanted to add an onion flavor but it was too late to cook a slice of onion, so I returned to the garden and picked ten chives and sliced them thinly and aDeed about ¾ of them to the soup. I then stirred in a heaping T. of white miso to enrich the broth. I then added four frozen fried fish balls I had bought yesterday..  When the fish balls thawed I sliced  them and returned the slices to the soup.  After about thirty minutes the noodles had softened and cooked and I ate two bowls of soup.

The flavor of the broth was delightfully light and fishy from the four types of fish flavors I added plus the pho seasoning and white miso.  The trick when making a soup is to convert water into a flavorful soup by the addition of flavoring ingredients. I achieved that today by combining fish, shrimp, crab stock, miso, and pho seasoning. And I have enough soup left for lunch tomorrow.

This fish soup is an example of acquiring and using a battery of shopped ingredients to create a dish, including the PPI red snapper that we cooked yesterday evening and the fish cakes I bought yesterday.

I had an appointment that went into the dinner hour tonight so Suzette created dinner without me.  We had baked four squashes she brought home that were raised in her garden at the Center for Ageless Living several days ago, including the spaghetti squash we ate with the steamed stuffed red snapper last night and two small kombucha squashes that Suzette decided to stuff tonight.

Suzette made a stuffing by sautéing pork sausage, corn kernels, raisins, and chopped pecans, red onion, garlic, and red bell pepper.

The creativity was to compose a single dish using the garden fresh squash as the center piece.  Suzette cored and removed the seeds and when the stuffing was fully cooked, I stuffed it into the two squashes while Suzette made a mornay/cheese sauce by making a roux by cooking butter and flour and adding milk and then shredded Monterrey Jack cheese, which she poured over the stuffed squashes and then baked in a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes to heat all the ingredients and melt and toast the cheese sauce.  The resulting browned cheese topping the squash resembled the toasted cheese on a bowl of onion soup.  Suzette had also brought home several ripe tomatoes so I sliced a lovely ripe tomato that Suzette used to garnish the pasta bowls beside each baked stuffed squash. 

We washed the slightly dry squash down with glasses of Italian Chianti.

This slightly one dimensional meal was very filling but not satisfying enough to discourage us from eating a chocolate chip cookie and small bowl of java chocolate chip ice cream for dessert and enjoying a glass of Suzette’s freshly made limoncello.

So dinner illustrates how Suzette integrates ingredients we buy with harvested ingredients to create a new satisfying dish.

Bon Appetit