Dinner Last Night #1

Miso Glazed Salmon,
Broccoli with Black Bean Sauce,
Rice







(Can you tell I'm not a food photographer? Yeah. I was hungry so I only took one shot. Sorry about the fuzziness.)

Except for the broccoli and the miso, this is entirely a meal of foods I had in the pantry or the freezer.

Game plan:

1) Put rice in the rice cooker, because it takes the longest (15-20 minutes). I love my rice cooker! I also keep rice around all the time. I buy the 25 pound bags at the Asian grocery. This is Jasmine Rice.

2) Defrost the salmon, because I failed to plan ahead. My new "stock" item is the frozen wild salmon sold at Whole Foods. It is about $7-8 for two 6-ounce pieces, which is as cheap or cheaper than the salmon in the seafood case, and it is wild which is supposedly better than farm raised. Plus I can keep it as a freezer item so I don't have to plan ahead. When I buy fish fresh I usually try to use it that day.

3) Nurse the baby because she is shreiking. This was not in my original game plan, but what can you do?

4) Mix:
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon yellow miso
(bought at the Asian grocery, lasts several weeks)
1 tablespoon low-sodium soy sauce
(also from the Asian grocery in a large vat)

Line a metal pan with a piece of foil and put the fish in (ungreased). This is a technique I always use, because the fish skin will fuse to the foil and you then can remove the fish without the skin and throw away the foil with the skin. Plus there is easy clean up!

Put the mixed miso sauce on top of the fish. Broil for 10 minutes.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that this is a simplified version of a Cooking Light recipe which is excellent if you have time for it (it has this salmon and some very yummy mashed potatoes.)

5) Cut up the broccoli and crush a couple cloves of garlic over it. Saute it for a few minutes, then add about 1/4 cup of water and let the water steam off. Add about 1 tablespoon black bean sauce and about 1 tablespoon of low-sodium soy-sauce.

That's it! If not for step (3), it should take less than 25 minutes.

On a side note, I keep a list on the refrigerator entitled "Foods S. will eat." It is for my husband, who thinks she will only eat yogurt, cheese, bread, and fruit. My mother was here one day standing about 10 feet from the fridge, and interrupted the conversation to say "you misspelled broccoli." It took me a minute to even figure out what she was talking about. And I had misspelled it as brocolli. Brocolli still looks more normal to me. I had to look it up for this post. But I also thought "so that is where I learned to be so obsessive-compulsive about editing errors."