I love smoked salmon but don't get to eat it very often because I don't eat farmed salmon at all, for health reasons, and unfortunately most restaurants do not serve smoked wild salmon.

But a couple weeks ago In Trader Joe's I came across beautiful Smoked Wild Salmon from Alaska - the best kind! I wanted to make fluffy scrambled eggs topped with Wild Smoked Salmon and lemon cream.

I finally got to make it today and it was so damn good. And quite easy. It felt so gourmet! I used Meyer lemon because that's what I had on-hand and worked off a recipe from Bon Appetit which I have pasted below. I used 2% Greek Yogurt in place of the sour cream to make the calories a little lower and used half the amount of dried thyme in place of the fresh thyme. Lemony good and a perfect accompaniment for the smoked salmon.

Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon and Lemon Cream

Sophisticated lemon cream makes these simple scrambled eggs dinner table-worthy. Be sure to use wild smoked salmon, preferably from Alaska. Wild salmon is sustainable, healthful—and delicious.

2 SERVINGS

• PREP: 20 MINUTES
• TOTAL: 20 MINUTES

Recipe by the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen

Photograph by Misha Gravenor

February 2009

INGREDIENTS

• 2 tablespoons sour cream
• 3/4 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon (packed) finely grated lemon peel
• 1/4 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
• 4 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 large green onion, thinly sliced
• 2 ounces thinly sliced smoked salmon

PREPARATION

• Mix sour cream, fresh lemon juice, finely grated lemon peel, and chopped fresh thyme in small bowl. Season lemon cream to taste with salt and pepper.
• Whisk eggs in medium bowl to blend; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Melt butter in medium nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add thinly sliced green onion and sauté 1 minute. Add eggs; cook until almost set, stirring often, about 1 minute. Divide scrambled eggs between plates. Top scrambled eggs with thinly sliced smoked salmon; drizzle with lemon cream and serve.

Ya Win Some, Ya Lose Some (Part 2)

Winner: Fennel salad with olive oil and lemon, red onion and spices.

Loser: Alaskan Cod breaded in panko and broiled. Blech.

Why oh why did I choose Cod? I mean, the recipe called for Cod and I hadn't ever cooked with it and it works so well battered and fried with chips and tartar sauce, right?

WRONG!

It sucked. Man. I hate to make a dinner and then watch it fail. Well, maybe that's dramatic. It was edible. Sam and I both ate the entire meal. But it wasn't delicious. The fillets were way too thick to cook properly and honestly, we both found the Cod to be pretty tasteless. Especially compared to my usual fish of choice to cook with the chock-full-of-Omega-3s-low-in-mercury, ever-so-affordable: Rainbow Trout.

I guess it wasn't a complete failure: the tartar sauce accompanying the fish was damn good! Sam actually said that it was better than many restaurant chefs' tartar sauce!

And of course, the fennel salad I served with it was absolutely fabulous. I used my mandoline again and dressed a medium fennel bulb and 1/4 cup thinly sliced red onion in 2 teaspoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, a pinch of ground coriander, cumin, some salt and pepper, and parsley. Mmmmmm!

1 package of ground turkey - two delicious meals!

I had a package of ground turkey, a desire to make spaghetti and meatballs and a craving for Middle Eastern food. What's a girl to do? Make two dinners, of course!

Ground turkey and chicken are becoming fast favorites of mine for protein. So versatile and easy to cook, ground turkey can be transformed into meatballs, chili, sausage, meatloaf, etc etc etc.

I bought some whole what spaghetti to keep it healthy (though Sam and I decided that the meatballs and sauce were good enough without the pasta and I never ended up cooking any of it!). I used a recipe from Ellie Krieger for Turkey Meatballs and a Quick and Spicy Tomato Sauce. I love how the smell of homemade tomato sauce permeates the apartment. Mmm.

But the middle eastern meatballs were what I was really looking forward to. Spiced Kofte on a bed of lightly dressed baby spinach in lemon juice and olive oil, with a tart apple raita in a toasted pita!!! Wow. The flavors were great. Thanks Bobby Flay! The savory, spicy meatballs went perfectly with the cool raita. Sam and I love yogurt sauces and we were both blown away by the unique apple raita. Plus, this meal was really easy to make. (Easier than the meatballs and tomato sauce!) Check it out!

Inspirations from the Farm Box: Kale and Polenta Pie, Rainbow Carrot Salad & White Bean Turkey Chili

On Monday I made a healthy favorite of ours for dinner: Turkey and White Bean Chili based upon a recipe by Giada De Laurentiis. It's so damn good. Sam loves it. I made 6 servings so we had leftovers for Tuesday.

Wohoo! A great dinner for two nights with only one night's effort. I'd totally kick back on Tuesday night.

Yeah right. We got our farm box delivery today. And that means...Inspiration!

Among the vegetables received were Red Russian Kale, Savoy Cabbage, Rainbow Carrots, and Shitake Mushrooms. Inspired by the bounty I decided to make some vegetable dishes to accommpany the chili.

Afterall, the produce is always best the first day. So here's the story...

The Red Russian Kale was purple and gorgeous, strong and tough.

I decided to use it in a polenta pie baked with parmigiano reggiano and pepper using quick cooking polenta.

It's kind of like a kale cornbread, and it's delicious with the chili ladled over the top!

I used a recipe modified from one by Jack Bishop.

The rainbow carrots were beautiful!! These are just a few.

There were also purple carrots. Just lovely.

I decided to make a carrot salad. I boiled `em till just tender then sliced and tossed them with a vinaigrette from Bobby Flay.

It turned out beautiful, spicy - incredibly flavorful. And the dish nicley complemented the chili over kale & polenta pie.

When Sam saw the meal I prepard, he actually started jumping up and down, excitedly.

It was a great feeling to see the joy my good hood food brought to the table!

Grilled Citrus Chicken with Citrus Butternut Squash Mash and Citrus, Celery, and Shaved Fennel Salad! Who likes citrus here?

Keeping with the EASY, TASTY, HEALTHY mantra I now have for cooking dinners, last night I utilized the (precooked) Grilled Lemon-Pepper Chicken Breast from Trader Joe's and went to town on the vegetables.

And I finally got to use my mandoline. It was cool. I made a Citrus, Celery, and Shaved Fennel Salad (recipe at bottom). It was delicious but kind of a pain in the ass, especially compared to the preparation for the rest of my meal. The biggest pain in the butt part was removing the pith and peel and then removing the orange and grapefruit segments from their membranes and keeping the juices from going all over the place. But it was worth it. Sam and I LOVE fennel and I especially love citrus. It was good, the vinaigrette was nice, the texture lovely, but honestly I think an even simpler fennel salad with some lemon juice would have been even more to my liking.

I need to remember to buy fennel more often. I love having a salad but I kind of hate most lettuce!! Well I don't hate lettuce it's just usually my least favorite part of a salad. But fennel - wow - you get the crunch of lettuce with this lovely light anise/licorice flavor. Yum. Actually, one of my favorite preperations of fennel (when not in a salad) is in a fritto misto. I will eat fried food (something I do not generally do very often) just to taste fennel this way. One of our favorite restaurants does it very very well - Marzano in Oakland.

But once again, I digress...

I used leftover orange and grapefruit juice and poured the juice over the chicken breast and then put it in the microwave to heat it up with some moisture and flavor. When it came out, I poured some more juice over the breast, almost like a sauce. It was soo damn good. But I share the credit with Trade Joe's. The addition of the juice was good, but the basic seasoning was already there in the package. I will definitely buy this again.

Then I took another Trade Joe's special - pre-peeled and cut butternut squash - zapped it in the microwave for about 8 minutes, poured some juice on the squash, added salt and pepper, and then mashed it with a masher and voila! DELICIOUS butternut squash mash flavored with NO FAT!! It was so sweet and delicious. We were both surprised at how yummy it was without any addition of butter. And so frickin easy!!!

Here is the Citrus, Celery, and Shaved Fennel Salad recipe from Gourmet magazine:

• 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon whole-grain or coarse-grain mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 navel oranges
• 2 grapefruit (preferably pink)
• 2 medium fennel bulbs (sometimes called anise; about 1 3/4 lb), stalks cut off and discarded
• 3 celery ribs, cut diagonally into 1/8-inch-thick slices

• Special equipment: a Japanese Benriner* or other adjustable-blade slicer

preparatio

Whisk together vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Add oil in a slow stream, whisking, until combined.

Cut peel, including all white pith, from oranges and grapefruit with a paring knife. Working over a bowl, cut segments free from membranes. Squeeze juice from membranes into a small bowl, then whisk 3 tablespoons juice into vinaigrette. Drain citrus segments, then add to vinaigrette.

Quarter fennel bulbs lengthwise, then cut lengthwise into paper-thin slices (about 1/16 inch thick) with slicer. Add to fruit along with celery and toss gently to combine

Going back to my roots...no, not deli food...asian!

I first learned to cook when I lived at Lothlorien, a vegetarian co-op at UC Berkeley, my sophomore year. One night a week me and two other "elfs" would cook dinner for the lot. Back then I followed recipes and learned as I went along, cooking vegetarian and vegan meals for 60+ co-op residents. It was a crash course in cooking. And I really enjoyed it. Of course, the first meal I ever cooked at Loth included Gazpacho and the recipe called for seeding about 30 jalapeno peppers. I had never handled a jalapeno before and had no idea the pain that was to befall me. Wow. After about 20 minutes of seeding the jalapenos with just my fingers, they were burning so badly that I actually had to stop cooking and get first aid! I literally BURNED my fingertips. It hurt A LOT! My fingers were ON FIRE!!! And it took hours for the pain to go away. But I sure never made that same mistake again!

Anyway, I digress..

Every week at Loth we'd get gorgeous boxes of organic produce and we could use anything we wanted to cook for ourselves. Around the same time I bought Mollie Katzen's The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and starting regularly making vegetable stir fry with her delicious sauce that had things like tamari, ginger, fresh orange juice, garlic, etc. YUM! I would cook plate after plate. Eventually I stopped following the recipe and made it my own with a few adjustments (like leaving out the cornstarch for example).

This decidedly Asian dish was the first one in my repertoire.

And yet, I can't remember the last time I cooked with Asian flavors! So I decided to go back to my roots last week, inspired by our purchase of "Just Chicken-Teriyaki" from Trader Joes. As you recall from the last post, my goal now is EASY and HEALTHY. And I've been leaning towards simple protein preparation and more complex vegetable sides. Though I hate to call the veggies "sides", as I like to think of the vegetable portion of the meal as the star with the protein as the supporting player. In terms of the food pyramid, that's how you should always think of your meals - at least in terms or proportions.

So I had this "Just Chicken-Teriyaki"which was sliced cooked breast meat with subtle teriyaki flavoring. I added lime lime juice and heated it in a pan, making sure not really dry it out - I was merely reheating and adding moisture and additional flavor. I am a firm believer in adding acid to your dishes to brighten and enhance. I like to always have lemons, limes and oranges handy. They work wonders and with very little effort!

To serve along with the chicken, I once again turned to Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop for inspiration - Sesame Broccoli. I've included the recipe below.

I used canola oil in place of peanut oil and used just a smidge less oil than the recipe called for, all in the name of lowering calories. But it really doesn't have that much oil in it and it makes a big ole pile of yummy broccoli!

Sesame Broccoli

from Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop

1 tablespoon sesame seeds
1/2 cup chicken stock (or vegetable stock)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 1/4 peanut oil
1 pound broccoli florets, rinsed, patted dry, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

Toast the sesame seeds by first heating a small, stick-free sauté pan on medium heat. Add the sesame seeds and jiggle the pan so they spread out in a single layer. Let them cook until lightly browned, stirring occasionally, about 3-5 minutes. Do not walk away from them while cooking, as once they start to brown they can easily burn. Once lightly toasted remove from heat and put into a small bowl, set aside.

Mix the stock, soy sauce, and toasted sesame oil together in a small bowl, set aside.

Heat 1 tablespoon of peanut oil in a large, covered sauté pan on medium high heat. Add the broccoli florets, stir to coat the florets with the oil, Sauté for about a minute. Clear a space in the middle of the broccoli and add the ginger and garlic. Add a little more oil to the ginger and garlic (about a teaspoon) and sauté for half a minute, stirring just the garlic and ginger, until fragrant. Then stir the garlic and ginger in with the broccoli.

Add the chicken (or vegetable) stock mixture to the pan. Bring to a simmer, reduce the heat and cover. Let cook for 2-3 minutes, until broccoli is still firm, but can be pierced with a fork. Remove from heat. Remove broccoli with a slotted spoon to a bowl. Return pan to heat, increase heat to high and boil down the liquid until just a couple tablespoons remain. Turn off heat, return broccoli to the pan, add the toasted sesame seeds, toss with the liquid. Put into a serving bowl.