Weekday Rice Bowl

 One of the bounties of the Santa Monica Farmers' Market was the availability of fresh ginger root, possibly the best ginger I have ever had. I began hashing together some ginger based sauces and came up with this for a weekday meal:

one inch ginger, thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, microplaned

3 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp fish sauce

(You can double this recipe easily and store it, which is a nice way to save some labor for a meal next week).

If I am cooking salmon, then I sous vide up three fillets at 110 degrees for forty minutes (if frozen), and then carefully remove them and let them soak in the marinade. If doing mushrooms, then I presoak the mushrooms in the marinade. In either case, reserve the marinade as a sauce for the bowl.

Optional: add green onions, quartered or thinly sliced

Optional: sous vide some soft boiled eggs (8.5 minutes@194). This can be done up in advance, of course, but I find it a good protein for a vegetarian rice bowl.

While the cooking is happening, 

prepare a vegetable in the steamer. Get it ready to go. 

Get the rice ready to go, and then set them to be done all at the same time.

Chop up an avocado

If salmon, I typically dry the fillets and cook them at high heat to crisp up the skin. If mushrooms then, just strain out the marinade and cook.

Once the rice is ready, spoon into bowls, add the mushrooms or salmon (skin side up), cut the egg in half (vertically). Add the chopped avocado. Top with Bonito Flakes, sriracha mayo,  and the sauce.

I typically serve this with steamed bok choi, on the side. 

 

Swordfish Sous Vide

One swordfish half can typically be turned into three or four steaks. For a quick weeknight meal, here's my preparation:

For the marinade and sauce:

3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp mirin
3/4 in. ginger piece
garlic clove

microplane the ginger and garlic into the mixture. I typically do this sauce up on the weekend while doing bulk food prep, but it only takes a few minutes.

Cut swordfish, bag it with the sauce, and let it marinate for at least fifteen minutes. Meanwhile,

• Fill pot of water and heat to 128 degrees.
• Toast sesame seeds. 
• Set aside and let the saucier pan cool. 
• Measure out 1 cup of medium or short grained sushi-style rice, prepare 1 1/4 cups water
• Snap the stalks from asparagus, put on a cookie sheet, prep with olive oil, salt and pepper
• heat oven to 425 degrees (you can broil them in the summer time when you don't want to heat up the interior)

Add swordfish, with marinade, to the water when it is properly heated and cook for thirty minutes.

After ten minutes, put asparagus into the oven.

After twenty minutes, start rice.

In saucier, prepare 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp plain rice vinegar, 1/2 tsp salt. Stir and cook until combined. Set aside.

When swordfish is finished, remove, and pat dry. Put sauce into a small saucepan and prepare to reduce on the stove.

Heat an iron skillet, add one pat of butter and a touch of olive oil, and sear the swordfish for thirty seconds on each side.

Plate the suckers. Then add the asparagus. Then add the rice, after coating it with the vinegar mixture. Drizzle sauce on the fish. DONE.

Paella

I adapted a New York Times recipe for Paella that worked quite well. I chopped up half a big onion, four garlic cloves, a load of green beans, leftover red pepper, and two Tappy's Heritage tomatoes, after seeding and pulping.

I simmered 4 cups of chicken stock to get it warm (since my stock sits in the freezer, this would have been necessary no matter what.

In the dutch oven, I warmed oil and then sauteed the onion. After five minutes, I added garlic, peppers, and salt and cooked for a couple of minutes before adding 1 Tablespoon of tomato paste and 1 Teaspoon of sweet paprika. After blending, I added the rice and blended it in.

After a couple of minutes of cooking the rice grains, I added the tomatoes, which included the quartered Tappy's heritage and a couple of handfuls of cabernet grape tomatoes. Then cooked for about five minutes.

Time to add stock. I brought it to a boil, dropped it to a simmer, and cooked it for fifteen minutes or so, until the stock had evaporated.

I used jasmine rice, which is what we had. It's a medium grain, so it worked fine.