Day 8 of the Food Lover’s Cleanse gave me the opportunity to be successful in cooking potatoes for breakfast. So often I cook them and they still taste raw, yuck. I learned some tricks this morning (peel and boil the potatoes for 5 minutes), and I’m so pleased. Cooking this hash also brought back many happy memories of sitting at the counter at the Homemade Cafe in Berkeley, CA and watching the cooks prepare the home fries. Mmm…
It was sweet potato hash and fried eggs this morning. I was pleased to be able to alter the dish to include more saturated fat, in the form of healthy virgin expeller-pressed coconut oil and grass-fed butter.
The potatoes were seasoned with cinnamon and a little brown sugar. Really good and a nice accompaniment to the fried eggs (topped with chipotle Tabasco). Had some coffee (Stumptown) with raw milk. Was so happy to receive my raw milk yesterday, I can’t even tell you.
Lunch was leftover curried lentil soup with a glass of raw milk. Shortly after that I made a date shake (with raw milk and raw yogurt), which was a great afternoon treat.
Dinner was so, so, so simple: roasted salmon with a grapefruit-avocado salad. Took about 20 minutes to prepare total. Gotta love it.
This sockeye salmon is part of my salmon CSA stash. It continues to be such a taste treat, though with only two filets left I’m starting to feel a little melancholy about its impending absence. So, I was happy to have been able to stretch this last filet for two meals. Gorgeous fatty fish.
As for the salad, again I used mâche for the greens, and put the grapefruit-avocado combo on top, dressed with a shallot vinaigrette. It called for walnut oil, which adds such a good, nutty flavor. I will use walnut oil more often in the future.
Tonight was the first real deal dessert on the menu – trail mix cookies. However, I had a log of korova (aka “world peace”) cookies in the freezer, so I thought why not use them! These are incredible cookies – made with grass-fed butter, organic cocoa, and Scharffenberger bittersweet chocolate. I sliced up a half dozen and baked them tonight, and was reminded just how chocolatey, melt-in-your mouth good they are.
Looking ahead to the coming week, I’m going to have to leave a number of recipes out. As a working person, it’s just not possible for me to make, for instance, soup from scratch at lunch. My hope is that making the full recipe for dinners will allow me to have leftovers the next day. The lunch recipes look good, though, so I plan to make some of them for dinner the following week.
All in all, this first week was highly successful. I learned some new techniques, new flavor combinations, and was introduced to some new ingredients that really thrilled me. Here’s hoping the second week is just as impressive!
That salmon looks amazing. I’d be sad at its completion too! The NW really needs to catch up with the CSA it appears. I have several in my area but they are totally based on produce.
Actually this salmon comes from a separate CSA from my main CSA (Hellgate CSA, which is where I get my veggies, fruit, grains, beans, and a few other things). The salmon comes from the Iliamna Fish Company, and they have two distribution points during the year: Brooklyn, NY and Portland, OR. In 2010 they took orders in June and delivered in August. This was the first time they’d done a CSA, I think, and I sure hope they do it again this year.
This fish was painfully easy to make, too – just put some sea salt and olive oil on it, and cook it in the oven (425 degrees) on a pan skin side down for about 10 minutes. One of the quickest and most nutritious meals I know of! T loves it, too.