 Simple Salmon with Roasted Vegetables This is a simple weeknight meal that we’ve made a couple of times in the past few weeks. It’s flexible, easy, and since most of the time for this recipe is the cooking time, which is largely unattended, it’s the perfect dish for busy nights when you need to do some work or house cleaning (or baseball game watching) while dinner cooks.
A few words about the ingredients for this dish. The must-haves are the salmon, the olive oil, and the cherry tomatoes. Everything else is optional and you should feel free to add other vegetables depending on your preferences. Do you like roasted beets? Add them (but be prepared for a very reddish dish). Hate fennel? Leave it out. Carrots, potatoes, turnips, parsnips, rutabagas, garlic… all good. You could probably even make this dish with extra firm tofu instead of salmon. This dish takes about 10 minutes of active work and 40 minutes for cooking. It’s a one dish, one spoon, and one knife meal, making cleanup a breeze.
Continue reading Salmon with Roasted Vegetables
 Bean Salad with Roasted Vegetables Even though we both love meat, we have our share of meatless meals. Since we workout so much though, and since John’s diabetic, we have to make sure those meatless meals have a significant amount of protein in them. One of the ways we do this is with liberal use of dried beans. We get our dried beans from either Alvarez Farms, Alm Hill Gardens, or Stoney Plains. Alvarez, in particular, has a wide variety of beans nearly every week. We love picking up chickpeas and making our Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and we regularly cook up some black beans with some pancetta and rosemary.
When thinking about what we could make for our cooking demo at Queen Anne Farmers Market, we wanted something with beans for several reasons. First, I think beans often get overlooked. They aren’t glamorous and on’t have a tremendous amount of flavor on their own. Not to mention there’s the time they require. You’ve got to soak them overnight and only then can you cook them. Second, we wanted to make a dish that was vegetarian. You never know when you’re cooking for a crowd how many people will be vegetarian or vegan.
Continue reading White Bean Salad with Roasted Tomatoes and Fennel
 We’re doing a lot of running these days, as we march towards a goal of 2 and a half marathons this year. In order to that, we need fuel. Protein, carbs, we need fuel.
One of the foods that are really going to help us out are lentils. High in protein, high in carbohydrates but they take on the flavors you cook them with, so they don’t have to taste taste healthy. But they are. Well, unless you cook it with a pound of bacon and then deep fry it.
Lentils are a legume, plentifully grown here in the Pacific Northwest, and readily available in the bulk bins in the grocery stores. As you’ll see, they are really easy to cook with… But, while we’re talking about that, let’s talk about cookbooks. Continue reading Green Lentils (With a Pan Cooked Halibut Afterthought)
 Spot Prawn and Asparagus Risotto
Sometimes I really second guess my cooking chops. Until I found myself with both spot prawns and asparagus in the fridge, I had no idea that shrimp and asparagus risotto was such a common dish. But apparently it is. I can count at least three cookbooks in our collection that feature a variation of this recipe and dozens of pages of recipes online. I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised. Asparagus pairs nicely with Parmesan cheese, a common ingredient in risottos and prawns have a round, rich, sweet flavor which should be perfect with the creamy risotto. So why not?
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 A Valentine's Day Dinner So, we’ve touched upon a side dish but, since the main course requires a little work before the weekend, let’s talk about the short ribs and the braise.
Like I had said, I wanted to not only show you how to make some dishes, but also teach you a bit about how to cook in general.
Yesterday’s Brussels sprouts dish taught you how to sauté, where you cook something in a little bit of oil and keep it hopping in the pan.
Today, we’re going to look at braising.
Braising is a method of cooking where food is first seared (hey, two things learned in one recipe) in a dry pan and then cooked in a liquid, generally with a fairly tight cover.
Now, this dish is going to end up taking you a few days to cook and we’ll talk about that below. But, assuming we’re cooking on Sunday, you’re going to want to start this dish on Thursday (Friday at the absolute latest), so lets get cracking, shall we?
Continue reading Short Ribs Braised in Porter Ale with Maple-Rosemary Glaze
 - Sweet Potato Chorizo Mole
Going meatless, or nearly meatless is the thing to do these days. Not only is it healthy to get lots of fruits and vegetables in your life, but eating less meat can help the environment as well. You see, CAFOs (confined or concentrated animal feeding operations) are not only horrible for the animals, they are horrible for the environment as well. I won’t go into detail on this post, because this is after all, a recipe and I hope that you’ll be hungry enough after reading it to actually make the dish, but let’s just say that on average, we eat a lot more meat than we need and a lot more than we used to 50 years ago.
So one of our goals at Cook Local is to find ways to enjoy ethically raised meat in smaller amounts. We love our meat. Heck, we have half a cow in the freezer right now and we’ve been enjoying said cow immensely for lunches in our homemade burritos for the past few weeks along with mass quantities of beans and kale. We’re not vegetarians and we have no plans to be. However, we do believe that for most meals, meat should be the garnish rather than the main dish.
Continue reading Sweet Potato and Chorizo Mole
 Lentils Despite the fact that we have about 180 lbs of beef in our freezer from the half a cow we purchased from Olsen Farms, we are actually trying to reduce the amount of meat we eat on a regular basis. We believe that for most meals, the meat should be the flavoring in the dish as opposed to the main ingredient.
However, since Mr. Cook Local is a diabetic, and thus needs a good balance of protein and carbs, we can’t just eliminate meat entirely from our diet or even from one particular meal unless we replace it with another good protein source. Beans are one of our standard protein sources, but legumes like lentils are another good source. Lentils have about 26% of their calories from protein and have a stellar amount of fiber per serving. 3.5 oz of lentils have 60 grams of carbs, 31 grams of fiber, and 26 grams of protein.
Lyall Farms has had the most gorgeous sweet potatoes this winter and so last week we picked up a few without having any idea what we were going to do with them. After a little web research that revealed several different variations of sweet potato and lentil stew, I pulled a few things out of the fridge and got to work.
Continue reading Sweet Potato and Lentil Soup
 Braised Oxtail It became very obvious to me the other day when having a conversation with another Seattle “foodie”, that I am not a gourmet cook. That’s not to say that I’m not a good cook. I am. We eat good food almost all the time. But is it gourmet? Not really. We take fresh, high quality ingredients and turn them into good, fresh, seasonal, accessible food. Not all of our recipes come out perfectly. And it’s rare that I take a recipe and strive to perfect it over many many iterations. There’s nothing wrong with that philosophy. But it’s not gourmet.
Dumplings? Easy. Delicious. Not gourmet.
Mock Turtle Soup? Nothing really gourmet about that. Meat, veggies, broth, spices.
White bean and kale stuffed delicata? Nothing gourmet here. Just high quality ingredients, mixed well in the right proportions.
Oxtail is one of those ingredients that smacks of gourmet. You just don’t hear of people cooking with oxtail at home very often. Really, there’s no reason for avoiding it. Oxtail is pretty cheap right now, since so few people appreciate it. You can get it for $5-$10/lb, or even cheaper if you shop around (there was a grass-fed meat vendor at the Kirkland Wednesday Market last year who was selling them for $2/lb).
Continue reading Oxtails Braised in Red Wine
 Dumplings A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to be part of a wonderful teaching opportunity. One of the fine folks we’ve met on Twitter invited us (along with a handful of others) over to learn how to make dumplings. This was no ordinary lesson. This was a lesson from a dumpling making master. We learned how to treat the dough, how to pinch off sections with a snap, how to roll them out into perfect circles and lastly, how to stuff and properly pleat them. We each took our turn with the dowel and our turn with the pork stuffing.
Some of the dumplings were beautiful. Perfectly pleated and curved, the plump stuffing looking like it was fit to burst, yet still tucked securely inside the dough. Others were… not. Hey, this was a teaching moment, not an art class. Still, by the end of the night I think each of us had turned out at least one mostly correct dumpling. Armed with this new knowledge, we decided to try making our own at home. Now that we have a chest freezer, and a little more space in our kitchen freezer, we’re trying to cook ahead a bit more and freeze some meals for those nights when we just don’t have the time or the energy to make a fresh meal.
Dumplings are nearly the perfect make ahead food. Roll, stuff, and freeze the dumplings ahead of time and then when you get home, pop the required number of dumplings out of the freezer, boil until they float, and then either eat or throw them in some hot oil and pan fry until crisp. The entire cooking process takes less than 15 minutes and the dumplings are as good as they were when fresh (or very nearly so).
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Sweeten your chicken with pears and rosemary
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree… and Cook Local gives you Chicken braised with Pears and Rosemary.
Finally. The last day of this infernal song. The final day of foul. We’re done with the chicken. We’re actually having turkey for Christmas Dinner, but if I never see poultry again… well, all right. I’m sure I’ll want chicken again in a week or so, especially since I have a Stokesberry Farms chicken in the freezer right now. But after [...]
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