Stirfry, Low Sodium Version

Regular soy sauce is pretty much off limits for me now, and recently a Facebook friend sent me the link to a low sodium soy sauce replacement she used herself as she requires a low sodium diet, too.  I made it yesterday for the first time, and it was OK.  Granted, I didn't have one of the ingredients; I had to substitute vinegars. The original recipe calls for red wine vinegar but I subbed with malt because that's what I had on hand.  The flavour was OK, and seemed like it would go well with beef.  This afternoon, after my obligatory 30 minutes of exercise - walking to the grocery store - I got some stirfry ingredients and made a beef and broccoli stirfry for dinner with the new sauce.

Before I get much further, here is the recipe for the sauce.

For the stirfry, I used a whole recipe of the sauce and added a heaping teaspoon of cornstarch to thicken it before throwing it in the wok.

The end result:

Well, it was different, that's for sure.  I'm going to make the sauce again for sure, but I am going to use red wine vinegar, which I picked up this afternoon, and I'm probably going to adjust the molasses amount because this was a bit too sweet.  But it's got potential for sure, and it was definitely low in sodium.

Thanks to Pale of A Creative Revolution for the sauce recipe!

I'm Back!

So, where have I been and what have I been up to?  Well that's a long story.  The short story is that in Feb. I had a major health issue rear up before me - I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy and heart failure.  As a result, I have to be on a low sodium diet and also I must restrict my fluids to 1.5-2L of fluid per day.  Easier said than done!

I have to convalesce from this for a while - I was in hospital for a month. I am bored, and I need a hobby.  Why take up something new when something I've had previously fill my recovery time with is right here, waiting to be revived?  Yep, I'm going to attempt to get back into food blogging.  Plus I have a new added dimension: low sodium cooking.

So far, I haven't enjoyed low sodium eating.  No salt = no flavour, right?  Well, pretty much!  I have recently become more obsessed with food labeling than usual, and I've had to make some pretty significant adjustments.  No salt also = no chips.  Ugh!  I have not had a potato chip in nearly two whole months!

Yesterday I ate out and had a case of the food fuck-its.  I gained 2lbs.  Today, I went to the grocery store and got some low sodium pantry items, feeling a little bit defeated.  I thought I could do low sodium my way, without any big substitutions.  But I was wrong.  My daily intake of salt should be no more than 2mg, which is about a teaspoon.  Dear God, how am I going to live with this?

Roast beef, seasoned with Costco's Mrs. Dash knockoff.

Tonight I made a low sodium meal with some of my new ingredients: roast beef and roast potatoes.  I don't know exactly how much sodium was in this meal, but the only ingredients that contained sodium were the packet of low sodium beef boullion (25% less salt than the regular stuff) which I cooked the roast in, and the 1/2 teaspoon of Club House's Garlic Plus seasoning mix I put on the potatoes (55mg/serving).  I seasoned the beef with Costco's brand of salt free seasoning, which wasn't bad at all. I sprinkled the dinner with Windsor's Salt Free "salt."

What a waste of $3.49!  The Salt Free = flavour free!  I also had the saltless salt on popcorn earlier today and though I thought I gave the stuff a decent shake over the popcorn, I didn't taste any saltiness.

The dinner as a whole, though, was quite palatable.  I have enough for leftovers and a few sandwiches.

 Man, this is going to be a long road.

Low sodium roast beef with roast potatoes.

Where are the veggies you ask?  Hmph!  I bought a salad kit the other day but it's gone off already.  Whatever!

Quick Beef Bulgogi

I've bookmarked a lot of recipes from the April 2012 issue of Canadian Living, and this is one of them. This is my first foray into Korean food, which is not a good thing living where I do. I should be way more adventurous and go off to a Korean restaurant and really try the food. I've been hesitant, though, because I once asked a friend who'd eaten Korean what it was like and she said one word, "fiery." OK, that put me off because "fiery" to me is not a good thing. I like a bit of kick, but certainly nothing anywhere approaching "fiery."

This recipe appealed to me because the ingredients were simple and there was no fieriness in it to be found. One thing I substituted out was the mirin for saké. I don't have mirin on hand but I always have saké around because lots of Kylie Kwong's recipes call for it.

The original recipe is HERE.

I have to say, this was a bit on the flavourless side. I let it marinate for an hour, but it seemed like little of the marinade stuck to the beef to flavour it. In theory, this should have been tasty. Was it the saké substitute? Would the mirin have packed more punch? I don't know. But, next time I might try saving the marinade and thickening it with cornstarch to retain some flavour.

I accompanied the dish with Kylie's Bok Choy with Oyster Sauce.

Solstice Dinner, Part 2, and Christmas Eve Dinner

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays this fine Boxing Day morning, and that you are all not too hung over from last night's festivities! I am just relieved this trying time in my life is over and that life can now return to normal.

Which includes posting here!

Let me just briefly finish my round-up of the Solstice meal I served on Monday (though the dessert will be Monday's Magazine Monday post so, really, I'm only covering the side dishes right now).

So, in addition to the sausage-stuff, bacon-latticed pork loin roast I served, I made three sides.

One was very simple, and that was steamed yellow beans from my garden, which I took the time to blanch and freeze immediately after picking in August. I was a little concerned about how they would turn out because when I removed them from the freezer, they looked odd...Not freezer burnt, but kind of translucent and splotchy. But, they steamed up just fine and were great!

I also made the same Brussels sprouts recipe I used last year. You can see that here. Really simple dish, even if slicing all the sprouts is a pain in the ass. Instead of the pine nuts, though, I used some of the pecans that came in the package from Jodi, and let me tell you, they totally elevated this dish to a new level! And once again, when I added these to the heat of the pan, they had an out-of-this-world aroma! Brilliant!
And then, finally, everyone's favourite, the Caramelized Onion & Brie Bread Pudding. Again, this was a smashing hit. I think a lot of people get potatoed-out over the holidays, and this is a great idea for a starch in your meal. In addition to using brie, and party because of the exorbitant cost of brie in these parts, I had a bunch of mozzarella left over from the pork loin, so I cubed it up and put it in, too. It was awesome and everyone was really happy with it.

So, apart from dessert, which as I said I'll post about on Monday, that's a wrap for Solstice 2009!
Now, onto Christmas Eve, which happens to be my father's birthday. We always have a big family get-together for this and my SIL does most of the cooking. Usually, Dad gets his favourite, steak & kidney pie, which is quite disgusting. This year, though, Shan decided to make another of Dad's perennial favourites, Beef Wellington.

But before we get to the main course, let's talk about the appies! Because we always have appies! First of all, Shan's aunt brought some West Coast prawns her brother had caught himself over the summer. These were to die for! There is absolutely no comparison between these prawns and the ones you buy frozen at the grocery store. They taste way richer, for one thing, and they have a much more tender texture and a more subtle colour. In the dish Shan's aunt brought, she paired the prawns with a sour cream mixture, cocktail sauce, and then topped with the prawns. We ate this with crackers and it was so good! Shan's aunt also makes a wonderful crab dip that has sambal olek in it. It was gone very quickly, I can tell you that. And finally, because my dad doesn't touch seafood with a 10-foot pole, Shan made him some stuffed mushroom cups, which were also excellent.
So, if you don't know what Beef Wellington is, basically, it's fillet mignon wrapped in puff pastry with shallots & mushrooms. Shan added gorgonzola this time, though not for me as I cannot stand moldy cheese. She did an outstanding job and everyone in attendance was thrilled to bits.For side dishes, we had steamed asparagus and green beans, salad, roasted butternut squash, and a risotto made with aged Asiago cheese.
This was a meal you'd pay a lot of money for in a restaurant, let me tell you! It was incredibly impressive. Thanks to Shan for all your hard work!

And yes, there was dessert. But that deserves a post of it's own, so you'll have to be patient with me!

Family Dinner

Sometimes it's just so nice to have someone cook a meal for you! Last weekend, me, my dad, my brother, and my SIL got together for a family dinner - something we hadn't done in a while because of everyone's hectic schedules.

Dad provided the steaks, and my brother, Jem, marinated them in Worcestershire Sauce, balsamic vinegar, and some steak spice. Then he threw them on the BBQ.We had some company, the neighbour's toy chihuahua, Lilly. She is half the size of Juno and very cuddly!

As the steaks cooked, my SIL made stuffed potato skins, using bacon bits, green onion, tomatoes, and cheese.We also had a salad with dinner - and it was one excellent meal! Everything was wonderful!

And for dessert, there was a leftover blueberry dessert made by Shan's aunt - light and a perfect ending to a great meal!

Beef Stew & Biscuits, Commercial Style

Here are some shots I took at work the other week, when beef stew & biscuits were on the menu. I'm not a fan of beef stew, but this looked really good & smelled just great. My shift ends before dinner, so I didn't get to sample it, but the residents, I heard were happy. The biscuits, which I made, turned out great! Dessert was provided by one of the residents, who spent the morning making homemade apple pie for everyone.

First, the cook started off using the grill to brown about half a cow's worth of stewing meat.

Meanwhile, potatoes & turnips get par-cooked.

The cook chopped up onions, celery, & carrots, then added them, along with the potatoes & turnips, to a big pan with the beef.

Some gravy (Bisto) gets going...

The gravy gets added to everything in the pan...

And we get this...

...And this...Then the whole thing gets covered with foil and put in the oven at 250F for 4 or so hours...And here are my biscuits (recipe here, minus the dill & cheddar):
And here are the gorgeous apple pies that resident made for dessert!

A great meal!

Cooking with Kylie: Stir-Fried Beef with Oyster Sauce

After having lackluster results with Kylie's recipes using the cooking sherry I'd purchased since I can't find shao hsing wine around here in the boonies, I consulted with Palidor of Crazy Asian Gal about what I could use in the sherry's place. She suggested saké. Today, with the last remaining few bucks in my food budget, I strode into the local well-used government-controlled liquor store and asked where the saké was located. The helpful clerk showed me and there was a selection of exactly one saké, priced at $10.80. I hesitated momentarily, because there was a bottle of sherry on the shelf next door for half the price, but it wasn't dry and I wasn't sure it would be suitable.

In the evening, I made Kylie's Stir-Fried Beef with Oyster Sauce.

Oh, what a difference! This dish really popped, and it was much more complexly flavoured than the previous two recipes I've made using the sherry in place of the shao hsing wine! It was simply delicious.

I'm really enjoying cooking from this book; the recipes are easy to put together, simple as the title suggests, and the dishes aren't bogged down with heavy sauces like the food found in Western Chinese restaurants.

Another winner from Kylie! And now that I have the saké, I feel like going back & making the previous two dishes to see what they taste like. All in good time!

Cooking With Kylie: Mongolian Beef

So, at the local overpriced grocery store the other day, this coyote came upon a screaming deal: 1.5kg local, organic, lean ground beef for $7.50. It was my lucky day! I picked up and brought it home, packaging it up and freezing it. I had a half pound portion, and decided to make this recipe by Kylie Kwong that I'd bookmarked when I got my copy of Simple Chinese Cooking.

I present to you Mongolian Beef!

I made a half recipe, and instead of using cabbage I bought a package of coleslaw mix, which is one of my stir-frying allies. I love it!

Now, the cookbook recipe calls for shao hsing wine and I notice that the recipe on the web site has changed it to rice wine. I had neither. When I got the cookbook, I looked everywhere I could in this one horse district for shao hsing wine but to no avail. The cookbook says you can substitute the wine for dry sherry, but I am too cheap to do that, so I bought a bottle of cooking sherry from the local inexpensive but butt-ugly big box grocery store. I have no idea how the flavours compare, but we do what we can, right?

The verdict: great recipe! Simple, as you might expect. I didn't do the step of combining the cabbage with the salt because I was lazy, and perhaps I'd have had a more complexly flavoured dish, but still, I wasn't disappointed. Thank you, Kylie!

Brisket Sammie

Have you seen this Quizno's ad for their Toasty Torpedo sandwich? If not, I highly encourage you to take 30 seconds out of your life to do so! It's one of the most brilliant pieces of food advertising I think I've ever seen.



I have yet to make it to a Quizno's to have a Toasty Torpedo: the nearest one is in Castlegar and a half-hour drive away, and if you're going to go all the way out there, you might as well just go to Chopsticks.

Anyway, who says you can't have a homemade version of the Toasty Torpedo? I used some of my brisket leftover from the other night and made myself a pretty fancy sammie last night, with sauteed onions & mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese. I had plenty of the pomegranate sauce left over, so I dipped the sandwich in that. I toasted it all up under the broiler, and voila!
Pretty nice, eh? Thank God for toaster ovens that don't heat up the kitchen like...an oven.

Apparently the heat is supposed to break on Wednesday. I hope I survive until then!

Tackling Brisket

Having been inspired by several bloggers, most recently Bob of the amazing bacon-wrapped brisket, to give making beef brisket a go, I finally got around to it yesterday. I went to the local overpriced grocery store and asked the butcher if I could have a hunk of brisket. After debating how much I wanted, I decided on 3lbs or so - just enough for one person to do a bit of an experiment. For $9.54 I got a whack of brisket and I was on my way.

So, remember the POM freebies (or almost freebies) I got? Well, this was the big experiment. I wanted to combine the brisket with the POM. Dave of My Year on the Grill posted a great BBQ sauce made from pomegranate juice that looked really good, but I couldn't find one of the key ingredients. So, I decided on a marinade instead.

Now, I was a little intimidated by the brisket. Bob advised "low & slow" but didn't specify how low or how slow. Dave had a lot of advice for me, however, and also provided me with a great link to a page with lots of great info on BBQing brisket.

I realized I might have an issue. I have access to a BBQ, obviously, but it isn't very fancy or big and it doesn't have very fine temperature controls. It doesn't even have a thermometer. I needed a temperature of about 225F and I really had to guess at it.

But before I get ahead of myself, here is the marinade recipe I whipped up. This was purely something I made on spec, and it took a lot of tweaking before I got a flavour I was happy with.

POM Pomegranate Juice Marinade

1 cup pomegranate juice
juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp grated ginger
1/2 tsp ground pepper
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp garlic powder
3 tbsp soy sauce

Combine ingredients in a large freezer bag. Mush around. Add brisket. Put in fridge for a few hours.

OK, onto the BBQing process. Low & slow, right? So, I started the BBQ and put only one half of the element on, and set it as low as I could get it. I put the brisket on some foil on the other, non-lit side of the BBQ, and let her rip. Well, no, not "rip." Keeping "low & slow" in mind, and bearing in mind the advice dispensed by both Dave and the site he mentioned, I was looking at about 1 hour 15 mins./pound of brisket. I was worried about getting a tough, chewy, inedible piece of leather-like meat. I put the brisket on at about 5pm, and at about 6pm, I basted it with the marinade a bit. This is what it looked like at that point:Hm...Looked to me like it was cooking a tad too fast for my liking. So, I got out my fancy-wancy thermometer with probe and stuck it the thickest part. It was 158F. I was going for 180F. I set my thermometer to beep when the temperature reached t 180, put the lid back down, and waited.The beeping stared at about 6:45, so the brisket took about 1 hour 45 minutes to BBQ. After removing it from the BBQ, I let it rest about 20 minutes, while I made a sauce from the leftover marinade, before slicing it thinly. Here is the end result!I would have preferred it slightly rarer, but whatever. And it was so juicy...It could have been more tender, but it was by no means the chewy nightmare I was worried about. The meat was really nicely flavoured, lean, and just plain delicious! The marinade, which I turned into a reduction, was really amazing, too. My dad came over to help me eat it, and he was really impressed. I served the brisket with a green salad and some of my homemade hamburger buns. I even made a POM vinagrette, but that's a post for another time!So, now I have enough leftover brisket and sauce to keep me in beef dips for many days - woo-hoo!

Thanks to Bob and Dave for all the help!

Family Dinner

Last night I went over to my brother and SIL's place for dinner with my dad. Dad donated a roast of beef that Shan BBQed, and it was fabulous! We also had a variety of other stuff, too.

Here is the roast of beef on the BBQ. Shan made a spice rub for it, and a homemade BBQ sauce. She started the roast off at a higher temperature, then brought the temperature way down to slow roast it.

She also somehow stuffed the beef with whole cloves of garlic - yum!

For an appy, Shan sauteed edamame in garlic, six spice mix, sea salt, and a bit of soy sauce. It was awesome!
Shan makes wicked salads...
And we had some grilled veggies...

There were also some potatoes with fresh dill & sour cream. Here is my dinner...

For dessert, I brought a selection of cookies I've made recently and frozen, including these, these, and these. There was also ice cream with Shan's homemade caramel sauce, which is just to die for!

Awesome dinner, and I came home with a pile of left-over roast beef, so I'm set for sandwiches for a while now!

Braised Roast Beast

For some reason, I was recently craving roast beast. This is not normal for me. Roast beast is OK, but not something I'd go out of my way to make for myself. Also, I was becoming nostalgic for a dish my mom used to make when we were young: Swiss Steak. (I always confuse Swiss Steak with Salisbury Steak, even though the two are totally different. I have no idea why, since my mom never made Salisbury Steak.)

Anyway, I found a small roast at the local overpriced grocery store on the weekend, an inside round roast weighing approximately .75kg that cost me just over $6.50. This is what I did with it.

First of all, I seasoned it.

Then, I seared it on all sides in my cast iron pot with a tiny bit of oil.

While the roast beast seared, I gathered these ingredients:

After the beast was nice and seared, I removed it from the pot and deglazed the pot with the tomatoes. I added the onion, garlic (sliced), and other ingredients and brought it to a boil. I added the beast back to the pot, and stuck the whole thing in a pre-heated, 350F oven, for about 40 minutes (I like my beast still pink in the middle). After that time, I got this:
I let the beast rest, then took it out and sliced it. I served the meal over rice.
This was excellent, and very much reminiscent of my mom's Swiss Steak. I'll definitely do roast beast this way again! And bonus - it was all done in one pot, so the clean-up was simple!

Magazine Monday #16: Unstuffed Sweet & Sour Cabbage

I know this is going to sound strange, but one of my favourite vegetables is...wait for it...cabbage. I am not kidding. I put it in soup a lot since it freezes well, I put it in stirfrys, and I often slice it thinly and steam it as a side dish, served with a spot of butter and some salt & pepper. Yeah, it makes you emit gaseous clouds, but I don't care about that. Cabbage is also cheap, and the combination of the arrival of the November 2008 issue of Gourmet and a sale on cabbage at my local overpriced grocery store (33 cents/lb) inspired me to make this week's Magazine Monday contribution.

The recipe can be found here.

I was a little skeptical of this recipe at first, because it seemed to contain some odd pairings: red wine vinegar, cranberries, brown sugar. But, as I tasted the sauce, I was impressed at the bright, bold flavours. This was a great meal, very hearty and reminiscent of cabbage rolls, something I love (my mom's were the best). It's also a really economical meal, and now I have leftovers for most of this week. You can't go wrong with that.