Poached salmon with peas and mushrooms

I sat on this for a few days because I wasn't sure how it would go over. I'm still not sure, but I think it's important enough that I'm just going to bring it up and see how you guys respond.

I'm pretty happy with how we've started off the year of food. I mean, we're still at the very end of vacation, and have eaten a bit of restaurant food already, but I'm okay with that. We don't do resolutions at our house. I'm not going to beat myself up for eating a dosa. Everything is fine. And when I actually started cooking myself new year's food, my brain and body wanted poached fish. So I made poached fish.

Man, could I be more defensive? Probably.

I tend to stay away from discussing this kind of thing because I find it horrifying that anyone should be smacked around by perceptions of female beauty. I myself have largely escaped this type of body issue. How did that happen? I think it was a convenient confluence: I met traditional beauty standards while not really caring what other people thought. But it's unhappily clear that I am an infrequent exception to the norm when I discover foodblog posts about following certain diets, or self-consciously targeting exercise to a particular body area, or overcoming eating disorders that should never have had to occur in the first place. January is a particularly bad time for this, with page upon page of new year's resolutions outlining how this year the author will Be Good and Eat Healthy, too often with a galloping subtext of self-hatred and dysmorphia. I especially don't like how I notice myself also edging into self-judgement after reading these things, even when I actually think what I'm eating is healthy and normal.

No one should have to deal with body hatred, especially in conjunction with food--something that should be joyful and amazing. Obviously a simple statement like that is not going to suddenly change things, though. The situation is far too problematic. So I don't quite know where to go, or if I'm even qualified to open a discussion, and I REALLY don't want to alienate anyone or exacerbate the problem in any way. But I also think the subject is too important to ignore.

I think the best thing for me to do is to acknowledge the situation here, but also to continue simply presenting cooking and eating food as an approachable, delicious, and normal experience. That's how I normally see food, and that's how I hope others can see it too. So that's what I'm going to do.

I made poached salmon and vegetables because I wanted poached salmon and vegetables. They were really good.

Poached salmon with peas and mushrooms

filet of salmon
water
bay leaf
butter/olive oil
shallot
mushrooms
peas
dry vermouth
salt & pepper
parsley & lemon to garnish

Fill a small saute pan with about an inch to an inch and a half of water--enough to cover your piece of salmon. Add a bay leaf and a generous sprinkle of salt, and bring the pan to a boil. Slide in your fish, reduce the heat to simmer, lid the pan, and poach for about five minutes, or until done to your taste. The timing will depend on the filet's thickness.

In the meantime, slice up a shallot and a big handful of mushrooms. In another saute pan, melt a chunk of butter or warm some oil. Add the shallot and saute for a minute or two, until softened, before adding the mushrooms. Season with salt and maybe a little paprika. Cook over fairly high heat, shaking or stirring frequently,

When your mushrooms have exuded all their liquid and begun to brown a bit, tip in a bunch of frozen peas. Add a splash of water and dry vermouth, stirring to deglaze. Now put the lid on the pan, turn the heat down to medium, and let the peas steam for a few minutes. Season with salt and pepper to finish.

To serve, pour your peas and mushrooms onto a plate. Top with your finished salmon. Quickly deglaze the pea and mushroom pan with a pat of butter. Pour the melted butter over your fish and top with chopped parsley and a grind of salt and pepper. If you want a squeeze of lemon, now is the time.

Eat.

Isn't it great?

Make the full transition

So I've been having a hard time getting back into the rhythm of cooking since we moved. That's probably pretty clear. Much of the problem stems from our location, or maybe I should say our location plus sun. There are a few small groceries in easy distance, but they're inconsistent. The real stores are a short bike ride away, but I have yet to establish a particular behavior pattern so as to make that ride a normal occurrence. This means our supplies are always low. Clearly, establishing better shopping habits is the best strategy; once we have good, consistent supplies, things will be way easier.

In the meantime, I've been going to the farmer's market (which I will clearly continue to do) and getting...just fruit and vegetables. No eggs, no meat, no milk, no cheese. We have and make lots of beans and grains, so that's good. I get bread, but since it comes from an actual bakery, said bread is not long for the world. So I've mostly been trying to live on...vegetables. It's like the terrible strategy everyone's great-aunt Edna adopts when their vegetarian or vegan grandnieces and nephews come to visit. "I know you really like vegetables." That. Of course I like vegetables, but they aren't an actual full dinner. I know better than this; what am I doing?

Right! So this has to stop.

Strategy:
1. Establish regular biking to store/food shopping routine.
2. Brainstorm delicious food not made solely from vegetables.
3. Brainstorm delicious food based around something other than beans. I love bean-based soups and pastas, but it's JULY. I love black bean quesadillas, but there have been a damn sight too many around lately, and on crap tortillas besides.
3a. Establish decent tortilla source.
4. Establish good backlog of staples of all kinds, not just beans and grains. Flour would be good, for instance.
5. Establish good backlog of food that's easy to just throw in a pan for five minutes and then eat instantly.


Key items to make, freeze, and keep for easy consumption:

- Burritos. I've had a terrible and fairly gross craving for those huge orange bags of frozen burritos, but it would clearly be better to make a huge and awesome batch of refried beans, a batch of rice/barley/quinoa, and some sort of exciting salsa featuring many farmer's market tomatoes, peppers, and onions. Then I would play "how many tortillas can I stuff and freeze without eating them?" until I ran out of supplies.

- Pizza. Though this would clearly be best with homemade sourdough-starter crust, I 1. do not currently have a starter (though now is the best time to start one since it's hot!) and 2. am not entirely sure how an unbaked/partially baked sourdough crust would hold up in the freezer anyway. Hmm. So, with that in mind, I want to make a batch of dough of some kind, roll it into smallish and individual pizzas, and cover each of them with everything in the world. I would totally do the potato-rosemary-garlic pizza, the massive amounts of black olives-artichoke hearts-red pepper pizza, the easy and awesome margherita pizza, the straight up onion-green pepper pizza. I would even make some plain ones with just sauce and cheese. We love pizza and yet have just moved from NYC to California. This is a required project.

- Black bean and/or lentil burgers. These can go any which way depending on what we have in the house, but they're essentially cooked beans or legumes mixed with a cooked grain of some type and some chopped onion/garlic/hot pepper. I totally wing the proportions, which is not exactly the best way to go for consistency of texture/etc, but whatever. Prebaked and frozen, they are exactly what you want to eat with mustard and barbecue sauce and a hunk of lettuce on a big chunk of decent bread. On a similar note, I should also make lentil kibbeh: more or less the same deal, only differently shaped and with more added spices for random snacking with yogurt or baba.

- Soup. It's too hot for this now, but the big pot of chili in the freezer has consistently been the best idea ever, and will continue as such in the future.


OKAY.

What's wrong with this picture?

How do people eat this proportion of meat to everything else?

How can a person possibly plate themselves FOUR pieces of turkey, one of which is a gargantuan leg, vs a tablespoon of cranberry sauce and two of stuffing?

Why is this being presented by a major food magazine as the correct way to celebrate?

Seriously, we aren't having turkey for thanksgiving. We rarely do, since we rarely see relatives on thanksgiving, and what's the point of making even a big breast of turkey for one vegetarian and one omnivore who only eats meat maybe once a week? I'm not going to eat leftover turkey sandwiches afterward. Maybe I'll make some kind of grain salad and black bean or squash soup and garlic sauteed winter greens to stick in the middle of our bowls. Maybe we'll bake a baguette and eat cheese and olives and pears. There won't be any meat at all, let alone a gargantuan misproportion of turkey.

Here is the actual plan:

- crackers, havarti with dill, goat cheese
- a huge sweet potato cooked somehow, but I'm not sure how yet
- purple farmer's market kale sauteed with garlic
- spinach salad with roasted kabocha squash, pecans, maybe dried cranberries
- spicy black bean and butternut squash soup, or some variation
- a pie of some sort, pref. apple, possibly apple/pear if we don't eat the pears with cheese
- a variety of red wine
- Bulleit bourbon

We'll see how much of that actually happens.

I also want to do something with the tiny squeaky head of savoy cabbage I got for a dollar at the farmer's market, but I'm not sure what to do. It may end up sitting around until Friday being sufficiently squeaky and cute to earn its room and board.