Happy End Of The Rash Of Three Day Weekends!

Before I became a parent I do not think I ever could have imagined that I would be grateful for a two day weekend as opposed to a three day weekend. I love my child, and I love getting to spend full days with him, but I am also happy when he gets to go back to school where he has three teachers and 13 classmates who will help fill his inquisitive brain up and answer his myriad questions for at least a few hours.

While Z was at school today I went and picked up our second box of veggies from our new CSA. It was a great bounty this week and was once again chock full of really very useful produce. I also was the immensely fortunate beneficiary of my friend E's "salmon overage"...she purchased one fillet too many at the local farmer's market and passed it along to me. E knows that my little guy can eat salmon three meals a day without hesitation so she knew we would make good use of it. These ingredients were the foundation for a very easy but superbly richly flavored dinner: asian marinated fish, smashed radishes, brown rice and spinach salad with honey miso vinagrette. Sounds involved doesn't it? Well, the truth of it is that the whole dinner took me 35 minutes to prepare and relied heavily on some kitchen staples that we keep around plus a new Trader Joe's find. Let me break it down:

For the fish, I marinated the salmon in Soyaki Sauce for an hour and then baked it at 450 for about 18 minutes. It was divine...like melt in your mouth delicious. I have been a little skeptical about paying more for salmon just to buy it at the Farmer's Market, but I am a full on convert now. That was AMAZING fish...buttery, tender, super flavorful without being fishy. Thanks E!

Because we had only one fillet of the salmon I also cooked up some Trader Joe's Turbot Misoyaki that I found in their freezer section the other day. I am a total sucker for fish prepared with a misoyaki sauce so I figured that we should try it. While it wasn't as good as the Misoyaki dish at Roy's Restaurant in San Francisco, it was pretty darn tasty. My only complaint is that the package only featured directions for cooking the fish in the microwave so I had to figure out how to prepare it in the oven. I ended up removing it from the plastic "dish" it was in and baking it from frozen at 450 for about 25 minutes in a pyrex dish. About halfway through I covered the pan with foil and that significantly sped up the process and also kept the moisture in. Next time I will cover it from the get go!

I also prepared some frozen brown rice, which I just steamed in a basket over boiling water for about 5 minutes.

To round out the meal I whipped up a batch of smashed radishes and a simple salad. I have always wondered what to do with radishes (aside from slice them up for salad or serve them with dip) and this recipe is a superb way to make them fly off the table. It was given to me by my foodie friend J who is managing our CSA. Each week she sends out a few new recipes for some of the more obscure vegetables and this was part of this week's batch. The recipe is as follows:

-20 radishes
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon soy sauce
-1 teaspoon sesame oil
-2 tablespoons vinegar
-1 teaspoon sugar

1. Wash and trim radishes. Lay each on its side, then crush by pounding decisively once or twice with the side of a cleaver or the bottom of a glass. (The radishes should split open, but not break in two.)
2. Sprinkle with salt and let stand 5 to 10 minutes; then drain. Transfer to a bowl.
3. Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and remaining salt. Add to radishes and toss gently. Refrigerate, covered, until ready to serve.

These were REALLY good. You just can't go wrong with that sauce recipe. I think I could put it on cardboard and I would want to eat it!

The salad was dressed with another favorite from our kitchen: Makoto Honey Ginger Dressing. We were introduced to this last year by my Godmother G, who grew up in the same small town that I come from but now lives in Germany. While she was visiting the U.S. we had lunch with her and this was served. It is SO flavorful and good. We were so excited to be able to find it in California, and now our refrigerator is rarely without it. It reminds me of the ginger dressing that you can sometimes get on green salads in sushi restaurants...not creamy, just almost a sweet ginger vinagrette. I end up looking for salad combos to put it on whenever we have it.

I am now finishing up the day with a nice cup of decaf chai and both a chocolate chip cookie and one of my tea-dipping biscuits that I wrote about a few days ago. I had a long hard run this morning so I figure that I am still refueling a little bit!

Before I close out today's entry, Katie M. asked me to elaborate a bit more on how we eat as well as explain the conspicuous absence of tofu in our vegetarian-heavy diet. You are correct that there is not much tofu in our diet Katie...and it has nothing to do with taste...we love tofu! Marinated, baked, sauteed, fried. I could eat tofu almost every say of the week. But the "problem" with tofu is two-pronged. First, a lot of tofu is now made from genetically modified soybeans. There is a lot of debate over whether genetically modifying food is safe or not and whenever there is such a debate over a food I prefer to stay on the more natural side of that argument. There IS plenty of organic and non-GMO tofu out there, so why don't we just stick with that? Well, that has to do with the second issue. Soy is so ubiquitous in the American diet these days, mostly as an additive to other diets, that many people are developing sensitivities to it. There is a whole school of thought that suggests that it is really sub-optimal to over eat any one food, and that doing so can result in an inability to tolerate said food as well. The main foods that fall into this category are dairy, wheat, corn and soy...one or more are in almost everything that is processed! My dear mom brought me up with the belief that it was simply not as healthy to eat the same foods multiple times a day, day in and day out and now as we have been tweaking our diet I find myself adopting that mindset myself.

None of that is to say that we do not eat any tofu around these parts...we certainly do. We also eat edamame and soynut butter. And there are weeks when we have soy products multiple times in a week. But I do make a conscious decision to be aware of both the source and the volume that we consume. At first this was a pretty big pain in the rear...tofu and other soy products are cheap and easy to use in a mostly vegetarian diet. But now I enjoy the challenge that limiting soy provides me with. It really forces me to be a little creative as I look for inexpensive, non-meat heavy meals to make that will provide my family with plenty of good protein.

All that said, soy will be featured in our dinner tomorrow night!

Katie also asked about the guidelines for how we eat. The quick answer is that our diet is pretty similar to the very popular Paleo Diet, but not the same:
-We eat a diet VERY heavy in vegetables: 8 to 10 servings a day. These are all organic and as often as possible they are also local.
-We do not eat much fruit at all. In the summer we will have berries, but for the rest of the year we have very little. We do have bananas, which drive me nuts because they are all imported from far far away, but I haven't been able to break us from the banana in a smoothie habit yet.
-We try to keep the bulk of our foods "whole" meaning that they are minimally processed (save for the chocolate chip cookies, of course.)
-Week by week I am working to make our diet more and more organic. It is a hard, sometimes expensive process, but I am learning little tricks along the way to make it more manageable. (Just today I discovered organic cinnamon in the bulk section at Whole Foods for a fraction of the cost of non-organic jarred cinnamon!)
-The meat, chicken and eggs we buy are all grass-fed, free range, etc. etc. and we eat small portions of animal protein when we do include it in our diet.
-Our grains are whole and organic: whole wheat, brown rice, etc.
-We have little (me) to no (D and Z) caffeine.
-We have very little dairy, and what dairy we do have (mostly in the form of cheese) is free of hormones and organic whenever possible.

We eat the way we eat because:
1. we feel better when we eat this way. We are less achy, better rested, more energetic and can think more clearly without the junk.
2. We really just get grossed out at the thought of putting all the pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and other chemicals in our bodies. Ugh...it just gives me the heebie jeebies if I think about it too much.
3. We think it is important to feed our child the most high quality food possible, both so that he can grow up healthy and strong and so that he can develop a palate for good food.
4. We believe that it is important to support local farmers and to not contribute to the environmentally harmful side effects of practices such as covering millions of acres with potent chemicals that may eventually end up in our oceans and drinking water, shipping foods long distances (about those bananas...) and raising cattle in congested feed lots.

Now all of this is not to say that we are perfect, organic only, nut and seed loving hippies. Take my chocolate chip cookies...and our burritos, the occasional ice cream cone and even the odd piece of store-bought cake. When we get a hankering for something we don't tend to ignore it. But we have found that over the years those hankerings have diminished dramatically and many of them have just faded away. Instead of craving In and Out Burger when we want junk food, we go for Chipotle burritos or get good quality pizza from the Cheeseboard. This has been a long, long process and we have never forced it.

We also do not shield Z from foods. While we provide him with super-healthy food at home, we also let him eat popcorn chicken nuggets at his friends' houses and enjoy cake at birthday parties. But we have found that he really prefers the food we serve at home to those other options. Give him the choice of salmon or a hamburger and he will choose the salmon any day. Put the kid in front of a piece of cake and he will eat part of the frosting up and then run off to play. He just doesn't have a taste for it.


Clearly, I could go on and on about all of this, but instead please just let me know if that answered all of your questions! I am always happy to revisit the topic. For now, I think I will release my second mouse of the evening. Life in the country...