healthy

Mee Kati (Coconut Milk Rice Noodles)

Mee Kati (หมี่กะทิ) is a noodle dish that is popular in Thailand (and some parts of Laos); thin rice noodles are steeped in coconut milk, giving them a creamy flavor that is distinct from their more popular cousins, Pad Thai and Pad See Ew.

Mee Kati is often sold by street vendors, where they use food coloring to give the noodles a pink hue. It’s a very unique visual experience, but one we’re going to forgo in this recipe (feel free to add about 1/2 tsp beet powder to the coconut milk broth in step #3 if you’re up for it).

Some usual Thai suspects are on hand in this recipe, to include limes, chiles, shrimp paste, and tamarind–but a more uncommon addition is soybean paste; either red miso paste or Korean doenjang will work nicely.

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Pan-Fried Tilapia Taco Salad

Tilapia has been an important food source in North Africa and the Middle East for thousands of years, but has only recently been gaining ground in the United States. Over the past 50 years, worldwide consumption of this fish has skyrocketed, and for good reason: tilapia is fast-growing, lean, low in mercury, and can thrive on an algae or vegetarian diet.

While wild-caught fish is always preferred, farmed tilapia has an extremely low toxin profile and minimal environmental impact when raised in the right conditions. Tilapia is one of the most sustainable and inexpensive farmed fish; by comparison, it takes over 3 pounds of wild fish to produce only 1 pound of farmed salmon. In a world of decreasing wild fish options, I think it’s prudent to find the next best thing. Seek out tilapia farmed in the United States, as they are better observed than in many other countries, especially fish farms in China and Southeast Asia.

Farmed tilapia does not have the same Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio as other, wild-caught fish, but it is still an excellent protein source – it just shouldn’t be treated like an Omega-3 rich meal. Instead, we like to think of it as the nutritional equivalent of chicken breast; not a robust source of vitamins and nutrients, but still great to have from time to time.

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Homemade Chicken Stock

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

There are four main benefits to making your own homemade stock:

1. It saves you money, especially if you use leftover chicken parts. As you’ll see in this recipe, even buying chicken parts specifically for stock is still cheaper than buying commercially-available stock.
2. You get to control the taste of the broth, especially how much salt goes into it – which in my case is NONE. I prefer to add salt to my dishes as I cook them, without having to worry about how salty my broth is going to make my dish.
3. You can make it as concentrated as you’d like, which helps you save valuable freezer/fridge space.
4. You have control over where the chicken comes from, and how it was processed, by purchasing your birds/parts from a local farm or from online vendors.

For this recipe, I used chicken parts from U.S. Wellness Meats; specifically, chicken backs and necks. I used these parts because they have lots of bones, which house a lot of nutrients that are imparted into the broth. U.S. Wellness Meats were out of chicken feet at the time of my order, so I got some locally. These are great because they are full of bones and collagen, which create a rich, flavorful, and gelatinous broth. Other options for chicken parts are leftover chicken carcasses (store them in the freezer after roasting a chicken, until you have a few ready to go), or whole stewing hens (older chickens that are too tough to eat using quick-cooking methods).

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Alex Boake’s Smoked Salmon Eggs Benedict

Have you been to Alex Boake’s blog yet? It’s pretty awesome. She complements each of her unique recipes with beautiful illustrations in place of photos, and each illustration carries a great sense of motion and impeccable placement. After a bit of gushing about her work, she offered to do a recipe swap – wherein she makes one of my dishes and draws it, and I make one of her dishes and take pictures of it. I thought it was a great idea.

I decided to try and tackle her Smoked Salmon Eggs Benedict recipe (also known as Eggs Atlantic, Eggs Hemingway, and Eggs Royale). I thought it was a fun gourmet dish to try for a weekend brunch, and I liked the idea of using a portabella mushroom cap to replace the standard english muffin typically found in this dish. The red bell pepper also adds a hint of sweetness not normally found in the dish, which was great. I only made one adjustment to her original recipe, and that was to add a little white vinegar to the water I used to poach my eggs – a trick I learned while working at a breakfast restaurant many years ago – the acidity helps to make sure the eggs don’t break apart during the poaching process.

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Peanut-Free Satay Sauce

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

Satay sauce is primarily a dipping sauce in the United States, but it takes on a different role in Southeast Asia, where it originated; in addition to being a dipping sauce, it is used as a general purpose condiment to provide depth to dishes, and is the pivotal ingredient in many dishes such as gado-gado in Indonesia. In Australia, it’s a flavor you can have added to kebabs (to delicious effect, I might add), and is used as a condiment in many parts of Europe as well.

Because peanuts are not Paleo-friendly, I replaced the peanuts with a combination of walnuts, almonds, and macadamia nuts. Surprisingly, you can’t really tell that there aren’t any peanuts in this sauce – it’s the combination of shrimp paste, garlic, coconut milk, and palm sugar that really give this sauce its signature taste. If you have no restrictions on peanuts, I made no other substitution so you can just throw them back into the mix.

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Moules à la Marinière (Mussels in Wine Sauce)

Here in the United States, mussels have a bad reputation as being a “lesser” shellfish. I happen to disagree. True, they may have a less intense flavor than clams or oysters, and they sure like to turn into a rubbery / chewy mess with a quickness, but with the right amount of care you can make something remarkable. And to top it all off, mussels can be found for relatively cheap compared to their more popular cousins.

This preparation is a Provençal (SE coast of France) dish. The “à la marinière” part of this dish translates to “mariner’s style”, which is when shellfish is prepared with white wine and herbs. Although the white wine really enhances the mussels’ taste, I like to think that it’s the butter and cream that really do the trick. Either way, you’re in for a treat.

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Smothered Pork Chops

For me (and probably many others), smothered pork chops remind me of being a kid. It is a generally easy way to make sure pork chops are both cooked thoroughly and not too tough or chewy, and many houses across America have their own variation. Unfortunately, too many of those recipes rely heavily on instant soup packets and/or cans, which are loaded with sodium, unhealthy oils, and wheat. In response, I set out to make a healthy alternative without compromising on taste. Here’s how it turned out.

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Gluten Free Italian Meatballs

Meatballs are a deceptively tricky dish. It looks like you’d just ball up some ground beef and be done with it, but in fact it takes a good bit of work to get meatballs that aren’t super-dense cannonballs. I experimented a little to find a good mix-in to keep the meatballs moist and light, and when it comes down to it, nothing beats bread. Luckily, Udi’s Gluten-Free White Sandwich Bread is both consistent with our diet and perfect for this dish.

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Braised BBQ Spare Ribs

This recipe is similar to my original ribs recipe, but with spare ribs instead of baby back ribs, and with more ingredients in the braising liquid. It resulted in a rich, complex meaty taste.

The first thing you’ll probably notice right off the bat is that spare ribs aren’t very nice looking. “Spare ribs” is a phrase used for the lower ribs, which aren’t particularly evenly cut. That’s the sacrifice one makes for getting cheaper ribs! The ribs I used in my recipe were pre-cut but you may have to cut them yourself. Also, spare ribs are usually home to a bunch of pieces of cartilage, which some people find unappealing; personally, I like to dig around the ribs and find them.

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Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Mashed sweet potatoes have a distinctly different taste from your everyday mashed potatoes. Yep, you guessed it: they’re sweeter. They’re also much more delicate so they require a slightly different approach; namely, you steam them instead of boiling them.

For this recipe, I used three different sweet potatoes/yams, only because we had all three at the house. This recipe will work fine with almost any sweet tuber, although admittedly this dish looks pretty awesome with all three.

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