Bobby Flay's Panzanella Verde Salad

It's Friday, and I thought I'd have my big meal for lunch today. Still looking at Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction on the Food Network, I watched him make a Panzanella Verde Salad, and had to try it. For me, it's fun to be inspired by delicious looking foods prepared on TV, then try them at home.

The dish went together easily. The only difficult thing was finding the right olives for the recipe. I came close, with two types of olives, buttery castelvetrano and briney cerignola. The grilled ciabatta bread was gorgeous, and so was the bright green dressing. I didn't have arugula, so I used baby lettuce. Highly recommended! For the recipe, click here.

Before/After & Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction

Me, Bill Volckening, before and after

Two months of healthy eating, and I have dropped about 35 pounds, recently dipping under 220 for the first time in over a decade. When I look at the gorgeous foods I'm eating now, I have to laugh. It's like I'm spoiling myself rotten...I mean...just look at what I had for supper last night.

Wild sockeye salmon Pacific Northwest style, after watching Bobby Flay

It was getting late, and I was wondering what to have. A little uninspired, I turned on a recorded episode of Bobby Flay's Barbecue Addiction on Food Network. He was preparing foods from the Pacific Northwest, and made a hot smoked salmon topped with a chop salad of baby lettuce greens, toasted hazelnuts, dried cherries, Gala and Granny Smith apple and a homemade honey mustard vinaigrette.

I don't have a smoker grill, but realized I could enjoy a similar experience by roasting the salmon and doing everything else the same as Bobby Flay. I glazed the salmon with a little dressing before and after roasting, in the oven less than 12 minutes at 450, and it was incredible! You can find the original recipe here.

GZ's Roasted Grapes

Today I was watching The Kitchen, and Geoff Zakarian made a dish I just had to try. It was roasted grapes in a muscato ginger thyme reduction served with blue cheese.

Insanely delicious! For the recipe, click here.

Loaded Question: Do you rinse first?

Yesterday I posted a photo on Facebook and Instagram and asked, 

"Do you rinse your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher? Or do you put them in without rinsing?"

A loaded question, indeed!

The responses varied, but were overwhelmingly in favor of rinsing first. The most popular reason offered was to avoid rewashing dishes after food gets stuck on them. Many households, such as my own, do not have enough occupants to fill a dishwasher quickly. It can take several days to fill mine, and in that time anything I may have eaten would be very difficult if not impossible for a dishwashing machine to remove. Do we want to rewash the dishes after washing them? I don't!

Aside from saving time avoiding rewashing dishes, pre-rinsing can also protect the machine from damage. 

"Our dishwasher clogged recently and the repair guy told us that we have to remove all food bits before washing, our machine can't grind them up." said Marina Salume of Portland in response to my question on Facebook. 

Good to know, but I'm a lifelong rinser. My gorgeous Miele dishwasher, which doesn't have a built-in garbage disposal or scrubber brushes, will last a long time.

Oven Tandoori Chicken

Tandoori chicken has always been one of life's great mysteries to me, along with Chinese barbecue pork. Yesterday I got a craving for Tandoori chicken, and decided to make it at home. I found a tutorial online, and the woman making the chicken appeared to be of Indian descent, so I went with her method. Couldn't have been more perfect.

First, I marinated the chicken in the lemon, ginger, garlic and spices after removing the skin and scoring it. The second marinade is where the red came in, along with some yogurt and spices. I baked the chicken on a rack at 400 degrees for an hour flipping halfway through, and voila! Tandoori chicken at home. 

Some people don't like the idea of red dye, and that's fine. To each his own. They weren't invited to dinner anyway. I'm a very curious home cook. If it can be made without a whole lot of hassle and it's something I enjoy, I try to make it at home. I get a real kick out of recreating the foods I had at restaurants. Maybe I'm just cheap, but there's something satisfying about saving the money, making it at home, knowing how to do it and knowing exactly what's in it. 

Two Gorgeous Granitas

It's supposed to warm up this weekend, so in anticipation of that, I decided to make some granita. What is granita? Well, it's a frozen dessert you can make easily in your freezer without many ingredients or special equipment. I had blueberries and some watermelon, so I made a granita out of each.

Now, before you ask for the recipes, I'll say the same thing I always do. I find recipes online and tailor them to my taste, or to work with whatever ingredients I've got. The two recipes that served as inspiration were this one and this one. I followed them fairly closely, but reduced sugar, used lime juice because that's what I had, and didn't add any water or other ingredients. It resulted in two of the most flavorful granitas I'd ever made, and they taste like pure, frozen fruit.

The watermelon granita is bright pink and icy. I've tried freezing watermelon before, and it loses a bit of its color, but not this granita. It's also an easy solution to using leftover watermelon if you know you're not going to eat it in time.

The blueberry granita is a soft reddish purple and a little creamier than the watermelon granita. I added a pinch of salt to enhance the flavor of the blueberries, and strained both of the granitas before freezing. That last step, the straining, isn't a requirement, but I think it gives the dish a cleaner finish and appearance. It'll be more rustic if you don't strain.

The temperatures here in Portland will approach 80 over the weekend and should be in the mid 80s on Monday. For normally mild Portland, that's considered a heatwave! So, I'm ready for it!

National Grilled Cheese Day & Red Tomato Soup!

Its National Grilled Cheese Day, and what better to pair with a great grilled cheese than tomato soup? As much as Campbell's reminds me of my childhood, there's nothing like making fresh, homemade soup. It's easy! But this time I changed the recipe a bit. Instead of adding cream at the end, making it a bisque, I had a secret, healthy ingredient that made the color much more dramatic.

The soup is full of veggies, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, fire roasted tomatoes, and I had some celery root to use up, so that went in, too. The last time I made tomato soup, it was a bisque and was a bit pale looking from the cream. Thinking of a healthy heart, I shouldn't have cream very often these days...well, maybe on a special occasion. This time I opted for the visual wow factor, the deep, red color. It came from the secret ingredient: red beets!

I served it with a grilled cheese made with extra sharp Vermont white cheddar, homemade Granny Smith apple chutney and arugula on panini-grilled rustic ciabatta. Absolutely divine! I can't have grilled cheese every day anymore, but when I have it, I want it to be exquisite. Of course, I made the whole thing up, and made it to my taste, but here's what I did.

Ingredients:

Extra virgin olive oil
1 yellow onion, roughly chopped
2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 celery stalk, roughly chopped
1/3 cup celery root, peeled and roughly chopped
2 medium red beets, peeled and roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled
handful of fresh thyme, tied together in a bundle
1 large can fire roasted tomatoes with liquid
1 carton low sodium chicken stock
pinch of sugar to taste
Kosher salt to taste
fresh ground black pepper to taste
1 cup water

Sewat the onions in olive oil in a stock pot over medium heat. Add the fresh thyme and chopped, fresh vegetables: carrot, celery, celery root, and beets. Sauté for a few minutes, lightly seasoning with salt and pepper. Add the chicken stock, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer for 15 minutes. Add tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, bring to a boil then let simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, remove bundled thyme stems, and blend with an immersion blender. If it's too thick, add water, 1/2 cup at a time, until desired consistency is reached. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve topped with a dollop of Greek Yogurt and fresh, chopped chives. Serve this soup, and everyone will be impressed and amazed by the color. Enjoy!!

loving the homemade Catalina dressing lately

Recently I had a flashback to summers in the 1970s having dinner in the sun room, and salad dressed with sweet Catalina dressing. When I started eating more salad, I realized I needed to keep it interesting. I don't enjoy bottled dressings so much, and always prefer to make homemade, so I found a recipe for Catalina dressing and modified it to my taste.

The original recipe called for a cup of oil and more sugar and salt than I wanted, so I substituted a couple tablespoons of honey for the sugar, dissolving it first in the vinegar, and about 1/4 of the oil. I forgot the onion, left out the Worcestershire, and didn't miss it, but added some onion powder. It was perfect! Who knew a ketchup-based salad dressing would be so divine! I served it recently on a tossed salad with Romaine lettuce, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, shrimp and toasted slivered almonds. It was outrageously delicious!

Back to the Kitchen

we have such gorgeous wild salmon here in Oregon

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. I thought now would be a good time to start up again because I had a heart attack in February, just six days shy of my 50th birthday, and I made a lot of changes in the kitchen afterwards. I'm doing much better now. It's the food.

tossed salad with shrimp, homemade Catalina dressing and toasted almonds

Food is the best medicine. It really is. Over the last several years I fell into doing what was easy and extremely unhealthy. I ate mostly fast food and processed food. I would work all day, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to start cooking, so I'd head for McDonald's or Taco Bell. If it was still early enough to cook, I'd often push the other easy button and grab a Papa Murphy's Take and Bake family size Hawaiian pizza, thinking I was being more healthy by adding green peppers and less unhealthy when I only ate half the pie. Note to Self: if I want to stay up all night drinking water, I'll remember my old routine.

homemade guacamole on a baked yellow orn tortilla chip

I ate a lot of red meat, a lot of fried foods, sweets, and foods high in sodium; and I would often live on coffee all day and binge on high-calorie processed foods close to bedtime. Foods marketed as healthy choices are not much better. Processed foods have one, more or all of the three deadly food sins: fat, sodium and sugar. Whole wheat bread, for example, is full of sugar. Canned vegetable soup is full of sodium. Salsa and chips...full of sodium and the chips are deep fried. Today I don't know if any of those foods would taste right. After eating "clean" for over a month, processed foods taste bad.

Oregon blackberries are sublime

Back in 2002, I lost 70 pounds eating very healthy, freshly prepared whole food, much of it raw. At the time I was following Cooking Thin on the Food Network, with Chef Kathleen Daelemans. The 2016 version of that 'diet' is a bit more mindful of salt, sugar and oil, but it's working the same way. After a week, I was so wired from good, clean nutrition I couldn't really drink coffee. It's such a wonderful thing to be in Oregon. We get some of the finest produce I have ever seen.

heavenly mushrooms, oyster, hedgehog and crimini

Since the heart attack, I have lost more than 20 pounds...and I wasn't even trying to lose weight. I was just trying to keep plaque from building up in the stent. The medical part of the story is: I had a partial blockage of the left anterior descending (LAD) artery, the main artery along the front left-hand side of the heart. When that artery becomes fully blocked it causes cardiac arrest and in a majority of cases, death. I narrowly escaped the "widow maker" heart attack. A stent was used to open the artery, and now it is my job to keep the stent clean and functioning properly, hopefully preventing the need for additional heart procedures in the future.

the healthy prep sink

Things were much better when I got home from the hospital, and I got back to cooking the way I did back in 2002. I love eating gourmet health food, and it makes me feel like a king. Taking the time to prepare fresh meals for myself daily is worth it. If I'm not worth it, who is? So, you can expect to see me cooking up a storm, and I will make an effort to post to this long lost blog more often. Thanks for reading!