Day 104 – What Good Men Do For Their Wives

Since Michelle was out for an hour today, I utilized the time to surprise her with a special meal.  That’s when I realized that I haven’t done a cooking blog in a little while.  So, here’s a step-by-step for the meal I riffed today.

I had just purchased some wild caught salmon, and some great veggies and vegetarian products at the market, which is why I decided to include them in this recipe.  Remember when I said that if I couldn’t find good grain-fed beef or healthily raised turkey that I would go vegetarian?  Well, I found good fish, but I ended up getting some vegetarian cheese and sandwich spread because they looked good and have low calories.

I also got veggie-burger patties.  That’s right.  Chad Wood bought veggie burgers.  Foot enters mouth.  Anyway, the veggie burgers have nothing to do with this recipe.  So, on we go!

The first thing I decided to do was to roast a bulb of garlic.  I don’t even know why, it just felt right.

Here’s how I did it.  I peeled the papery stuff off the garlic bulb, cut the top off, dropped a tiny bit of oil on it, and wrapped it in aluminum foil.  Like this:

Make sure to seal it up before you pop it in the oven.

In the oven it goes at 425 degrees for around 45 minutes.

In the meantime, I had to prep the salmon.  I thought about glazing it in some honey mustard.  Then I thought “nah”.  Here’s a better idea:

The brownish substance in the left is called “sorghum syrup”.  It’s kind of like molasses.  Luckily for Michelle and I, the farmer’s market in town travels to Kentucky to supply us with the especially good sorghum that’s actually made using horse-powered machinery.  Sounds kind of archaic until you taste it.  I used about two teaspoons of it.  you don’t need much.

Here it is all mixed up.

Get the salmon filet covered on both sides.

I placed both filets on a red oak plank.  Here you see the jar of sorghum syrup.  This sorghum syrup is amazing.  It’s like taking the best things about molasses, honey, and all things sweet, and creating something of a miracle of flavor.

Bear in mind that the garlic is still roasting.

At this point, I had to decide on a vegetable.  We had recently bought some amazing hot banana peppers and squash at the farmer’s market.  I got some good organic spinach from the grocery store, as well.  I couldn’t decide on which one I wanted, so I decided to roast them all!

Squash is so low in calories you hardly have to worry about it.  A pound of squash (which is 4 calories per ounce) is less than 100 calories.  I’m looking for a meal right around 500 to 550 calories today.  So, the salmon filets are close to 300 calories each, so I rounded up.  2 teaspoons of sorghum syrup adds about 40 calories.  The squash is 4 calories an ounce, bringing this portion to right about 65 or so calories, give or take a few.  The pepper adds about 15 calories to the whole thing.  The small onion adds about 40.  Last, but not least, the cup and a half of spinach I added is about 12 calories.  So the total is roughly 772 calories.  Divide that by half and that would give Michelle and I 386 calories each, not counting the garlic.

ANYWAYS, back to cooking:

I chopped up the veggies and put them in a bowl.  Then I added this egg free mayonnaise stuff I had found.  This stuff tastes SO GOOD.  I know this picture is poor but here it is:

I put a table spoon of that in the bowl (adding 40 calories, bringing the total to 812), put the lid on, and gave it all a good shake.  Then I dumped it into a baking dish:

I set the oven to 350.  Now the stage is set, time to mash some garlic (that I had just taken out of the oven) up.

So I took out the garlic bulb, and it was probably the most euphoric scent I had ever experienced in my life.

If only you could smell this...

Since the garlic was roasted, the cloves sort of squished out of their peel.  Then I mashed them up with a fork until they were, well, a little mashy:

Good enough for now…

At this point, I had to chill out for a bit, except to flip my fishies when they got about like so:

Once it came out (after about 25 to 30 minutes, I took the veggies and fish out together), this is what the veggies looked like:

I tossed that in a bowl and I added some vegan cheese.  If you think that’s gross, you’re way wrong.   One slice of vegan cheese is 40 calories, bringing the total to 852.  I also added the bulb of roasted garlic to the veggies, which added about 80 calories to the whole thing counting the oil I roasted it in.  The total is now 932 calories. The cheese melted into a liquid and I shook it all up, and plated the fish.

The final product:

That’s a lot of love, right there.

932 calories divided between the two of us came up to 466 calories each.  I said I wanted to land between 500 and 550, so we each had a glass of skim milk from the Homestead Creamery in Virginia.  Yeah, we drink Cow’s milk every now and then.  Who said you can’t eat good and watch the calories?  This meal was amazing!  That’s all I have for today.  I hope someone benefits from reading this.

Be sure to season it up with some salt and pepper to taste.  Don’t use to much salt, though!