Ahoy there! I’m a sucker for anything fried (especially seafood) so for this lovely fall Friday in late October, I’m sharing with you 11-2: Fried Shrimp and Scallops. I’m usually a fan of eating out when it comes to frying (and fish) due to the…lingering odors left behind, but sometimes you gotta get in there and be your own captain of the seafood sampler.
Simply Delicious says to make this for appetizers, but I think it can be a whole meal. You also even get your choice of sauces!
I’m aware of two salmon steak recipes in my Simply Delicious collection, 11-15: Grilled Salmon with Thyme and this one, 11-18: Salmon Steaks with Mushrooms. The other one mentions you can substitute salmon fillets if you can’t find the steaks, which is what I had to do for this one. Strangely enough, I WAS able to find them for the other one. Believe it or not, I’ve been looking for them for a while and just haven’t had very good luck with it (even in Northern California, where it seems like you can find just about anything if you look hard enough).
Simply Delicious does NOT miss an opportunity for a mushroom sauce–it’s kind of their thing. They suggest rice (10/10?) as a side dish, but I’m going to go with some gnocchi instead.
Quick note: Just passed the 8-year anniversary of this project, and I’m STILL going. I’ll be doing this FOREVER.
Almonds are grown in California in abundant numbers so luckily, the featured ingredient in 11-8: Almond Trout is fairly inexpensive for us. This is not the first recipe to include almonds in a main course. Jamie chopped some for the sauce of the 11-16: Indian Fried Fish and I added them whole to 9-27: West Indian Meat Casserole. Jamie also combined pork and almonds in 7-55: Sunday Pork Stew. Who could forget the chopped almonds in the sauce from the mauve chicken in 6-24: Mushroom-Almond Chicken? Once you go into desserts, Simply Delicious offers tons of recipes that contain this wondrous drupe, which is technically a seed, but commonly called a nut.
Pan-fried fish has to be my second favorite preparation of fish, second only to full frying in a deep fryer, of course.
“Chicken wings are a longtime American favorite.” Truer words have never been written, editor of Simply Delicious. To complement another recent wing recipe that Jamie made (1-1: Orange-Glazed Chicken Wings), here’s 6-10: Savory Chicken Wings.
I love having chicken wings as both an appetizer and a snack. The editor of Simply Delicious know me too well.
Oh boy, another pork tenderloin recipe. This is the last of my Costco pack, but I’m going tomorrow, so who knows what I’ll come home with. 7-1: Pork Tenderloin with Mushrooms is the first card in Group 07: Pork, and a pretty straightforward recipe. Other pork tenderloin recipes I’ve covered so far include 7-27: Pork Tenderloin in Creamy Sauce, 7-34: Grilled Pork Slices with Garlic, and 7-36: Pork Tenderloin with Curry Sauce.
This recipe includes parsnips, a root vegetable related to carrots and parsley. Parsnips are usually winter vegetables, but I think you could probably still get away with it in mid-April.
Here’s a pretty basic “chicken with sauce” type recipe that can be fancy or not-so-fancy. “Chicken Diable” or “Chicken a la Diable”, as evidenced by the name, is essentially “the Devil’s chicken”, evoking images of spices and fire. 🌶 🔥 As Serious Eats notes in their version of the dish, the French have a very different idea of spiciness than some other cultures.
Everyone’s got their version of this dish–here’s Bon Appetit’s, and Google turns up many more results. Whether it’s actually spicy is up to you–if you actually like things spicy, prepare to have to add some heat to this one.
Here’s a new-to-you part of the book I want to start featuring. The last three chapters of Simply Delicious comprise their own section: Cooking School. These chapters detail more of the practical culinary knowledge required to execute recipes well, and teach some skills by going through some basic recipes.
I’m going to start mixing up the regular recipe entries with these Cooking School ones as well, which shouldn’t be too different. If anything, they’ll be a lot shorter–like this one.
Chapter 18 is about Basic Techniques. I thought that 18-17: Cooking Glossary I would be a good place to start. I used this same (complete) glossary when I taught cooking to K-8 kids in an after school program a few years ago, and I inserted a copy of it into the recipe book at the restaurant I used to work at. There’s also one taped inside my spice cabinet at home for reference.
7-28: Pork Chops with Rosemary is a pretty simple pork chop recipe that’s good for a quick dinner. We buy the big packs of chops from Costco, so we always have to come up with different ways to prepare them.
Along with the abundance of pork, we’ve been growing and drying our own rosemary–it’s WAY more potent and flavorful than the packaged stuff from the market. If you have to choose, go with the fresh over the dried–it’ll taste so much better.
Schnitzel has been a favorite of mine ever since I went on a trip with my family to Israel when I was 13 (I chose that instead of the party–I never say no to a chance to travel, especially abroad). Obviously, they didn’t serve a lot of pork schnitzel there, but 7-50: Parma Schnitzel is a good version all the same.
This is a quasi-Italian-style schnitzel, which according to Wikipedia, is one of the few countries that schnitzel is not a cuisine of. Well, this one’s good anyway.
If you still have any zucchini or tomatoes lying around from a late summer harvest, this is a great vegetarian recipe with which to use those up. 🍅
Also note the new background: my first entry from my new (hopefully somewhat permanent) kitchen. 🙂
I styled mine in more of a fried zucchini-appetizer way, but the casserole way works too.