Eating PRO on the go, 2010: Salmon salad

As I mentioned, we had all that extra salmon. We also had a little spinach, since we hadn't cooked all of it. The beginnings of a salad were had! It was a bean-grain salad, mostly, with extra veggies and then the salmon. Pretty straight-forward to make, and it made a good lunch, although we had enough that I've now eaten this salad for three meals (in a row), while traveling... better than anything I can get in the airport, I suppose.

-Salmon (about a pound?)
-A small bunch of spinach
-Approximately 1/2C garbanzo beans
-Approximately 1C of bulgur
-1 avocado
-3 tomatoes
-1 cucumber
-1 lemon (for squeezing over the top)
-Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the bulgur and chickpeas. Chop the veggies. Break up the salmon into pieces. Combine everything. Squeeze the lemon over the top and add salt, pepper, olive oil if you want, spice if you want.

This is the last installment of eating pro on the go... 'til next year, then.

Eating PRO on the go, 2010: Salmon with couscous and spinach

We had one night left, so decided to use up some couscous that Justin had left in our room (he was using our kitchen), and figured we'd just run to the store and pick up some protein and a veggie. I wanted more salmon, and Jess was willing to put up with my desire for the pink fish, so we got another fillet of salmon. It was pretty big, so we had leftovers, but that is for the next post. We also picked up some spinach, since that cooks way down and you almost never have leftovers from that.


Its crazy, the salmon here sells for $7.99/lb. Thats wild Alaskan salmon, for ya.

Anyway, we cooked the fish in a pan - heat some oil (medium-ish heat), put in the fish, cover with a lid, and leave it that way while you prep everything else. At some point, check the fish, you might have to flip it (we put it in skin-side down) if its a thick piece. The skin was delicious when it got all crisped up, although Jess wasn't too interested in trying any. Thats ok, shes a recovering vegetarian. It was like pork cracklin's, but tasted like salmon instead of pork, and a lot less greasy. So, don't throw out the skin, if you don't want to eat it on the fish, peel it off and put it back in the pan to get all crispy.

For the spinach, we washed it, then heated some oil and threw in some coarsely-chopped garlic. In went the spinach, and about three minutes later, out it comes.

Couscous, just follow the instructions, its hard to mess that one up. We had left over pasta sauce that I put on top, that added some flavor, along with some smoked paprika that I'd brought.

Boy that dinner disappeared fast. I guess racing makes you hungry...

Eating PRO on the go, 2010: chicken stir fry

I'm actually quite hesitant to put this picture up, since it just looks disgusting. We had bought an entire chicken, because it was cheaper, and we used the breasts in the pasta dish the other day. I butchered the rest of it to use the dark meat in the stir fry, and it was quite good - I normally don't take the dark meat off the bone until after its cooked, but in this case, it worked. It also allowed us to make chicken stock for the lentil soup that we had last night.

I swear, that chicken is cooked, and tasted delicious.

I marinated the chicken (cut into pieces) for about 20 minutes in a mixture of soy sauce and honey - sort of like a terriyaki sauce. I really liked the flavor that gave to the chicken, I'll be trying that combination again some time. The vegetables were a usual mix - an onion, two heads of broccoli, a yellow pepper, a green pepper, a zucchini, a yellow squash, and a carrot. I doused the veggies in a generous glug of soy sauce, early on, and just cooked the chicken in a separate pan. We served this one over brown rice. I'll be honest, I'm a little sick of brown rice... but it seems to be the only grain that we manage to agree on this trip, so I'll put up with it.

Eating PRO on the go, 2010: Lentil soup

I actually remembered a camera, but it doesn't do much to make this meal look appetizing. Its a pretty simple one, but tasty and healthy, which is good enough for me on a race day. We brought some canned red curry paste, and my little plastic baggies of spices, which is why I have various spices and stuff listed in the ingredients - if I didn't have them, I probably wouldn't bother buying them, since its so expensive that way.

Lentil Soup
Serves 5-6 people, depending on how hungry you are.
1/2lb lentils, we used green ones
1/2 can diced tomatoes
2C chicken stock (made from leftover chicken when we bought a whole chicken instead of just chicken breasts for the pasta)
1 bay leaf
A couple carrots
A couple stalks of celery
1/2 of a ginormous onion
4 cloves of garlic
1 bunch of collard greens
curry paste
A bay leaf
soy sauce

Serve with some brown rice.

Put the lentils in a big pot with the bay leaf, tomatoes, chicken stock, a generous helping of soy sauce (we're a little short on salt), and as much curry paste as you would like - we used ~2 tablespoons of it. Add water to cover the lentils, more water for more soupy lentils, less water for less soupy lentils. Bring that to a boil, while you prep the vegetables. Once it boils, drop the heat back to a simmer.

Chop the carrot and celery into pretty little pieces, rinse and chop the collards. Slice the onion into long slices - you'll be pan-frying the onion and garlic, because that tastes better. Put the carrots and celery into the soup. Put some oil in a pan, and bring that up to a medium-high heat. Add the onion, and stir those around for 5-10 minutes, until they're just starting to brown (but not burn), then add the chopped garlic, and stir that around until its just golden brown. Add that to the soup. Simmer everything for a while, until the lentils taste cooked and the carrots and celery are cooked.

Heat some olive oil

Eating PRO on the go, 2010: Pasta with Brussels sprouts and chicken

We seem to be rotating pasta dishes and taco dishes right now, but they're all good cheap healthy things to eat, so I guess that's alright. Still no pictures, because I forgot my camera at dinner and we were hungry. But it looks similar to the other pasta dish.

1lb whole wheat pasta (small shapes)
A whole bunch of brussels sprouts (6C?)
1 red onion
2 chicken breasts
salt, red pepper
olive oil

Get the pasta water boiling. Start a frying pan with olive oil, a little water, and the brussels sprouts. In a second frying pan, put the onion (sliced thinly) with some salt and olive oil. Once its more or less sweated, add more oil, and put in the chicken, with some salt and red pepper flakes. I did it in two batches. Keep the onions in there, just push them over to the side. The Brussels sprouts can mostly sit there covered as you deal with the chicken.

Once everything is cooked, mix it all together - add some ricotta if you want, its a nice addition.

Eating PRO on the go: Bean tacos

Tacos are just so easy to make (and eat) when you're traveling, plus they have all sorts of good stuff in them. After the fish tacos, we had some leftover stuff, namely tortillas, that had to get used up. The ingredients for the bean burritos/tacos are below. No picture, because I was hungry!

-whole wheat tortillas
-an avocado
-a tomato or two
-refried beans, heated up
-grated cheddar cheese
-lettuce
-black beans
-brown rice
-taco sauce of some sort

Build the burrito, and try not to overstuff...

Eating PRO on the go: Pasta with spinach and Halibut

This is a quick and easy one - and you definitely don't need the halibut to go with it, but fish is cheap and local here, so we've been taking advantage of it. We also had some parsnips on the side, just because they taste good. This was the night we discovered that the oven doesn't work without smoking the place out, which made things a little interesting. Should have just pan-fried the fish. But how were we to know, I guess. Anyway, the pasta and spinach and ricotta mixture tastes really good on its own, but the halibut was darn good too.

Pasta with spinach and ricotta
Served four hungry skiers

1 12-oz box of whole wheat ziti
1 box of frozen spinach (1lb?)
1/2 bunch of swiss chard (leftover from lentil soup)
1/2 bunch of collard greens (leftover from lentil soup)
lowfat ricotta cheese
1 onion
1 clove garlic
olive oil
1.5lb halibut

Get a pot of water boiling. Meanwhile, cook the onion until its sweated. Add the spinach and cook until its thawed. Add the collards and cook until they're close to wilted. Add the chard, and cook until its wilted.

Once the water is boiling, cook the pasta. Follow the directions on the box.

For the fish, we broiled it until it was flaky when we poked at it, and the room smelled too much like smoke to stand it any more.

Eating PRO on the go, 2010 version: Fish tacos

Back in 2008, Jess and I were cooking for ourselves with a crockpot in a hotel in Michigan during nationals. This year we've upgraded, to a real dive of a motel, but with a much bigger kitchen. We're cooking for four of us, and it works pretty well as long as you don't turn the oven on... smokes a wee bit. Anyway, the first night was a lentil soup thingy, no pictures so no recipe, sorry. Last night was fish tacos, with fresh wild Alaskan salmon - how can you pass that up? The tacos were pretty awesome, and the fish was what made it.

Fish tacos
Feeds four hungry skiers
1/2lb black beans
~2lb salmon (if you're on the east coast, its still better to pay for the wild Alaskan stuff than the farm-raised Atlantic salmon - farm-raised salmon creates a lot of waste, in a concentrated place, and they feed them corn, which vastly reduces all those good omega-3 fatty acids, which is one of the major benefits of eating salmon in the first place. And, the farmed fish just don't taste as good, which should be reason enough)
8 tortillas (in this case, whole wheat)
1 avocado
2 tomatoes
2C lettuce
2C cooked brown rice
1/2 red onion
lime juice
Taco sauce, if you want

Cook the beans, either with a quick-soak or a long soak, in simmering water with a bay leaf and some onion chunks just to add flavor. Cook the salmon however you like to cook fish - we did it in a pan, and sort of tore it into pieces as we went. Be sure to cook it through - freshwater fish (and salmon is diadromous) contains far more parasites than marine fish, which is why salmon aren't a traditional sushi fish. Add some salt and lime juice to the salmon.

Chop of the avocado and the tomato and the lettuce. Put all the various things spread out buffet-style, and build your burrito.

Clean-out-the-freezer Fritatta

With Ed in VT, and me leaving for Alaska, I needed to get the fridge cleaned out and somehow feed myself at the same time. Luckily, the only things that needed using up were eggs and cheese, so I used up some frozen spinach, frozen corn kernels, and sundried tomatoes to make a delicious fritatta. It always pays to bring food for the plane, since now you have to buy flood in the air if you want to eat - they don't feed you, the bastards.

Fritattas are pretty easy. First, I sauteed a shallot in some oil, then cooked the spinach and corn until the ice had melted (not very long). I set that aside, mixed together 10 eggs, liberally buttered the pan, and dumped in the eggs. Then the veggies and stuff, and some chopped sundried tomatoes, cheddar cheese, and some salt and pepper. Cook without stirring or anything for ~5 minutes, until the top has just barely set. Then put the whole pan in the oven (preheated to 350F), for 5-10 minutes, depending on how unset your eggs are, or under the broiler if you want the tops to get brown.

I pulled it out of the pan and let it cool on a cutting board, but I don't think that matters too much.
Gooey and uncooked, with the cheese and veggies just thrown on top.

This is the point when I put it in the oven.