Menu #5

Menu Wisdom

Learning to eat right in a toxic food environment isn’t easy—especially if Food Inc is spending $30 billion a year to tempt us with the siren song of factory foods.  In Greek mythology, the song of the sirens caused seamen to abandon reason and leap overboard, where they promptly drowned.  In modern times protection from mind-numbing siren songs is found in the purposeful step of writing a menu before venturing out to sea, or to the supermarket.  A menu, thoughtfully written in the safety of the home, charts a safe dietary course.  This is so important we moved menu writing up to Healthy Change #4.

We have hesitated to share our menus.  First, because this infers that whatever is good for us is good for everyone else.  That’s definitely not true; we’re all different.  Second, it suggests we’re nutritional know-it-alls, and we’re not.  Nutrition is an overwhelming complex subject that no single person can master.   But we do dedicate most of our time to the study of nutrition, and are happy to share what works for us. 

So with this post, we will start sharing our menus.  (This will also force us to not skip any weeks, which we all know can easily happen.)  Each menu post will suggest three to four dinners, you fill in the rest based on family needs and tastes.  The beautiful wife likes to eat out on Fridays (we call it research for the blog), we often have an omelet on Saturday night, and Sunday may be a family dinner.  Three warnings:

1. We eat quite simply, so no fancy dinners.  A healthy dietary need not cost more than the modern American diet (MAD).
2. We also cook simply.  Most meals can be prepared in 30 minutes or so.
3. We focus on plant foods with a sparing amount of meat or meat products.  One goal, for example, is to eat the five daily servings of vegetables per the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Menu #5

I know this is the first menu, but we number them according to the Healthy Changes.  So we’ll start with #5.  No recipe is posted here without us first trying it out.  Ditto for the menus—typically we’ll have tried them out the prior week.  This week we stayed in a century-old family home in the Wasatch range of Utah, so ate simple, hearty food.

Monday

• Baked sweet potato, with butter and a little brown sugar.
• Spinach salad, with avocado, tomato, and bacon.

Tuesday

• Potato and onion soup, just right for the cold weather.  See the recipe here.  The soup takes about an hour to prepare, but you save time the 2nd night.
• Whole wheat bread.  Usually we bake our own, but in Utah there’s good bread in the store.

Wednesday

• Salmon.  We try for two fish servings weekly—one fish dinner a week and tuna sandwich for lunch.  We poached the salmon in salted water, then finished it under the broiler, with butter and dill.  We grab a lemon off the tree for use at the table.
• Asparagus, steamed.  It seemed early for asparagus but the price was right.

Thursday

• Potato and onion soup—we enjoy leftovers and this soup tastes better the 2^nd day.
• Corn bread, I used the recipe on the box but reduced the sugar and used more corn meal than flour.   It’s important to use fresh corn meal. 

Please comment:  So that’s our first menu.  We usually have a green salad of some sort with most meals but the cold weather turned us to hot dishes.  Actually, it wasn't too cold for a little Rocky Road ice cream.  Please share your favorite ways of eating salmon.

Comments

[Brooke O.]

I like to bake/steam the salmon. I start by laying the salmon on tinfoil (makes for easy cleanup too and serves to create a steamer), I add salt and pepper, sliced onions and a few sliced lemons. Roll up the foil on top and sides to seal. I bake for about 15 minutes or until done, we eat it with homemade dill sauce and a squeeze of lemon.

[Brooke O.]

I like to bake/steam the salmon. I start by laying the salmon on tinfoil (makes for easy cleanup too and serves to create a steamer), I add salt and pepper, sliced onions and a few sliced lemons. Roll up the foil on top and sides to seal. I bake for about 15 minutes or until done, we eat it with homemade dill sauce and a squeeze of lemon.

[Mims]

If I have salmon with scales on one side, I like to fry it:

Heat a pan (preferrably non stick or cast iron). Put in the salmon skin side down, sprinkle with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Fry for about 6 minutes until cooked. Eat! (Yeah, I like simple cooking).

Occationally I do an extremely simple dish, which is really quick if you prepare:
Set the tea kettle to boil.
Pour Cous cous at the bottom of a bowl. Put fresh or thawed spinach on top. Put finely sliced salmon on top of the spinach. Pour boiling water over it all and put the lid on for 5 minutes. Season with lemon juice, salt and pepper.

As a Scandinavian I also eat gravlax and smoked salmon with anything; boiled potatoes, potato pancakes, rice, pasta, on bread, just as it is...