One of the difficult things about cooking during the week is that time and energy often come up a bit short when you get home to cook an elaborate meal. This challenge is magnified when you are trying to make the meal not only taste good but be healthy for you as well.
Luckily, this recipe manages to be healthy, tasty and quick to make. This is the holy trinity when it comes to weeknight dinners as far as I’m concerned. I can’t take the credit for this one however as it was my lovely wife’s idea.
The only real work you have to do is making the homemade vinaigrette.
Prep
- Put the Spinach in a salad bowl.
- Slice the grape tomatoes to your preferred size.
- Put the salad aside while you make the vinaigrette.
Ingredients for the salad
- 1 Bag of fresh spinach
- 1 small smoked salmon filet
- ½ a box of grape tomatoes
Ingredients for the vinaigrette
- 1/3 cup of extra virgin Olive Oil
- 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
- 2 teaspoons of mustard
- The Juice of ½ lemon squeezed
- 1 teaspoon of dried dill weed
- ½ shallot finely chopped
- 2 teaspoons of honey
Making the vinaigrette
- Mix the lemon juice, mustard, vinegar, dill weed and shallots in a bowl
- Whisk them vigorously until they are well mixed together
- While whisking, slowly stream in your olive oil to help integrate it with the vinaigrette
Final Preparation
- In a slow stream pour the vinaigrette over all part of the salad and then toss it to ensure the vinaigrette is well integrated.
- Cut the smoked salmon in half and place it on top of the salad for final presentation.
This is definitely one of the simpler recipes we have done but the end result is fantastic. The smokiness of the salmon pairs perfectly with the tangy and slightly spicy finish of the vinaigrette. We paired this meal with a Geyser Peak Sauvignon Blanc which will be a “Wine under Nine” selection in an upcoming post.
So if you are looking to be healthy on a weeknight, give this recipe a try and let us know what you think!
Stuffed Chorizo Portobellos with a Tequila Lime Sauce
One of my favorite parts having people over and entertaining is getting to cook an elaborate and tasty meal. It also usually means that I’m making appetizers to go with the main dish. I love making appetizers, I think appetizers allow to be more creative than other dishes. You can experiment with flavors that might be too much in the context of an entire meal but work great as bite sized snacks.
This dish ware originally conceived on a weekend when we were going to have family over. We were making our Beer Can Chicken and we wanted to something tasty to munch on while the main course finalized.
Enter the baby Portobello. If you haven’t cooked with these mushrooms let me assure you that they are very versatile. In this instance, we decided to give the meal more of a Mexican flair. Here are the ingredients that we used:
- 1 dozen Portobello mushrooms with the gills removed
- 1 package of Pork Chorizo
- 1 package of Monterrey Jack Shredded Cheese
- ½ a Cup of Tequila
- Juice of two Limes
- 1/3 of a stick of butter
- A pinch or two of the EME Fish & Poultry Seasoning
- 5-10 Shakes from a Sale Shaker depending on your preference
- 1 tbsp. of flour to thicken (I used low carb flour)
Prepping the Mushrooms
- Use a small spoon to remove the gills from the mushrooms. You have to be careful and gentle while you are doing this because it’s fairly easy to break them. And once their broken it’s hard to stuff them. They should look like this:
Making the Sauce
- Now it’s time to make the sauce you’ll need a small sauce pot for this step. Grab the butter and put in the pot at high heat until it fully melts.
- Once the butter melts, pour the tequila in and squeeze the lime.
- At this point I back off the heat to about medium and let the sauce reduce.
- Once it has reduced I put the flour in and whisk it with a spoon, this will thicken the sauce.
- Keep the sauce on a low heat so it doesn’t overly thicken.
Final Cooking Instructions
- Once the sauce is made it’s time to cook the Chorizo. All I do here is put it on a pan on high heat until the chorizo is fully cooked. I did not bother seasoning it at all since we already have a sauce for it and chorizo is flavorful on its own.
- Once the chorizo is done, put it in a bowl and put it aside.
- Heat up your grill to about 400 degrees or so and put the Portobellos on the grill BY THEMSELVES. This step is key, because as the mushrooms heat up they produce a lot of liquid.
- Use tongs to grab the mushrooms and drain the liquid into the grill. You want them to be as dry as possible so that your sauce doesn’t get watered down by the mushroom juice.
- Once the mushrooms have been drained, use a spoon to stuff them with the chorizo.
- Pour the sauce onto the chorizo as it will do a good job of absorbing it.
- Finally, put the cheese on top of the chorizo and close the lid of the grill.
- Once you have the mushrooms stuffed you just need to leave them long enough for the cheese to melt.
Once the cheese is melted the mushrooms are ready to eat. They were a big hit the last time I made them. If you make them let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading.