Roast salmon and root vegetables with couscous

Recently, I was craving root vegetables (parsnips, potatoes, and carrots) when I came across a recipe for herb-roasted root vegetables from my favorite cookbook author, Giada De Laurentiis.  I have two of her cookbooks: Everyday Pasta and Everyday Italian.  I love them both because the recipes are so easy to follow and well-written that I could probably repeat the same recipe without referring to the book.  More importantly, just about every recipe I’ve ever attempted has resulted in deliciousness.  (Also, this isn’t the first time I’ve posted a dish from her cookbooks.)

This particular roasted root vegetable dish called for carrots, parsnips, sweet potato, and brussel sprouts, seasoned with olive oil and Italian herbs.  Sticking with the roasting theme, I made the “Salmon baked in foil” which was, you guessed it, salmon baked in foil packets.  The best part of this foil packet dish was the diced tomato-shallot salsa that cooks with the salmon.  It was simply divine; I could have eaten an entire bowl of the stuff with a loaf of crusty bread.

Being the carb-lover I am, I had to balance the meal out with some noodles or rice.  I had a box of couscous in my pantry, which ended up complementing the salmon quite well.

Oh, bonus photo!  I thought I had taken a photo of something else I cooked from Giada’s cookbooks, and indeed, I found it!  Taken all the way back in August, here is a photo of “Rigatoni with Sausage, Artichokes, and Asparagus,” which actually brings me to the only pet peeve I have with the cookbooks — recipe titles are sometimes misleading.  For instance, this particular dish also has sun-dried tomatoes in it.  But why aren’t sun-dried tomatoes in the title?  Nor are they listed in the index.   A more glaring misnomer is her recipe for “Penne in Spicy Tomato Sauce”… also known to everyone else as puttanesca.  But it’s a small price to pay for an otherwise great cookbook.

Penne with sausage, asparagus, artichokes, AND sun-dried tomatoes, topped with freshly grated Parmesan.

Last week, JY and his housemates had another bbq.  Unlike the grill warming, the weather this time around was perfect — 75 and warm, despite it being mid-October.

For potlucks, I like to try new recipes.  This way, if it’s good, I can share the deliciousness with everyone.  And if it’s bad, then it’s less for me to suffer through.  For the bbq, I decided to make “Mediterranean Salad” from Giada De Laurentiis’s book Everyday Pasta. (A great cookbook, by the way.  Highly recommended, with a dedicated post coming soon.)  It turns out that Mediterranean Salad is just a fancy name for couscous.  Couscous with toasted almond slivers, dried cranberries, chopped basil and mint, lemon juice, lemon zest, and garlic.  It turned out to be super delicious!

Meditteranean salad (a.k.a. couscous)

A close-up shot of the couscous

The grill, featuring corn, kabobs, a buffalo steak, and my salmon filet (marinated in pseudo-teriyaki)

JBL's sauerkraut, with chicken sausage

I couldn’t think of a more fitting way to start this blog than to review Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. My two-sentence summary of the book is as follows: As we sit at the top of the food chain, the question is not what can we eat, but what should we eat? Pollan dissects food sources and food politics, and comes to the (somewhat unfortunate) conclusion that there’s a lot we shouldn’t eat (or at least, there are very few foods that don’t come with a big dollop of guilt).

Normally, I’m not drawn to non-fiction, but I was intrigued by a chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that first appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine last year. It was about corn — how our government significantly subsidizes corn, which created a monoculture of corn growers in the Midwest, which then resulted in the use of corn byproducts in every processed food in America.

So I bought the book and started reading it at the beginning of this year. While I found it interesting, it took me forever to finish it. Six months to be exact. So, if you don’t feel like trudging through all 411 pages like I did, I’m here to give you the Cliff Notes version. I’ll save the literary criticisms for the real book reviewers. Here’s what I found most practical and interesting about The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

• We are walking corn. Corn is in everything, from ice cream to chicken McNuggets. And it’s so “cheap” because we pay for it with our taxes that pays for the Farm Bill.
• Industrial organic is too good to be true. When buying produce, here’s the preferred order of food source: local, seasonal, and organic; local, seasonal, conventionally grown; not local but organic; industrial organic… I think you have the gist.
• Ideally, if every farm were to move from monoculture (only one crop grown) to growing many different crops and animals as well, then not only would the farmers benefit, but so would the livestock, the environment, and the community as a whole.
• You are what you eat. Quality is better than quantity. Knowing where your food comes from is ideal.
• Conventionally grown produce is one thing, but try to steer clear of meat from big factories. Poorly-treated animals is not only inhumane, but results in less nutritious and less tasty meat. This goes for eggs and milk too.
• Don’t eat so much meat. We eat way more meat than our ancestors did. It’s bad for our health and for the environment.
• It’s important to read labels and know the definition of terms such as: organic, free range, hormone free, etc. Some of these terms are used more loosely than others. For instance, free range animals often only have a little more space than non-free range animals.

Anyway, there’s a lot more information and interesting details about food but I won’t go into all of it here. I found The Omnivore’s Dilemma to be informative and interesting, if a bit depressing. By the end, I felt like I couldn’t eat anything without wondering what the true “cost” was. I’ve heard that if The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about what NOT to eat, then Michael Pollan’s more recent In Defense of Food is about what TO eat. Even if I do feel guilty about some food choices, this book has renewed my commitment to go the farmer’s market more frequently and to be a better informed food consumer.