Provencal Salmon Burgers With Cucumber Sauce

Ingredients:

3 cups each cauliflower and broccoli florets (1 lb. total)
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 pound salmon fillets, skin and bones removed, cut into chunks
1 egg white
3/4 teaspoon herbes de Provence
5 kalamata olives, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped capers
1 tablespoon finely chopped red onion
2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
Olive oil cooking spray
4 whole wheat buns
Green leaf lettuce, torn (optional)

Cucumber Yogurt Sauce:

1/2 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 cup nonfat plain Greek yogurt
1 crushed clove garlic
1 teaspoon lemon juice


Instructions:

 1)  In a medium saucepan, bring 4 cups water to a boil.  Add cauliflower and broccoli.  Cook for 4-5 minutes, until tender but still firm.  Remove vegetables from pot and toss with lemon zest and set aside.

2)  In the bowl of a large food processor, combine salmon, egg white, herbes de Provence, olivers, capers, onion and Dijon.  Pulse 3 or 4 times until mixed but salmon is still chunky.  Remove and form mixture into four 4-ounce patties, set aside.

3)  Prepare cucumber yogurt sauce.  Grate cucumber over a cheesecloth or clean towel.  Wrap up cheesecloth or towel and squeeze tightly until all of the liquid is removed from the cucumber.  In a medium bowl, combine cucumber, yogurt, garlic and lemon juice and mix well.

4) Heat a medium saute on medium-high heat and mist with cooking spray.  Place salmon patties in pan, mist tops with cooking spray and cook for 4-5 minutes per side.

5) To assemble burgers, place each salmon patty in one bun and top with 1/4 cup cucumber yogurt sauce.  Add lettuce to burger, if desired.  Serve with one cup broccoli-cauliflower mixture on the side.

* serves four, takes about 15 minutes to prepare

* one burger with one cup vegetable mix equals 342 calories

* I don't like raw onion or garlic, so I would saute it lightly or parboil it before mixing it in.

* You could also skip the burger aspect and eat the patties over rice, or just with the vegetables.

* untested

Seafood

I've listed the universals about seafood preparation, and almost to a "T" I disagree with all of them. I understand the ruling principles of the "ideal," but living in the real world, and accounting for personal taste, I say "go with what appeals to you."

I. Know your fish types. Whether your fish is fresh water or salt water in origin, oily or lean in texture, or round or flat in structure, if a cooking method works well for one of its type, then it will likely work well for another. If you want turbot but can only find flounder, don't fret. It takes a lot of time to learn about fish, and a lot of practice.

II. Fish should not smell. Well. Maybe a little. More precisely, fresh fish should never be malodorous. A fish should smell of it's source: a salty ocean, a clean river or lake. Personally I cannot eat fish with an odor. Nada. I have cooked "caught in the wild" salmon and trashed it as inedible because of a strong taste or smell.

III. Buy fish whole. If you buy fillets, you lose the key indicators of freshness: shiny scales, bulbous (not sunken) eyes, firm flesh resistant to the touch, and--ahem--a tight anus. I agree with this, but I don't have time to debone a fish, create the fillets and then cook the thing. I buy it cut up, but from a good source.

IV. Serve fish flesh side up. Unless you have mastered crisping salmon or red snapper skin to an even-colored, crunchy, crackling, plate fish fillet with the flesh side up, skin side down.

V. Cook lobsters live. The standard methods are to steam, boil, broil, or grill. Steaming produces the most tender meat, but for real hedonism, first pour boiling water over the live lobster and let it steep for a minute or two. Then remove the partially cooked meat from the shell and poach it in butter. I would never just pour boiling water over a live lobster. I do agree with steaming, rather than boiling, because boiling gives you watery meat. Lobster shell is hard to cut--very hard on the hands, so I buy (if I can find it) cleaned lobster meat, and it's harder to find than you would think. I recently found a source at one market, where it is cleaned and shipped frozen from Maine, and that's good enough for me. My favorite means of buying it is on Cape Cod where I can go to the local marina where the lobster boats come in, and they sell huge hunks of fresh, cleaned lobster meat at a reasonable price. Ya gotta go to the source.

VI. Cook scallops until rare. It is a culinary crime to overcook a scallop. A sea scallop might take no more than one minute per side in a hot pan to be prepared adequately for safety and superior flavor. I can't stand rare scallops. Go figure. I don't care if it's rubbery. I want mine cooked.

VII. Devein shrimp. For cosmetic and textural reasons primarily. Discard the vein by scoring the shrimp with the tip of a paring knife and then scraping or pulling the vein away. I was taught to devein shrimp as a child, using my thumb nail. Again, for the time factor and labor? I try to buy already deveined shrimp unless I absolutely want to go through the steaming, shelling, deveining process, and I will only do that with jumbo shrimp. Doing it on tiny shrimp....shrimp shrimp? Would take all day.

VIII. Crabs. I've written a whole blog piece about buying and eating crabs. Catching them too. I'll have to transpose that to this blog, because it includes a great method by my brother of boiling them out in the yard over a makeshift brick pit. I never cook crabs at home. Bothersome, hot, and discarding the detritus is a smelly mess. I'll pick through a canister of lump crab meat and that's my limit for home cooking.

Shrimp In Sriracha Sauce With Basmati Rice

1/3 cup Sriracha (a Thai hot sauce)
1/3 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 handful cilantro, roughly chopped, plus more for garnish
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds large shrimp (16 to 20 count), deveined


Mix together the Sriracha, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, cilantro, and sugar. Season aggressively with salt and pepper. Put in a 1-gallon plastic bag, add the shrimp, and mix together in the bag. Marinate in the fridge for 2 to 4 hours or longer.

Heat a grill. Skewer the shrimp (4 to 6 shrimp per skewer) and grill until pink and delicious, 2 to 3 minutes per side. Remove the shrimp from the grill, slide the shrimp from the skewer using a fork, and pile on a serving platter.

Sprinkle with finely chopped cilantro, and throw a few toothpicks in a few shrimp.

Serve with Basmati rice on the side.

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Notes:

I made this the first time with only one pound of shrimp. I thawed them in hot water, pulled the tails and patted off the water.

I halved the Sriacha sauce, which is wonderful, but still a little hotter than I would want on a normal basis. If I make this again, I would cut the sauce to tablespoons or teaspoons.

The sugar and olive oil make a wonderful chemical binder that makes the sauce really adhere to the shrimp and lacquers over them.

I did not grill the shrimp, but stir-fried them. I am sure grilling is wonderful.

I used dried cilantro because it's all I had. I think you should strive to use fresh.

For one pound of shrimp, I used one garlic clove. I think with even two pounds one clove would do it. It was a good-sized clove.