Sous Vide Salmon with Fried Rice and Salad & Almost Vegan Rice Noodles Stir-Fry

It is always interesting cooking dinner at our house because we have different dietary requirements. I'm the "on and off" vegan but when I cook I am mostly vegan; my wife is doing the no carb thing to lose weight; and my step-daughter would pretty much eat anything that I put in front of her :) This evening was no exception where I ended up cooking 3 different dishes for the 3 of us. 

The sous vide salmon was inspired by a friend of mine, Ian who told me about his experimentation with sous vide fish and the great results he had with salmon. I had some frozen cooper river salmon in my freezer so I decided to give it a shot. Here were the 3 dishes that I cooked tonight:

• Sous Vide Salmon Spinach Salad - Wife
• Sous Vide Salmon w/ Vegetarian Fried Rice - Step Daughter
• Almost Vegan Rice Noodles Tofu Stir-Fry - Me

First off you need to brine the salmon in a 10% salt solution to leach out the albumin. This is the whiteness that comes out of salmon with sous vide cooking. Generally you should brine this for 10-20 min max so you don't over salt the fish. Apparently I didn't do it long enough since there were some albumin leaching out when I sous vide the salmon. The albumin doesn't affect the taste of the fish at all. It is only for appearance sake.

I would also recommend using fresh salmon instead of previously frozen if you can find some in season. The next thing is to rinse the brine with clean water, dried with a paper towel, and lightly seasoned it with black peppers. I didn't season it with salt since brining will add salt in the salmon already. Add a couple of teaspoons of olive oil and then vacuum back the salmon.

I preheated the sous vide machine to 125 degrees and placed it in the water bath for about 20 minutes. The results was quite amazing! Generally after sous vide cooking the food is not always aesthetic pleasing but with salmon it's not too bad.

I then pan seared it with olive oil on high heat for about 30 seconds on each side to give it some color.

The salmon came out amazing! For my wife I placed it on a bed spinach with diced yellow bell peppers, and crumbled Boison herbed cheese. She thought the salmon was one of the best cooked salmon I ever cooked! Thanks Ian for the recipe :) 

The vegetarian fried rice is an easy recipe. I used 1 egg beaten, leftover rice (leftover is better than freshly cooked rice), and chopped Asian vegetables (Yu Choy) that I had in the refrigerator. Any type of stalk/root vegetables like string beans, carrots, peas, or asparagus would work fine too. First thing is to cook the egg with a little oil and whip as much air into it to keep it light.

Remove the egg and set it aside. Add the vegetables next with oil and add some liquid to help steam the vegetables to cook it through. The most important thing is to not over cook! 

Add the leftover rice into the wok and then add a little chicken broth. Continue to stir fry until the rice has heated through. Add the cooked egg back into the wok and season with salt as needed. I would generally add some green onion to provide a more aromatic taste. The end result is quite spectacular with or without the salmon.

Almost vegan rice noodles tofu stir-fry. Since I'm vegan today I decided to make this stir fry for myself. I took some wide rice noodles that I purchased at one of the Asian markets a couple of days ago and separate them in strips.

I then chopped whatever vegetables I had in the refrigerator - today's veggies happened to be Chinese broccoli, fresh shitake mushrooms, and green onions. The protein I used was fresh firm tofu. I would occasionally use fried tofu depending on what I had available. 

I decided today to use two types of seasoning - a vegetarian bouillon base that is flavored with mushrooms and an XO sauce.  The XO sauce is what makes it "almost" vegan because it contains minute amount of dried preserved scallops.

Heat up a wok to high heat until it begins to smoke. Add either peanut or olive oil to the wok until the oil smokes. Add the mushroom and the tofu and quickly stir-fry. The mushroom requires a liquid to fully cook so it is necessary to add some of the vegetarian bouillon until you have a nice glaze on the mushroom and tofu.

Remove and set aside. Head up the wok again and add a little oil and then the vegetables. Add liquid if necessary to cook the vegetable through and then add the rice noodles. 

Add the remaining bouillon and the XO sauce and quickly stir fry until the rice noodles have cooked through. Add the mushroom, tofu, and green onion back into the wok and quickly stir fry everything.

After 2-3 minutes it is fully cooked and ready to be served on a plate :)

Enjoy!!

Spam Musubi

Spam musubi is one the reasons why my cholesterol was so high last year back in June when my wife and I visited Kaui for a week. If you look at the nutritional fact for Spam it is pretty scary. Check it out:

The reality of Spam it is high in saturated fat and sodium! So why eat it? Spam is one of those canned processed food items that many of us grew up on. It is quick to cook, rather inexpensive, and many of us would agree that it is tasty but we would not confess in public. The shelf life on a can of Spam is supposedly "indefinite" but will lose flavor over time. I had a can of Spam opened once and forgot to eat it 3 weeks later and it was still very tasty. Here it the quote from the Hormel website:

What is the shelf life of a Hormel Foods product in an unopened can? The processing techniques utilized by Hormel Foods makes the canned product safe for use indefinitely if the product seal remains intact, unbroken and securely attached to a can that has been well maintained. It is suggested that all canned products be stored in a cool and dry environment to keep the flavor adequately preserved. For maximum flavor it is recommended that the product be used within three years of the manufacturing date. After that period of time, the product is still safe to use however, the flavor gradually declines.
 
I'm vegan so what am I doing making Spam musubi?  I fell off the vegan wagon a month ago and I had leftover Spam that I wanted to document on the blog. I've been back on the vegan train a couple of weeks ago but decided to splurge on a rainy Seattle Sunday :)
 
Ingredients (makes 2 musubi for 1 serving)
2 tsp teriyaki sauce
4 oz sliced Spam - don't use the low sodium or low fat version. It's just now the same!
1 cup of cooked rice
2 sheets of dried seaweed
1 Spam musubi mold
 
There's really two ways to make this and I'm going to show you one of the methods. Take your mold and coated with oil to prevent sticking. You can purchase this mold from any decent Japanese grocery store.

Take a sheet of dried seaweed and cut it lengthwise. You can also cut a few strips of seaweed to place in between the rice and the Spam for added taste. I love the taste of dried seaweed! 

Place a sheet of the dried seaweed in the mold. The other method is to skip this step and place the rice in the mold without the seaweed and wrap it at the end. They both will work fine.

The two slices of the Spam and coat with teriyaki sauce. Heat out a frying pan to medium heat and cook the Spam slices for about 2 minutes on each side. You want a caramelized look to the Spam.
 

Place a slice spam in the mold on top of the seaweed.

Add a slice of seaweed on top of the Spam.  This is also optional. Then add a scoop of rice, fold the seaweed and press down on the mold.

Keep pressing down on the mold and remove the Spam musubi!

Slice the musubi in half and enjoy with beer or a cup of tea! You can do different variations by alternating the layer of rice and sushi in the mold.

 
Enjoy!!