Food Friday: Some Recent Triumphs

P's Beautiful Turkey Pie

Last weekend P made a beautiful turkey pie from some Thanksgiving leftovers I had put in the freezer. This is a great recipe from Real Simple that he would occasionally make in New York, although our local grocery, even the big one, didn't have refrigerated pie dough. We used puff pastry and came out great. A big shout out to one of my oldest friends, Amelia, who suggested pie and also thought some crust initials would be fun. Peter insists he didn't read that comment, and M refused to eat the pie, but I really liked it!

Our freezer could use a defrost so have been trying to use up what we have.  Last week I made a delicious meatloaf out of some random ground beef, cumberland sausage, and cooked chicken that we had.  To that I added bread crumbs (am I the only one for whom bits of old loaves of bread pile up in the freezer?), a couple of eggs, a couple of grated carrots and a couple of grated cloves of garlic.  It was delicious, and turned into two meals (I put about a third of it in the freezer and we had it last night with pasta). Here is M's review. The first word he says is "delicious," but it's hard to understand through his food giggle and my late breaking idea to film what he was saying.

Partially thanks to Cheryl's suggestion and partially because I wanted to use up what I thought was fish stock from the freezer, I made some delicious salmon stew.

Mushrooms and Shallots

This is a delicious dish that is really simple to make.  You start with a small wild salmon fillet.  I don't know what the weight was; but the piece was probably a four inch square (for two).  I sauteed a bunch of shallots and mushrooms in butter and olive oil, added some green beans cut to one inch in length, then added the salmon and "fish stock" (it was actually the water I'd cooked some carrots in, but it worked) with a fish bouillon cube (the bouillon we get here is much better than US bouillon).  I also added a couple of tablespoons of savignon blanc since I had it in the fridge.  I cooked a small amount of brown rice separately and served up the dish with a little fresh parsley.

Salmon Stew, served with a chunk of fresh
baguette from our local French bakery.

M was served a deconstructed version which
was heavy on the rice (he dislikes fresh salmon).
This did not go over well.