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Posts tagged ‘coconut’

Lemon-coconut salmon and asparagus grain bowls with pink rice

Between work, teaching, and all the various tasks that come along with expecting a new family member in, oh, four months, I haven’t had a lot of time lately to cook creatively and try out new recipes. Even this one isn’t particularly new – more like a new combination of things I make fairly regularly. But I’m feeling pretty inspired by the spring produce starting to trickle in, and I’ve been trying to eat more fish lately (baby, your brain is going to be so powerful!). When the seafood counter was out of my favorite lake trout fillets we decided to splurge on a piece of wild Sockeye and go with that instead, but I prepare trout and salmon pretty much interchangeably, so either would work in this recipe. All together it was a pretty perfect spring dinner, healthy and flavorful and reasonably quick. There are a few good cooking lessons to be learned here (especially in cooking the fish – my all-time favorite, go-to method), so I’ll take each component one at a time and add some helpful notes!

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Baked oatmeal + persimmons, toasted coconut, and vanilla

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Here I am, the day before Thanksgiving, not talking about Thanksgiving food. This would be a perfect breakfast for an otherwise long weekend full of heavy dishes and indulging, and it would be particularly great to serve if you have guests in the house, but that’s just a coincidence. The main point is that this is a wonderful breakfast for when you have a bit of time in the morning – partially because it needs some time in the oven, but mostly because its very nature seems to most fit a slow, cozy, restorative sort of start to the day.

It’s rare, these days, that we have those sorts of mornings at home – between working, house guests, and out-of-town weekend plans, only once or twice since we’ve been in Madison have we had a morning with nowhere to be. So, when two weekends ago we had a cold, gray day with nothing on the schedule until the afternoon, I knew immediately that I’d turn to this recipe. Oatmeal, baked slowly with spices, maple syrup, milk, and an egg, plus fruit and/or nuts and/or any other toppings you might think to add. I knew going in exactly what I wanted to add – cubes of persimmon, toasted coconut, pumpkin and flax seeds, and vanilla. I’d been adding those things to my regular, everyday oatmeal in the mornings, and I couldn’t get over how well they all went together.

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Citrus-coconut tartlets with cream cheese pastry

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Just a quick post of a recipe that’s unfortunately not entirely quick – but totally worth it.

I’ve made this one twice in the last week, first testing it for a little catering job I did last week and then tweaking it and sending it out to rave reviews. I’m glad I did the test, since the recipe definitely needed some re-working, and the end result was fantastic. These were the first thing to go at the event, and I had trouble keeping myself from eating four or five at a time from the test batch.  Super flaky cream cheese pastry, tart and sweet lemon-lime-coconut filling, and a crispy little layer of vanilla glaze on top. Topped with two strips of candied lime zest, if you want to get fancy. Read more

Chocolate coconut muffins with coconut flour

I baked something without gluten.

Yes. Even though gluten and I have a pretty close, dependent relationship (in which I depend highly on it to make tasty things), I did it. And I’ll do it again, readily.

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Back to work macaroons

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Damn you, Molly Wizenberg. Damn you! (In a good way.)

I received Molly Wizenberg’s lovely “A Homemade Life” for Christmas (two copies, in fact), and immediately sank in for two straight days of reading in Portland, which happens to be one of my most favorite activities. The book is taken mainly from her blog, Orangette, which you’ll notice I’ve mentioned more than a few times lately. Each chapter is a story from her life, followed by a related recipe, starting at childhood and ending with her wedding cake. Read more