Food and Crafts for All Occasions

Green Salad with Smoked Trout, Poached Eggs, Potatoes and Asparagus

This has been one of my favorite salads lately. Sort of a version of Niçoise salad with smoked trout instead of tuna and poached eggs instead of boiled ones. My greens choice for this salad is a mix of frisee (I love ’em bitter!) and Asian greens mix (not to be confused with Asian salad mix!) which includes mizuna, pak choi, baby tat soi and other fancy and very tasty herbs.  If you cannot find Asian mix in stores, go for Spring Salad Mix or something like it.

As for the trout, you can smoke it yourself or buy it in a store. Trader Joe’s carries quite delicious and inexpensive smoked trout. If you want to smoke trout yourself and are a happy owner of a Green egg grill, follow the instructions given here for salmon. The only difference with trout would be that you would need much less salt and shorter time to cure it in the fridge since trout fillets are much smaller and thinner than salmon. For the same reason, the cooking time will be shorter too. Shoot for 45-50 min.

Green Egg Smoked Pork Baby Back Ribs

Have you watched So I Married an Axe Murderer? If you have, you should remember how Charlie’s mom got herself a Juice Tiger and announced that she juices everything now. Well, the same happened to us after we'd bought a Green Egg grill. We grill and smoke everything we can put our hands on. For the smoking purposes we also got a special blower/fan called BBQ Guru that lets the Green Egg maintain the same low temperature for a long time. We also bought a plate setter for indirect heat.

Our Ideal Saturday

For food crazies like us, ideal Saturday means lots of good cooking and good eating. This is how our last Saturday went.

Starting breakfast: Fruit salad with non-fat organic vanilla yogurt and crunchy granola with oats, puffed rice and pumpkin seeds.

After a pretty quick farmer's market shopping for morels (hurray! they are 25$ per pound now) and garlic spears, we returned home and started to smoke the spicy Andouille sausages we stuffed the day before.

While they were smoking,we had sandwiches with home-smoked salmon, Persian cucumbers, sour cream and horseradish, all on a Russian rye bread:

And after I made two batches of strawberry jam, one with lavender and another one with chocolate.

The sausages are ready:

And so are the jams:

Despite snacking on the jams and sausages (you have to taste what you cook, right?), we still had some room  left for light dinner:

And some after dinner cooking, just cannot stop yet. Morels were halved, soaked, washed, sauteed and put into the fridge.

If we're going to have more morels this year, I'll freeze them (sauteed) so we can enjoy them in winter too.

Green Egg Smoked Salmon

Several years ago Ilya and I had a gas grill and an electric smoker and thought we enjoyed grilling and smoking very much.  However, after we bought us a Green Egg, we finally understood what real grilling and smoking is all about. Even pizza in it cooks within 2 minutes and tastes like the one from a real wood oven.