The last of the Silver Spoon

Well, after 2 months and 30 recipes or so later, I am finished with my run of the Silver Spoon.  The recipes are easy to follow and put together using simple ingredients and in most cases, the food turns out to be complex and delicious.  This was a great way to get some very healthy foods into our family, just in time for the start of the new year and for the new year diet.  When I normally cook food, I cook during the weekend to produce at least one meal for a dinner and one to take to work for lunch.  Both of these meals last half the week.  I then make another two meals on a Wednesday or Thursday for the rest of the week and then restart.  Some of these recipes were made into non-meat meals to help with the diet.

We have a roasted red pepper sauce, meant for pastas.  I made it so my wife could use it on her yam noodles (which have almost no calories themselves.)

This was a mushrooms and prosciutto dish.  It had about 1 and 1/2 pounds of mushrooms and 3 ounces of prosciutto along with garlic and many other yummy things.  I do have to note, that only about 1/10th of the recipes in this book, used garlic.

This was blueberry risotto and while it may look strange, it is not a sweet dish but a savory one.

This was the best dish I had made in while.   This was called Baked Savoy Cabbage.  It is a layer of cabbage, then a layer of freshly cut mozzarella and then a layer of Italian sausage with some freshly ground black sea salt and pepper.  Then the layers continue until you finish with a layer of cabbage on the top.  You then pour a 1/2 cup of cream or in my case, half and half, over it all and it turns into this perfect casserole dish.  As I was telling my son who is studying the food pyramid in kindergarten, this dish has food from the meat, vegetable and dairy food groups all in one serving.  Maybe have a side of the blueberry risotto and you have all 5 food groups at one meal.

This is the last of the Silver Spoon recipes and my time in the book, if you are interested in any of the recipes and you do not want to buy the book for yourself, please let me know.

The Silver Spoon part 3

I wanted to let you know about this and how happy I was about making this dish.  I did the Chicken in Lager recipe from the Silver Spoon book and used the broth and the tender vegetables to make a risotto.  I took all of the broth and placed it in a pot, brought it to a boil and in the other pan, put some of those cooked carrots and leeks in some olive oil and then added a cup of aborio rice.  I played the normal technique of making risotto which is a long task but came out with some meaty, rich and very tasty risotto.

Now, what else did I make out of this cookbook?  Well, to continue my crusade, I made some Brussel Sprouts and almonds:

My wife then had some fake crab meat and she wanted something good, so I made her a cold crab salad.

But what made this salad a good addition to this blog, was the fact that the red sauce on top of this crab salad, was made from a different sauce.  I had to make a Velote' sauce which was basically just a roux and some seafood stock together.

Then I had to make an Aurora sauce, which is a Velote' sauce with tomato sauce added in.  I did that and had this finished sauce where was drizzled on top of this salad.  My wife liked the salad and made a good comparison to the Mexican layer salads of the 1970's.  This salad had a layer of raddichio, hearts of palm, crab meat, and then sliced dill pickles.