A Cheap Substitute for Expensive Fishes

The Substitute: swai fish

Along with basa and tra, two related varieties also appearing at more and more stores, belong to what’s called the Pangasius family and they’re similar in character to catfish. In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, which has an authoritative site that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the fish that end up on our dinner plates, describes swai as a river-farmed catfish, sometimes simply referred to in the U.S. only as catfish.

Swai is a white-flesh fish (typically available in fillet form) with a sweet mild, taste and light flaky texture that can be broiled, grilled, or coating with bread crumbs and fried, according to experts. It can be prepared simply, but also takes well to sauces. A 3.5-ounce serving of plain fish contains around 90 calories, 4 grams of fat (1.5 saturated), 45 grams of cholesterol and 50 milligrams of sodium.

The swai fish, unlike catfish which are found in ponds, is found in the rivers of Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. If you don’t find the label swai fish in the local supermarket, it is called and labeled by other names–shark catfish, or striped catfish. I typically do not like fish. However, I love this one! It is light-tasting, and, in my opinion, does not have that 'fishy taste.' I serve this fish with English peas or green beans and wild rice or rice pilaf.

Swai fish may also be added to other dishes. The nuggets may be cooked and then tossed with pasta and other seafood for the perfect, healthy, and filling seafood pasta. This fish flakes quite easily and with the perfect mix-ins and some bread, it can be made into a sandwich. It may also be made into an open-faced sandwich by adding some olive oil, olives, cheese, and probably a bit of capers. Some recipes may even be developed on your own as you get to know this fish better. 

Swai fish is a perfect alternative to the usual food fish, just to give the menu planning a bit of variety by introducing more fish to the list. This is a fish easy to cook, even with novice cooks starting out in the kitchen as it goes well with a variety of other ingredients and can be cooked using a lot of cooking techniques.

Seasoned Swai Fish Fillet

    4 (4 ounce) fillets swai fish

    2 tablespoons margarine

    1/4 cup dry white wine

    1 tablespoon lemon juice

    1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro (optional)

    1 teaspoon minced garlic

    1 teaspoon salt

    1 teaspoon ground black pepper

    1 teaspoon paprika

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Spray a shallow pan or baking sheet with cooking spray.

Place fish fillets into the prepared pan.

Heat margarine in a saucepan over medium heat. Mix white wine, lemon juice, cilantro, garlic, salt, and black pepper into the melted margarine; simmer sauce for 2 minutes.

 Generously glaze sauce over fish fillets. Sprinkle fillets with paprika.

Bake in the preheated oven until fish flakes easily with a fork, 10 to 12 minutes.

Choosing Vegetarian Recipes

Whether you are an experienced chef or someone who has never put together a suitable menu for eating meal, think about expanding your understanding of cooking by adding vegetarian recipes. Chefs of popular restaurants and moms of hungry families will enjoy having more meals to cook, and the customers and children who eat the food will be overjoyed as well.

Perusing vegetarian recipes is great, even it it's simply just to add some yummy treats to the kitchen with something new. No cook likes to get fed up by preparing the same meals over and over. It is always fun to try new ingredients or methods of making the foods you love and it can be just as fun to try out various dishes with vegetarian recipes you have never tried before.

Amazing vegetarian recipes can be found in many places. Search online, in cookbooks, or at local health food stores for ideas. If you have friends that have been cooking great dishes try exchanging vegetarian recipes with them. Sometimes restaurants will even share vegetarian recipes with their customers for little or no charge.

Paying a visit into a local health food store is a great way to obtain all of the ingredients and spices you will need to begin cooking vegetarian recipes to perfection. Workers at these stores are often knowledgeable with the resources they have and you can learn a lot from them.

Including vegetarian recipes into any diet will bring variety and give healthy eating options. Many studies suggest that switching just some of your weekly diet to vegetarian recipes can be of great assistance to your health. Let your taste buds enjoy new things that are good for your body. Vegetarian recipes will often include many of the vitamins, minerals, and sources of nutrition that every body needs. Instead of meat, vegetarian recipes are filled with healthy protein substitutes so that you do not miss out on things you need. 

Take a look at your health and at the foods you've been eating. By substituting a few vegetarian recipes into your diet can quickly improve how you feel and can be part of an overall health plan that will improve your life. Since few things are as important as leading a healthy life, take your time into finding and checking out new and better ways to eat. 

Vegetarian recipes are just one of many things that you can consider. And contrary to popular belief, vegetarian recipes are full of the taste and enjoyment of many other foods you eat. The biggest difference is that they are much better for you. Contrary to popular belief, vegetarian cooking can be very tasty when you know how.

                                   Baked Creamed Onions

Ingredients

2 cup small whole frozen onions
1 can low-fat cream of celery soup
3 tbsp. milk
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 cup croutons or bread crumbs

Preparation Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cook onions as directed on package, drain. Place in lightly greased casserole dish.

2. Combine soup and milk. Pour over onions. Sprinkle with cheese and croutons or bread crumbs. Bake for about 15 minutes.

Curried Vegetable Soups

A steaming bowl of soup on a cold, stormy or snowy weather is the perfect antidote to all the gloom. It’s like a warm snuggle or a burst of sunshine with rays strong enough to melt the icicles gathering on the eaves of the house. Hot and savory soup beats the cold mist with steam, fogging up eyeglasses as one nurses spoonful after spoonful of the broth. Soups recipes bring about this comforting feeling, reflecting the care the cook nurtures a pot of broth or stock, with which most great soups begin.

Hot soups can be as nutritious as the ingredients you put on the pot. Meat, poultry and seafood provide the much-needed protein in both the broth and as main or supplementary ingredient. Vegetables, herbs and spices contribute vitamins and anti-oxidants that give soup its healing properties. In fact, in Chinese herbal medicine, soup with special herbs and ingredients are often prescribed to cure an ailment or malady. Perhaps that’s why chicken soup is often given to those with colds and flu.

Curried Vegetable Soups

Vegetables soups are especially good with curry flavors because they can be a bit bland. You can sweeten vegetable soups, adding sugar and cream. This would work well with a canned pumpkin soup recipe, for example, because pumpkin can be used in both sweet and savory recipes. You can also make sweet carrot or yam soup, adding orange juice, ginger and a little sugar. Curry powder adds flavor to any of these.

Other vegetables are better kept savory. A broccoli or turnip based soup would be good with savory curry flavors. Some vegetables have a strong flavor and others are very mellow, which is why there are different curry soup recipes for different vegetables.

This is a chicken stock based soup recipe and the combination of dill, curry powder, and cayenne pepper adds a flavorful spiciness without overpowering the other flavors. Halve the amount of cayenne pepper if you want a milder taste. Corn and tomatoes have a naturally sweet flavor and this is a wonderfully warming soup.

Leaving the soup to stand at room temperature for a couple of hours and then heating it through again is optional but it does improve and enhance the flavor. This soup recipe makes enough for four servings.

What you will need:

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 teaspoon curry powder

5 oz frozen corn kernels

1 cup canned crushed tomatoes in juice

1 cup chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 cups milk

1 teaspoon dill weed

How to make it:

Melt the butter, then add the flour and whisk for a minute. Add the milk and keep whisking the mixture over a medium heat until it is thick. Add the cayenne pepper and curry powder and stir. Add the tomatoes and chicken stock, then the corn and dill.

Heat the soup to a simmer and cook it for ten minutes. Let the soup stand at room temperature for two hours, then gently warm it up and serve hot with some warm, crusty bread for dipping.

You can use curry powder and cayenne pepper to live up any vegetable soup recipe. Pumpkin soup is one of the most versatile kinds of soup because it can be sweet, tangy, spicy, smooth, chunky or a combination of these flavors and textures.

Chicken Fricassee With Cream

Chicken Fricassee With Cream

The most popular item in the menu of Chef Georges Blanc’s gastronomic restaurant, which bears his name, is the Poulet de Bresse and here he makes Chicken Fricassee with the famous Bresse, a breed of chicken from the Rhone-Alps in France and the most sought after and expensive label of all chickens in a country that takes its food quality and labels seriously.

In France, there are five labels for chicken categorized according to their production method: standard broiler, certified, label rouge, organic, and Bresse. The Bresse is considered to be the most superior quality out of the five and is highly valued for its depth of flavor, delicious clean fat, and tender meat. Few of these precious foul make it out of the country due to their high demand inside France.

In this recipe, Chef Georges Blanc cooks a classic French recipe called chicken fricassee with cream using a large fatty Bresse chicken with white plumage, red comb, and blue legs—making up the colors of the French Flag, or tricolore. Chef Blanc adds that, “It is the only foul which bears the seal of quality of the French Agricultural Industry. It is free-range, fed exclusively with grain and milk, and the result is a very high quality foul.” You can make the same recipe using free-range organic chicken from your local farm although it might taste a lot different from the Bresse version as molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal would attest in the BBC series “In Search of Perfection,” Bresse chicken is a clear winner in terms of taste and texture out of the many chickens breeds in the world.

Known for his series of cookbooks, particularly, The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc, Chef Blanc likes preparing and serving traditional and authentic French family-style cuisine. His recipe for Chicken fricassee is one of the best available around.


Recommended Wine

Gevrey Chambertin, Pommard


Chicken Fricassee With Cream

Ingredients


· 1 chicken (about 4.4 lbs.)

· 14 ½ tablespoons butter
· 2 cup double cream (40-45% fat content)
· 12 baby onions (cut into 4 – 5 chunks each)
· 3 garlic cloves, mushrooms
· 1 1/4 cups white wine, thyme
· 1 laurel leaf
· pepper, salt


Preparation Instructions

1. Cut chicken into eight pieces. Place pieces in a pot with melted butter and season with salt and pepper. Add chopped onions, four or five garlic cloves, and some mushrooms. Add bay leaf and thyme. Cook until it turns a golden brown color, then sprinkle with white wine. Add cream. Cover and leave to cook for forty minutes.

2. Take the chicken out and place in a saucepan. Add some water to the cream. Strain the liquid to take out the herb garnishing and then pour into the chicken and heat for a little bit more. Season according to taste. Arrange on a dish and serve.

Hunting Ducks and Cooking Them

Just as in any dish prepared in a slow cooker, crock pot duck recipes are convenient for the home cook and a family who appreciates a beautifully prepared whole duck or duck breast. Crock pot, which originated from a brand name of slow cookers in the United States, is now synonymous to the process of cooking food in low temperature for a very long period. The slow cooker is a great way to cook duck recipes. While the common way is to parboil and then roast the duck to get that shiny, dark brown crisp skin, a slow cooker can make things even simpler.

1. Duck Hunting Rivers, Lakes, and Ponds

   Share

   FOWLEDREALITY

   ·

   22 DAYS AGO
2. 
   

   Use a 6 quart crock pot for whole ducks weighing 4 to 5 pounds. In crock pot duck recipes, cooking time may vary according to your crock pot design. But the most common step here would be the preparation of the duck. For whole ducks, remove the giblets as well as the fat hanging from the cavity opening. You can remove the skin entirely before cooking but if you want to serve it with crisp skin, prick the duck all over to render the fat first. Rub the duck with salt and pepper all over. If you have citrus, garlic and onions, you can insert it into the cavity for flavor.

   
   

   To get the beautiful burnished brown skin, brown the whole duck in a sauté pan for 15 minutes on each side. You can also broil the duck later after removing from the crock pot. Into the slow cooker, put in the other ingredients such as onions, shallots, celery and other herbs and spices. You could also put in chopped apples and potatoes so that it makes a raised bed at the bottom with which you can settle the duck. If you have a little round rack that will fit into the crock pot, that will be helpful too. With its raised position, the fat will melt down the body and drip into the vegetables below. That means more flavor is soaked up by the duck and the vegetables.

   
   

   Or try out this recipe if you caught black ducks

   
   

   http://www.gourmandia.com/recipes/black-duck-with-wine

   
   

   Black Ducks with Wine

   
   

   Ingredients

   
   

   1 black duck

   
   

   2 cups all purpose flour

   
   

   3 tablespoons butter

   
   

   Salt to taste

   
   

   1/2 teaspoon thyme leaves

   
   

   2 white onions finely chopped

   
   

   1 duck heart - chopped

   
   

   2 cups white wine – warmed

   
   

   2 scoops whipped unsweetened cream

   
   

   Preparation Instructions

   
   

   1. On a chopping tray chop the duck into medium chunks. Roll the pieces in the flour and set aside.

   
   

   2. In a saucepan heat some oil/butter and fry the duck until golden brown, turning often. After this add salt, thyme, duck heart, and wine.

   
   

   3. Cover and cook in a preheated oven at 350 degrees F for an hour. To this add cream and cook for another 20 minutes. Serve on a warm platter with the gravy from the pan.

A Humble Feast for People Who's into Diet

Vegetarian Dieting

Vegetarianism is defined as the practice of consuming solely plant-based foods and taking out meat, poultry, fish and seafood. Dairy and eggs may or may not be included. Compete avoidance of animal products is classified as veganism. On the other hand, a diet by definition is the intentional selection and/or limitation of food to control body weight and/or address certain health issues such as high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar and heart disease.

In the broadest sense, vegetarianism may be considered a diet in itself as it confers health benefits including weight loss if done properly. Those who practice this oftentimes do not wish to call it a diet as this term connotes deprivation and that it is something you get into for a specific amount of time to achieve a specific health goal as opposed to a lifelong lifestyle choice.

In the strictest sense, a vegetarian diet can be viewed as a “diet within a diet” wherein excessive fats and high-glycemic fruits are limited and instead more vegetables are consumed.

Whether vegetarian or not, smart choices have to be made to be able to achieve long term health and wellness and avoid diseases.

With the rapid increase of people who refrain from or totally avoid consuming meat, more and more restaurants are offering vegetarian options in their menu. Same goes for airlines and cruise ships. These are usually priced more expensively that other meal options and/or sometimes have to be requested ahead of time. Though vegetarians are rarely spoilt for choice in most restaurants, coffee shops and fast food joints, there are some that have a variety of vegetarian options or are flexible in converting some of their dishes.

A home made recipe for vegetarians alike would enjoy:

Ingredients

1 can (8 oz.) mandarin oranges, drained

1/2 cup balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp. olive oil

2 tbsp. granulated sugar

1/2 cup raspberries, preferably fresh

2 lb. mixed salad greens

1/2 cup raw almonds

1. In a medium bowl, mix together all the ingredients except the salad greens and almonds. Put in refrigerator and chill for about 30 minutes.

2. Put salad greens in a large salad bowl. Remove dressing from refrigerator and pour over salad greens. Sprinkle with almonds and serve.

Chocolate Cupcake Recipe

Chocolate cupcakes are the perfect party treat for any occasion, be it a children’s party, a picnic get-together, intimate Valentines or Christmas with the family. One cup is just enough for one person and it can be served in a casual setting with no mess or fuss, or can also make an elegant presentation in weddings or formal occasions. You can enjoy these chocolate cupcakes on their own or decorate them in different colors depending on the occasion and your imagination.

To make a perfect chocolate cupcake use the best quality ingredients and measure each and every ingredient as precisely as possible. This will ensure a fluffy and delicate cupcake with awesome chocolate flavor. Wet ingredients like milk are best measured using glass cups placed on a table with a level surface. Dry ingredients like sugar and flour are best measured in cups that are flat on top. Use a spatula to level the dry ingredients and lightly scoop them making sure you don’t press them and make them compact in the cup or you will end up using more than you need. Sifting the ingredients is best to get an accurate measurement. This also prevents lumps from forming and making the batter smoother and lighter for fluffier and airy cupcakes.

Ingredients

2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup cocoa powder, unsweetened

Pinch of salt

3 tablespoons melted butter

1 ½ cups white sugar

2 eggs, well beaten

3/4 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 cup milk

Preparation Instructions

1 Mix together all the dry ingredients except the sugar.

2 In a separate bowl, blend the melted butter and white sugar. Beat in each egg separately. Add the vanilla extract.

3 Add the milk to the dry ingredients, then add the remaining moist ingredients, stirring well.

4 Pour the batter into muffin pans lined with cupcake papers. Fill about 1/2 way, to allow space for the batter to rise. Bake for 15-20 minutes in a preheated oven at 350 degrees F.

Duck Carpaccio With Pistou Sauce

An exotic appetizer, carpaccio is often served in fine dining restaurants and luxury hotels. Carpaccio is traditionally made with thinly sliced raw beef and served with a mustard dressing or olive oil dressing but the dish has transformed and evolved since its conception and various types of carpaccio has been made and experimented with including fish, fruits, seafood, and in this recipe, duck! In this recipe, duck carpaccio is dressed with a pistou sauce made with basil, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pine nuts for a truly flavorful and stimulating appetizer.

The essential thing when making this recipe is to slice the duck meat very thinly since this is the essence of carpaccio. To do this, you need a meat slicer or slicing machine but if you don’t have one, use a very sharp and long knife to slice the meat as thinly as possible. To make it easier, the duck breast with the fat on is wrapped in cling film and frozen. Once the duck breast is frozen, it is easier to cut it into very thin slices and it melts lusciously in the mouth when it is eaten.

Ingredients

For the pistou (sauce):

1.76 oz. (about 3 ½ tablespoons) basil

2 teaspoons walnuts

2 teaspoons hazelnuts

2 teaspoons pine nuts

salt, pepper

1/4 cup olive oil

For the presentation:

1 duck breast, sliced (about 1 pound)

1 mixed salad bouquet

2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar

basil leaf

Preparation Instructions

1 To prepare the pistou, chop the basil, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pine nuts. Pulse in food processor and season with salt and pepper. Progressively add olive oil to obtain a thick paste.

2 Wrap duck breast in plastic film and freeze until hard. Cut into thin slices with a slicing machine.

3 Using a paintbrush, cover 4 serving dishes with the pistou sauce. Place the duck slices on each of them, covering the entire plate. Salt, pepper, and cover lightly with pistou. Repeat a second time.

4 Season the salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

5 Lay a small bouquet of salad in the middle of the dish. Decorate with a basil leaf.

All About the Bream

The Recipes of Easter