Healthy Meal: Fish with Leeks, Shallots and Lemon

It was 6:30 and I was tired. I worked a long day, sandwiched between a long commute and, as per usual, cooking was not high on my list of appealing activities. Enter my resolution to cook more and eat better. (And the ticking spoilage clock that is fish once you buy it).

In any case, I am pleased to report that at 7:30, after 25 minutes of easy prep, I sat down to an awesome, home-cooked meal. One that was healthy, fulfilling, and sustainable.

How, you ask? Well, let me expound. First, if you're going to buy fish these days, you have to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium website (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/) and get to its Seafood Watch pocket guide. It offers the definitive list of what you should and shouldn't buy. A warning: it's complicated. I intended to buy cod, but of the list of where and how the cod is fished, Whole Foods failed to offer sustainable cod in its fresh fish section. I also tend to think having a conversation with the Whole Foods folks about the website is a good thing. I ended up with silver hake, like cod but a more course grain. I think this recipe would work with any fish, your conscience permitting.

Ingredients:
2 lemons
2 shallots
2 leeks
2 cloves garlic
2 zucchini (or any roast-able veggie)

organic olive oil cooking spray
Sea salt
Pepper
2 6 oz. fillets of your favorite fish

(6:35 pm) Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees. Spray a casserole dish (9x12) with olive oil spray - about 3 sprays should do it. Wash and slice leeks on a diagonal for large circles, white and light green parts only. Juice and zest one lemon. Toss sliced leeks, 2/3 of the lemon juice and the zest and a healthy dose of salt into the casserole dish (see picture above) and roast covered for 10 minutes, until the leeks just start to turn soft.

(6:45) During those 10 minutes, mince the two shallots, cut the two cloves of garlic into slivers, zest the second lemon and slice the zucchini into bite size pieces. Put the zucchini, garlic, sea salt, most of the lemon zest and two sprays of the olive oil into two pieces of foil, wrapped well but not closed entirely to prevent the zucchini from steaming. Roast.

(6:55) Take out the leeks and add the two pieces of fish right on top of the leeks. Generously season the fish on both sides with sea salt. Top with any remaining lemon juice, the minced shallots and pepper. Cover and roast side by side with your zucchini 15-20 minutes.

(7:20/7:25) Plating and eating. Easy, delicious and healthy. Get this part: Per serving, this entire dish is only 250 calories a serving. (Hake - 160 cal/6oz; Leeks - 54 cal/1 cup; lemon juice/zest - 20 cal; Zucchini - 20 cal/cup, or 3 Weight Watcher points total for the whole meal). If you anticipate needing more food to be full, I would recommend adding brown rice to the dish.

Thanks go to Great Food Fast, the book that offered the basis for the fish recipe, which I then tweaked a bit.

Christmas Dinner Goose

Christmas Dinner Goose
Originally uploaded by AndyRob

Christmas Dinner Goose from Somerfield, soon to become the Coop at Wanstead.

Kitchen to Couch

In the last six months since it was published in The New York Times, Michael Pollan's article, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, has stayed with me, acting like a small voice, a call to action. In it, he reports on and explains our society's move away from time in the kitchen actually cooking to instead watching, discussing, and writing about food. If you didn't read it, you should, especially since you're reading this blog and probably have some interest in food writing: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html.

Winter weather stimulates my appetite for slow-cooked, lovingly prepared foods. But am I making them? Nope. Sure, I will host a dinner party (or New Year's brunch), but when it comes to my daily food needs, I am far more likely to defrost a frozen meal or eat out rather than come anywhere near "cooking." Yet I write a food blog, watch cooking shows, discuss food and restaurants with my friends, and generally think about food.

It's apparent I'm not alone. Pollan ponders the disconnect. He reports that our food preparation time has halved since the time Julia Child was on television to about twenty-seven minutes a day, roughly half the time of an episode of Top Chef. (My ratio is more pronounced, with about five minutes of preparation to a full hour of Top Chef watching). When did we trade time in the kitchen for, as Pollan eloquently puts it, "hyperexuberant, even fetishized images of cooking that are presented on screen"?

In case it's escaped you, let me underline one of Pollan's points: today's cooking shows teach you nothing about how to actually prepare the dishes. I've certainly been sucked into Food Network's "Challenge" series about building the largest structure out of sugar or the cake that looks most like a cartoon character. Um, learning about cooking? Not so much. Pollan suggests that what used to be education has now become more about selling -- a brand of chef, a prepared sauce, and whatever else fills the content of the commercials.

Pollan closes on two notes that smack of hard truth. Pollan points out that cooking strikes "a deep emotional chord" in us, an anthropologically identifiable part of our culture, and then throws in this doozy: "obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation." And cites the studies, admonishing us in the end that the diet to embrace is to "cook it yourself."

So, in January, in this time of acknowledgements and resolutions, I confess that I watch more food television and eat out more than I cook, that I cannot cook a meal without following a recipe, that I cannot remember the last time I cooked for myself after work, and that I want to change. I resolve in 2010 to "cook it myself," not to stop eating out, but to perfect a routine of home cooking that works into my life and is healthy and workable long term. Wish me luck.