Stuffed Flounder, Beet Salad

Delicious dinner tonight in the works. I'll start with the beet salad. Take beets (we had 3), cut off stems and greens. Put beets in a big pot of water to boil for about half an hour. Greens can be eaten like mustard/kale/etc, but we are reserving ours tonight. Pull out beets and rub off the skin, which will come off fairly easily. Slice off the ends, toss those, and slice the rest of the beets. Put your grill pan on medium heat and toss the sliced beets with balsamic, garlic, salt, and pepper. Save the liquid while you grill your beets, 2-3 minutes per side. Put your beets back into the balsamic mix until you are ready to serve. Tonight, we are eating quickly, so they will come out of the balsamic pretty quickly. Put the beets atop salad (tonight is arugula blend), and add goat cheese to the red discs. I DO like beets.

On to the stuffed flounder. We did a twist on the original. My fish, by the way, was only beheaded and cleaned, but I didn't tell the monger to open up the pockets in the fish's body for stuffing. I'd recommend having them do it, but really it is quite easy. Just slip your sharp filet knife from the bottom of the midline downwards the length of the fish and then repeat from the midline upwards towards the top of the fish. For the stuffing, we used shrimp and a cilantro deliciousness. Take a bunch of cilantro, pull off the leaves and put them into your Cuisinart. Add 2 cloves garlic, a pinky-sized piece of ginger (yea, look at your pinky), 2 tbsp grapeseed oil, 4 tsp maple syrup, a dash of fish sauce, a dash of soy sauce, salt, and pepper. Hit the blend until you get your consistency, which is much like pesto. We stuffed the flounder with this and some shrimp and put it in a greased 12x9 pyrex at 350 for 30 minutes or so. Word.

Shrooms

Every once in a while, we buy the mondo pack of mushrooms from Costco. In weeks where I have to eat the whole thing myself, I have to get creative. This week, I achieved. We had some Strawberry Balsamic vinaigrette left to us by some departing friends, and I wondered, what will we do with this? The other factor going into this is that I have a 1lb tub of mixed spring greens, also from Costco. It is $4, so don't hate.

Anyhow, I cut up about 10 big mushrooms, dumped in the vinaigrette, and let them marinate up. They went into my dinner salad, along with feta and a heated, healthy portion of the black bean/pineapple/red onion/avocado salsa I had done earlier in the week. This was a fantastic salad, and I owe it all to the sweet balance the Strawberry Balsamic mushrooms brought to the plate.

Sorry for the delay in posts. Blame Brad.