Magnificent Miso Mollusks

If you're looking for a quick weekday meal, look no further than some seared scallops.  They don't take much time to cook up, and make for a very tasty meal.  The sweet scallop is perfectly complimented by the salty and umami from the miso paste.

You'll want to start by patting your scallops dry.

Then we mixed up a marinade of miso paste, mirin, rice vinegar, ginger, and a touch of sesame oil.  We used this recipe as a guide.  We let the scallops marinate in the sauce for about 30 minutes while we prepped our sugar snap peas and toasted up some almonds.

When you're ready to cook your scallops, get your pan nice and hot.  Place your scallops in the pan, and let them get a nice, golden brown sear before flipping them.  Searing them gives them not only a great taste but nice textural component as well.  Be sure to keep your attention on the pan, they only take a few minutes to cook on each side.

We topped our scallops with some freshly chopped scallions, and had a nice little salad of mixed greens, sugar snap peas, and almonds.  The outcome is a fresh, sophisticated, warm weather dish that looks as great as it tastes.  That's it--quick, simple, and delicious!

Sear-iously Good Tuna

The items in this week's share really inspired this quick and easy dinner of sesame crusted seared tuna over bok choy and daikon.  It didn't hurt that tuna was on sale at the grocery store either.

Start by mixing up a marinade for your tuna.  We used soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and some fresh ginger. Toss everything together, add your tuna, and let it sit while you prep everything else.

For the salad, we just chopped up some baby bok choy, sugar snap peas, and daikon.  If you have a mandoline, that would be ideal for slicing the daikon.  But if you're like us and don't have one, just try to slice the daikon as thin as possible.

For the dressing, we threw together some sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine, black vinegar, and a touch of honey.  You could also use rice wine vinegar in place of the Chinese cooking wine and black vinegar, we just didn't have any on hand.  So we improvised.

Now, back to the tuna.  Once marinated, we seasoned it with some wasabi salt & pepper that we'd picked up from the Asian market, to add a little spice.  But if you don't have any, you can season with salt and pepper.  Then just roll it in your sesame seeds.  We used a combo of black and regular.  Place your tuna in a hot pan and sear it for a couple minutes on each side.  We like it raw in the middle, so we didn't leave our tuna in the pan very long.

Then just slice up your tuna and arrange it on top of your salad.  We topped ours with some freshly sliced scallions.  It paired nicely with the Flying Dog green tea imperial stout that I happened to find at the grocery store that morning.  Restaurant quality food in a matter of minutes.  What more could you ask for?

It's a Wrap!

On a cold, rainy night like tonight we were looking for a quick, easy, healthy, tasty, and comforting meal.  We were hungry for some delicious pot stickers like we had at Chinese New Year, but we wanted to keep it Paleo, and use some of our share ingredients, so decided to make some Asian lettuce wraps.

Essentially, we used the recipe for the pot sticker filling.  We started by mincing up some ginger, garlic, and scallions.  

That was all mixed with some ground pork, salt, white pepper, sesame oil, a little soy sauce, and a dash of Chinese cooking wine.  Next we chopped up our shitakes from the share, and tossed it all together.

We cooked the mixture in a pan with a bit of coconut oil, and it was ready in no time.  While that cooked, we julienned some carrots to wrap up in the lettuce, and chopped up a little more green onion, and some cilantro to garnish.

We tore the leaves from the head of bibb lettuce to use as our wraps, and set up a little station to build our wraps.  Just spoon in some pork and mushrooms, add a few carrot sticks, top with some green onion and cilantro, and you're good to go!