Garlic lover's pasta, wild pesto salmon

Two full bulbs of California garlic -- at least a dozen and a half cloves -- go into a simple sauce for organic whole wheat spaghetti, above.

A second version of Garlic Lover's Pasta uses organic whole wheat fusilli and adds fresh organic baby spinach.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

Garlic -- and lots of it -- chopped fresh or canned diced tomatoes, and extra-virgin olive oil are all you need to prepare a simple and satisfying sauce for pasta. 

You can add grated cheese to the pot as well as at the table for the finishing touch.

I use Trader Joe's organic whole-wheat pasta ($1.39 for 16 ounces). The California garlic and organic diced tomatoes come from Costco Wholesale.

For breakfast, I crowned Garlic Lover's whole wheat fusilli and spaghetti with an organic brown egg.

Wild for salmon

Another simple and simply delicious dish is wild salmon fillets that get a squirt of fresh lime juice and a pinch or two of Aleppo pepper before they go into the oven.

I roast salmon in a 375-degree oven for  8 to  12 minutes, depending on whether I want it rare for me or cooked through for other family members.

Once they come out of the oven, all you have to do is spoon on Kirkland Signature Basil Pesto from Costco Wholesale.

Kirkland Signature Basil Pesto is a refrigerated product that you can use at room temperature for wild salmon, above; or as a sandwich spread and pasta sauce.

Canned-fish salad -- pink salmon, yellowfin tuna and sardines -- is great in sandwiches, but when you're on a no-bread diet, you can pile it high for breakfast with organic spring mix, kimchi, olives, tomatoes and cucumbers. I dress the canned fish in Dijon mustard, fresh lime juice and ground cumin.

Why I cook in large batches. When dinner is as easy as plating and reheating leftover wild salmon with pesto and organic fusilli with garlic, tomato and spinach, followed by a salad, what's not to love?

Tasting and cooking notes -- in pictures

One of my favorite breakfasts got healthier when I asked the Golden Grill, on Queen Anne Road in Teaneck, to grill or broil fresh whiting fillets, which are normally fried.

Frozen sea scallops from Costco Wholesale were a little tough and a few contained fine grit. I made them with organic diced tomatoes, white wine and lemon juice.

I made a faux Cuban sandwich for my son, above, using a crusty baguette from Balthazar Bakery in Englewood. I had only two of the four ingredients, roast pork and Swiss cheese, and no heated press. My son doesn't like mustard, so I used Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce, and melted the cheese under the broiler, below.

I used pre-washed organic spring mix to garnish a sandwich of canned fish salad with sweet pepper, onion, garlic, apple, Dijon mustard, lemon juice and ground cumin.

A fluffy 10-inch frittata, above and below, was made with 7 organic whole eggs, smoked wild salmon, shredded cheese, low-fat organic milk, fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, and no-salt organic seasonings. I started it on top of the stove and finished it under the broiler, and served it with orgnaic brown rice and sweet plantains. Almost all of the ingredients came from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack.

At Whole Foods Market in Paramus, a briny Lobster and Corn Bisque is made without heavy cream. A small, 8-ounce cup is $3.74, including tax.

A 16-ounce cup of Organic Indian Chai, a spiced black tea, is $1.93 at Whole Foods.

Whole Foods' gorgeous antipasti will set you back $9.99 a pound. I'm happy with the assorted Italian olives with whole garlic for $3.99 a pound at Jerry's in Englewood.

A perennial favorite in our home is Valentina Mexican Hot Sauce (Extra Hot), with a black label, which we buy at Hackensack Market on Passaic Street.

An earlier version of canned-fish salad went great with Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix, cucumber, tomato, kimchi and za'atar thyme mixture.

I cook ahead hot cereal, pasta with sardines and other dishes in larger than unusual quantities to cut the time it takes to put a meal on the table. Here, fresh blackberries and low-fat milk were added to reheated 10-grain cereal and rough-cut oatmeal with pignoli nuts, dried cherries, black chia seeds and goji berries.

No-recipe home cooking in photos

Breakfast salad: Organic spring mix with beefsteak tomato, za'atar thyme mixture, and reduced fat cheese; cabbage kimchi, olives and canned-fish salad (yellowfin tuna, pink salmon and sardines).

Small mustard greens with a bottle of Mexican green salsa.

Mustard greens plated with half of a mahi-mahi fillet cooked in spicy green salsa or salsa verde and a sweet potato made in 6 minutes in a microwave (speed-cook setting).

An egg-white omelet with reduced-fat cheese, white anchovies and coarsely ground Aleppo pepper plated with leftover sugar pea shoots.

Fresh greens


I cook greens, fresh broccoli and French green beans the same way, and they are ready in under 5 minutes.


First, cut and wash your greens, then blanch in a covered pot with boiling water for 1 to 2 minutes.


Using the cover, drain the pot and put it back on the stove with no flame under it.


You can drizzle the greens with extra-virgin olive oil, sprinkle on a little salt and add seasonings such as powdered garlic and black pepper.


Or, you can add a little soy sauce and sesame oil, and no-salt organic seasoning. You're done.


Fish in green sauce


Pour half of a bottle of spicy Mexican salsa verde into a large, non-stick pot and warm it up. Add any kind of wild-caught fish fillets, including frozen mahi-mahi or Alaskan salmon.


Pour the rest of the sauce over the fish and squeeze the juice of one or two limes into the pot. Cover and cook for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on whether the fish is fresh of frozen.


You also can cook a whole fish this way. Slash each side in three places with a sharp knife to help you judge when the fish is done.


You can serve fish in green sauce with a sweet potato, organic brown rice with lentils, made in an electric rice cooker; or whole-wheat pasta with bottled sauce.


I reserve the green sauce for use with omelets or eggs fried sunny side up.


Canned fish salad


Empty canned fish and oil or water into a plastic container, add chopped celery or sweet pepper and then flavor with Dijon mustard, fresh lime or lemon juice and powdered cumin to taste.


Cover and refrigerate.


Sources


H Mart or other Asian supermarkets are great sources for a wide variety of fresh greens, including spinach, collard, mustard, bok choy and Chinese broccoli.


Costco Wholesale usually has fresh wild-caught haddock, flounder and Pacific cod, but when it doesn't, I buy frozen mahi-mahi or salmon in the freezer section.


Costco also sells Kirkland Signature Organic No Salt Seasoning, a blend of 21 spices and other ingredients.


ShopRite and Hackensack Market carry Mexican green salsa from Goya and La Costena. A 16-ounce bottle is enough to prepare as much as 2 pounds of fish.

Related article

• Costco's food and prices are the best revenge

Looking for healthy food in the hospital

Image by Sifu Renka via Flickr

Although you can't stop the destruction of the giant bluefin tuna, you can refuse to buy
 any at Mitsuwa, the Japanese supermarket in Edgewater, and at Japanese restaurants.

Editor's note: Today, I discuss my search for healthy food in a hospital cafeteria, urge you to boycott a Japanese supermarket's bluefin tuna festival, note higher prices at Costco Wholesale and offer a recipe for a mayo-less canned fish salad.

Sliced strawberries nestled in whipped cream? For breakfast?


I stared at the tray on the fruit-salad bar in the cafeteria of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, and wondered what hospital administrators are thinking.


In September, I had tests and then open-heart surgery at the hospital, and was served a series of healthy but awful meals during my recovery: no salt, no sugar, no caffeine and no taste.


Since I started cardiac rehab a few weeks ago, I had walked past the cafeteria on the first floor without going in, so on Friday, I walked through and did the same on Monday morning.


The cafeteria is open to the public as well as to the staff, including doctors and nurses, but the chances of finding healthy food are slim. 


On Friday, just after 9 a.m., the first salad bar I came to had only a few shrink-wrapped platters of pale, farmed salmon with vegetables or salad, but on Monday, the same bar was empty.


To the right, there were bananas and two other kinds of whole fruit, plus buttered rolls, big Jersey bagels, pastries, muffins, sugar buns, cookies and pound cake. 


The Boar's Head Sandwich Bar was self-service, but you can be sure the only cold cuts served there are from animals raised with antibiotics and growth hormones, and cured with preservatives.


A grill offered an "all-natural" hot dog without nitrites for $2.66. The hamburger and cheeseburger are a mystery, however.


A steam table offered two or three kinds of hot cereal and scrambled eggs, plus greasy mystery bacon, sausage and corned-beef hash.


At the fruit-salad bar, fruit salad was 50 cents an ounce -- or $8 a pound. I guess the sliced strawberries and whipped cream cost the same.


I'm on a no-bread diet, so if I wanted to have breakfast there, I would have to satisfy myself with coffee or tea and fruit salad or maybe some eggs without anything else.


Tuna-boycott time


It's time to boycott the Giant Bluefin Tuna Festival on Nov. 19-20 at Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater.


Please stay away from the Japanese supermarket's three "cutting performances," in which beheaded fish weighing hundreds of pounds are reduced to sushi and sashimi by a small army of workers.


The magnificent giant bluefin tuna is an endangered species, but the Japanese have a voracious appetite for the fish, despite its extremely high mercury content. 


In 2009, Mitsuwa sold sashimi from the belly of the fish for $60 a pound. 


Women of child-bearing age and children should not consume any blue-fin tuna.


Higher Costco prices


In looking over my wife's receipt on Monday from Costco Wholesale in Hackensack, I noticed a couple of price increases.


Two pounds of Jarlsberg sliced, reduced-fat Swiss Cheese are now $9.49, compared to $8.99.


Two large containers of Greek Yogurt are now $6.99, and 1 pound of Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix is $4.89.


The Roma plum tomatoes are from Euro Fresh Farms, but they are grown in the United States and pesticide free ($4.99 for 2 pounds).


Canned-fish salad


I chopped up red onion and sweet yellow pepper, opened up two cans of pink salmon, two cans of Moroccan sardines and a can of light, yellowfin tuna.


Everything, including the liquid from the cans, went into a plastic container, and I mixed it all up.


Then I added lots of Dijon mustard, ground cumin and fresh lemon juice to taste, but no mayonnaise. 


A big mound of the canned fish salad made a nice breakfast over red-leaf lettuce dressed in extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, with olives on the side. 

'All you ever cook are fish and pasta'

Image via Wikipedia

What's for dinner? Potato chips or mackerel in red-wine sauce?

My 13-year-old son came home around dinner time and lugged his book bag into his room.

While he was at the YMCA gym, I was shopping for fish to prepare for dinner. But when I went into his room to call him to the table, he was finishing off a large bag of potato chips.

"You're eating chips? What about dinner? I cooked mackerel (one of his favorites)."

"I don't want any," he said between bites of the chips. "All you ever cook are fish and pasta."

Even if that were true, he was the one who suggested more than 13 months ago that we stop eating meat and poultry, and he was the one who went back to being a carnivore when a hamburger was put in front of him on a flight several months after all of us took the pledge.

My wife also has returned to eating meat and poultry, but I've been happy eating only seafood, even as I cut down drastically on bread and pizza starting about six months ago to lose weight. I've shed 25 pounds.

I've added cheese to my diet, including the full-fat kind I used to avoid, pairing it with fruit or adding it to salads.

My son isn't being deprived of meat and poultry. This week, my wife prepared his favorite soup with chicken feet, and even added beef and ribs to it. I bought him uncured, preservative-free bacon from Trader Joe's.

Image via Wikipedia

He raved about the macaroni with a sauce of olive oil, chicken broth, garlic and anchovies the first couple of times I made it, garnished with lots of fresh, wilted spinach and grated cheese, but now it's taken its place among the hated "pasta" dishes he avoids.

I bought organic ground beef at Costco in Hackensack for him, while stocking up on canned fish, vegetable stew, four-bean chili and other non-meat items for me, but once I took him to Smashburger, he refuses to eat a burger anyplace else.

I told my son that if he continued eating chips instead of the dinners I prepare, I won't return his PlayStation 3, which I hid because his school work suffered.

My wife didn't back me up. She said eating chips was no reason to deny him the video-game console. 

Image via Wikipedia

I've had to be inventive without meat, poultry, bread and pizza as part of the dining equation, both at home and eating out. 

My breakfasts often are salads with the same ingredients I once stuffed into sandwiches -- smoked fish, sardines, cheese, tomato and so forth. 

This morning, I fried four quail eggs -- sunny side up -- from the Korean supermarket, and ate them with leftover baby bok choy, Korean stewed tofu  and a cooked cabbage-and-sweet-pepper dish my wife made. 

I just prepared a canned fish salad -- tuna, pink salmon, sardines and anchovies -- with Dijon mustard, lemon juice, cumin and other Middle Eastern spices, and diced celery and onion, and wonder if my son will have a sandwich of it for breakfast tomorrow.

I love pasta and rice, but can't eat them to my heart's content while cutting down on carbohydrates.

Eating out, there are several meatless Korean dishes I like and others that can be prepared without meat, and they always come with vegetable, fish and tofu side dishes that are perfect for me.

Everywhere else, I choose fish or shrimp for my entree, such as the fried whole tilapia I shared the other night with my wife at a Colombian restaurant.