fish joy

it's been a few days since my last post, so i wanted to make sure i reported back about my fish experiment. i sous-vided about a pound of monkfish with a hollandaise sauce, and packaged it up with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts. very, very pleased! it had that bistro-poached-fish consistency, although it was "meatier" than the tilapia (i'm guessing because of the difference in fish, and the width.) mine were cut into pretty thick steaks, so i left them in the water a good long time. the sauce was great, too. i used wagner's sauce mix. turns out you don't really need a lot of sauce at all, maybe a teaspoon or two. basically, even if you used straight butter, it would be hard to make much of a caloric impact with a sauce. for the mix, i used the recommended amount of butter and skim milk - but we used it for six servings instead of the four on the package. worked out just fine and made plenty of sauce, which tasted nice with the brussel sprouts.

which, by the way, i'm loving - except that it takes a whole friggin' lot of them to make in any kind of bulk! they're so low in calories, you can use 6-8 ounces in a meal, easy. but some quick math shows how tough this is for those of us without commercial kitchen equipment. 12 servings of roasted brussel sprouts is about 6 POUNDS of raw veggies. i'd need at least 4 oven racks and nonstick sheets to cook them at the same time. yipes.

i put together a cheese ravioli meal too, but i haven't tried it yet. i'm a little nervous about it since i realized (too late) that i should have COOKED the ravioli and flash-frozen it before i vacuumed it. i'm just hoping that nuking with the sauce cooks it enough to make it acceptably al dente. fortunate that i only do a couple on the first round. :)

the taco soup didn't come out as fabulously as i would have liked, although el nino seemed enthralled by it and has already put away two whole servings. it's kind of fun - we feed him beans on a weeknight, then drop him off early the next morning at daycare before the inevitable. DH calls it "lobbing a pulled grenade over the wall." wheee! (and sorry, michelle. we love you!) i'm thinking that taco soup (black beans, fat free refried beans, TVP hydrated with taco seasoning, fat free sour cream, low fat shredded cheddar) might work better as the filling in a soft taco (maybe la tortilla factory) as a sort of faux taco bell chili cheese burrito (and MAN, do i love those.) so maybe that'll be the goal. will let you know how that works out.

the time commitment is still pretty high, although i'm bringing it down. i made about 35 meals over the course of 2 days, for a total effort of about 7-8 hours. i'm thinking that it might be more efficient to cook more food, every other week. not sure yet. we've got so much backed up now in both freezers that i've got no choice but to take a week off just so we can eat our way back to some freezer space! ironic, huh? :)

i've also come to realize that while there are a number of snacks that i just cannot make myself (ostrich jerky comes to mind) there are a quite a few that i can. that'll be the final frontier, i guess. baking my own protein cookies and bars. i know, i know. it's not really rocket science. i just need to figure out how to make it easy and tasty.

cheers all!