FRIDAY FISH: Smoked Salmon Arugula Salad –Featuring a Light Sour Cream Vinaigrette (You’ll want to use this vinaigrette a lot!)

simple, healthy, easy

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My best sous

While I’m a bit late to the gate getting started on lenten –or any other time–FRIDAY FISH recipes, this one’s worth waiting for. I’ve been making it for a few months, though the story begins with just the vinaigrette. Ok; it’s a tish long of a story but worthwhile. Wanting to escape the traditional high-calorie olive oil vinaigrette … there are 480 calories in 1/4 cup of olive oil … I had paid close attention one day when my mentor Jacques Pépin (he doesn’t know he’s my mentor) mentioned something about using cream for a vinaigrette as it had 50 calories per tablespoon rather than the 120 for olive oil! Well, this little WW follower stood up and took notice, filing that away for posterity, but really for me. Not long afterward, making a salad, I thought about the yummy Daisy Light Sour Cream that saves my bu** so often while cooking. (I often stir a dollop into a bowl of pureed vegetable soup and skip the high-cal and fatty heavy cream too many cooks stir in at the end of cooking.) And, why, I ruminated, couldn’t I use it for a vinaigrette? If heavy cream was good enough for my man Jacques, why not light sour cream, which weighs in at 35 calories per tablespoon, for me? So, the next time I made salad, I made my vinaigrette just like always BUT — I whisked in Daisy Light Sour cream instead of extra virgin olive oil. Eureka!!! Voila!!! Bingo jingo!!! A lower-calorie, creamy vinaigrette was born. Hello, huge salads and maybe even caloric deficits.

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Butternut Squash-Mushroom Arugula Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing

Recipe dedicated to my friend Lisa November, whose presence reminds me to pursue vegetarian dishes!

Looking for other Thanksgiving ideas? Start here..

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When I first made this pretty fall recipe, I posted a junky quick photo to facebook with the words, “Did they tell you to bring a salad to Thanksgiving dinner?” My longtime food blogging and fb friend, Mary, piped up that no one in HER family would ever ask someone to bring a salad!!!…and…she’s mostly right. On the other hand, fine Minnesota friend Lani quipped, “I’m saving this!” So, the jury’s out. For now. Salad, however, really is not the first thing we think of for Thanksgiving, is it? (Didn’t we used to have jello salads? Sure, we did. Long ago and far away. For years and years. Mine had cranberries, apples, and pecans in it. I’ll bet some people still make them.) Thanksgiving is all about turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, vegetable casseroles, rolls and butter, pie, and all things crispy on the outside and tender on the inside–including mac and cheese, they say, though I wouldn’t know. (I do make a first course vegetarian soup lately in a feels-like almost useless, spineless effort to serve a curated meal.) It’s also about feeling thick as an ugly tick and wondering if you should just live on cold pumpkin pie, spiked hot tea, aspirin, and Tums the next day. Which is my way of saying that a little fresh something or other isn’t going to hurt anyone and could be the one thing you go back for when it’s time for seconds. And, playing the grandma card here, some fiber might be exactly what’s needed alongside all that mushy food and free-flowing wine. There. Well, now that that’s out of my system, you can serve this sweetish, peppery, briny, “meaty,” salad featuring butternut squash, mushrooms, and arugula anytime. But if you serve it at Thanksgiving, you’ll be happy!

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Wild Goose Breast Salad

On long days of cooking or testing recipes, I’m blessed to have a TV in my kitchen and I often have it tuned to PBS: Create TV. I’m not that picky; I leave it on and whatever happens happens. It may be Rick Steves. A stellar quilter whose name I can’t quite remember. Sicilian chef Nick Stellino. Cool travel woman Samantha Brown. And if God is good– really good — Jacques Pépin may make an appearance. Of course, I live for that moment and stop what I’m doing to watch. So maybe I AM picky. One day, making dinner awaiting my husband’s return from building a house for Habitat for Humanity , my friend Jacques came on making a duck breast salad. (Don’t we all feel we’re friends with Chef Jacques Pépin?! I know I do.)

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Cod with Arugula-Basil Pesto

Even before Covid-Cooking Time, I for years stocked the garage freezer with everything from extra baguettes to whole chickens to cookies to quarts of chili and chicken broth. Pork chops found on a great sale were purchased in quantity and leftovers suitable for quick lunches had a home. Nights when I was too tired to cook meant I tossed a couple of quarts of stew under the stream of a hot kitchen faucet for few minutes, popped them out into a 4-quart pot, covered them, and set them over low heat until they bubbled up dinner. A frozen half baguette heated beautifully in about 20 minutes in the oven at the same time.

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Pork Tenderloin and Vegetables on Arugula with Lemon Vinaigrette plus Pork and Blue Cheese Tacos for the Next Night

for Father’s Day or tomorrow night

Some years we have no bunnies at all in our yard. Other times, such as now, we are overrun by the the dreaded chomper-hoppers. (Have you ever seen one hop straight up 4 feet or more? They can. ) I blame it on the lack of outdoor cats and our local bob cat family temporarily taking up residence in the next subdivision over. While cute, especially when oh so very small, they eat everything we don’t want them to eat but perversely leave the weeds for us to pull.

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