Poached Salmon with Creamy Caper Onion Sauce

Whenever I get home from a holiday, I reminisce by looking through my photos and remembering all the people I’ve met or visited with and all the places I’ve been.  I also reminisce about the meals I have eaten.  I’m going back through my summer photos of food because there are so many dinners and salads and desserts that got made, photographed and eaten with relish, but never got posted.  I am not even home yet and I am already feeling nostalgic for wild salmon, which I have yet to find in Cairo.

Wild salmon is much drier than its farm-raised brethren so poaching is an excellent method of cooking it.   Add on a creamy caper onion sauce and you can’t go wrong.   I cooked this, along with a cherry tomato tart, for my in-laws and it was very well received.  My father-in-law has been ill and had not been eating very well for a couple of weeks when I served this and he cleaned his plate!  We were all very excited.  Seriously.  To the point that we took a photo of his empty plate.  Looking back now, that seems weird, but it felt right at the time.  Any small victory!

Strawberry Shortcake Muffins Kicked into Dessert #Muffin Monday

With the addition of extra strawberry sauce and whipped cream, these become Strawberry Shortcake Muffins Kicked into Dessert! So easy for Sunday dinner or any day of the week, really.

My maternal grandmother was a wonderful homemaker.  In addition to running a business full-time with my grandfather, she did the grocery shopping and cooked the meals and cleaned house.   I seem to recall that they had a lady in to do the ironing once a week.  And, of course, we pitched in when we visited.  Especially my mother.

The store was in the front of their property on one of the main streets going through New Iberia, LA and their house was in the back so they were never really off-duty if someone had a major appliance emergency.   Their home number must have been given out when an appliance sold because hardly a weekend or holiday went by without a call from someone who needed help with a recalcitrant machine.  Back in the day, Maytag appliances were only sold in smaller shops, by authorized sellers who also provided service when needed.

My grandparents only sold Maytag washers and dryers (and other brands of refrigerator and freezers and stoves) but my grandfather would service anything so he was never lonely like the repairman on the television ads.  Some of my best childhood memories are riding around with him in his old truck, meeting the farmers’ wives out in the country and, trying to be an able assistant, handing him the tools he needed to make repairs. 

While my grandmother was a good cook, time did not allow for fussiness or time-consuming dishes.  She had a number of solid recipes that took advantage of seasonal fruits and vegetables and which were simple to make and always well-received.  One of her most popular was strawberry shortcake.  She would buy the little round sponge cakes at the grocery store and macerate (although I am sure she never called it that) her freshly sliced strawberries with a generous amount of sugar.  After the strawberries created their own syrup, she would whip cream and serve a good helping of strawberries on each of the little cakes and then top with whipped cream.  What could be more simple or more delicious? 

I give you these:  Strawberry Shortcake Muffins.  My grandmother’s strawberry shortcake kicked up a notch or two because 1) freshly baked at home and 2) rich cream IN the muffin AND on top and 3) strawberries IN the muffn AND on top.

Strawberry Shortcake Muffins Kicked into Dessert

This is part of Muffin Monday and the muffin recipe comes from Seasons and Suppers,  a great website if you are trying to eat more seasonal fruits and vegetables.

Ingredients

For the muffin batter:

2 cups or 250g  all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup or 170g granulated sugar

1/2 cup or 115g butter, cold and cut into cubes

1 egg

1 cup or 240ml heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

9 oz or 250g (after hulling and dicing) strawberries

For the strawberry sauce:

9 oz or 250g strawberries

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon cornstarch

For the whipped cream:

2 cups or 480ml heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla

(Photo disclaimer:  I discovered as I started this project that my dear husband had my camera in his backpack.  And I had just put him on a plane back to Cairo.  I had to use an old tiny Canon until younger daughter’s lovely Canon SLR could charge. I apologize in advance for the dark and blurry method photos.)

Method

Preheat oven to 350° F or 180°C.  Grease or line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. 

Hull and dice your muffin strawberries.

In large bowl mix together the flour, baking powder and sugar.  Cut in cold butter with a pastry blender (or two knives) until it is in small pea-size pieces.  (Mine was more like soft sand.)

In small bowl mix the egg, vanilla and cream.  

Add all at once to flour mixture. Stir with spoon or rubber spatula until just blended.  Gently fold in the diced strawberries.

Spoon into muffin cups, making sure each muffin has some strawberries and bake for about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, hull and slice your sauce strawberries.

Pop them in a small pot with the sugar, water, lemon juice and cornstarch.

Cook over a medium heat for a few minutes, stirring gently, until the mixture thickens slightly and the cornstarch cooks clear instead of milky looking.  Remove from heat and set aside.

No food coloring, I swear!  Doesn't it turn a gorgeous red?!

When the muffins are baked, remove them from the oven and cool completely before removing from the pan.

When you are ready to serve, add in the vanilla and whip your cream with a whisk or electric beaters until soft peaks form. 

Cut the muffin into two (removing the muffin liner if used) and spoon over some of the strawberry sauce.

Add a spoon or two of whipped cream.

Enjoy!

(End note:  I should say that these muffins are divine just on their own as well!)

My five most viewed posts this week have been

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins 

White Chocolate Mousse Torte with Fresh Berries

Trinidadian Rum Punch 

and

Oven-roasted Filet of Grouper

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins #MuffinMonday

These sour cream chocolate chip muffins are sweet but not too sweet, with fluffy insides perfectly complemented by the semi-sweet chocolate chips. Bake a batch for someone you love!

For the relatively transient life that I have led, I have some good friends who have been my friends for a very long time. I was an expat as a small child but we moved to the Houston area when I was going into fourth grade, after my parents divorced.

My father continued with the expat life, always making sure that my sisters and I had bedrooms wherever he lived and his employer always paid for at least one flight a year, when we would spend most of the three months of summer in his latest location. He would have had us year round if he could (always nice to be wanted!) but Mom would never have given us up and he often lived in places where the expat children ended up going to boarding school anyway because of the lack of a good quality local English language school. (Talking to you, Negritos, Peru and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.)

Once again, anyhoo (feel like I have been digressing a lot lately) we moved to Houston, my mother, two sisters and I in the summer between my third and fourth grade years. Mother didn’t think moving back to New Iberia, LA as a young (unwilling, as it were) divorcee was a good idea and I am sure that she was right. Goodness knows the people of the big, progressive city of Houston were judgmental enough. We are talking about the Seventies, folks, and I was one of only two children of divorced parents in my entire fourth grade class of 60 children (two homerooms.) I don’t even want to tell you what those statistics are now but, suffice to say, that there are a lot of families and children in pain out there.

Dear me, but the start of this post is depressing! Let me go on to say that the friends I made in that fourth grade class are still some of my best friends today. Without explanation or excuse, we can get together and, frankly, sometimes act like fourth graders or perhaps 12^th graders because there is often alcohol involved. (Hey, judgers, the drinking age was 18 back then so all of us most of us were legal.)

Last Thursday one of those dear friends was in the hospital recovering from surgery. She was blessed by the presence of her mother, elder son, only daughter and a caring sister I had just missed greeting. I arrived with these muffins for the nurses, so they would take extra good care of her. I would have volunteered to stay the night but she was being ably cared for by her excellently raised daughter, whom I trained briefly in nurse bribery and cajoling. I hung around until the on-call doctor appeared and we got her meds changed from those that were making her sick (there was some discussion of a replacement Jack Daniels IV, which was rejected) and then I handed over the bribery muffins and responsibility, secure that she was in good hands.

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins

If you need people to see things your way or to take care of a loved one, these muffins seem to work pretty well. Also, they are part of Muffin Monday, which is good fun for me. This recipe comes from Taste of Home. Aside from adding more chips, this recipe was made as written because you don’t need to mess with a pretty good thing.

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups or 190g all-purpose flour (I used King Arthur Unbleached White Wheat.)
2/3 cup or 132g sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup (8 ounces) or 240ml sour cream
5 tablespoons or 1/3 cup or 70g butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (Original recipe called for 3/4 cup but what’s a 1/4 cup of chocolate between friends? The difference between “I like you a whole lot” and “I love you,” that’s what.)

Method
 Line a muffin tin with paper muffin cups or spray with non-stick spray. Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Mix it around a little and make a little well in the middle.

Combine the egg, sour cream, butter and vanilla.

Stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.

Fold in the chocolate chips.

Fill your muffin cups three-fourths full.

Yay! I bought a new muffin tin. I didn't realize how old and grotty mine had gotten till I started taking photos!

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool for five minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack.

Enjoy!

You might also be interested in these muffin recipes:
Sheila's Mexican Cornbread
Quick Bread Breakfast Muffins
Banana Bacon Peanut Butter Chip Muffins