Flax Fish Sticks with Special Sauce

It started with a baseball game -- hot dogs, popcorn, soft serve, peanuts, fries. The whole works.

This time I had a taste of tater tots. The last time I had tater tots was in elementary school, when fried potatoes were still considered your daily vegetable.

They weren't really tasty. Or well-executed. They were definitely from a an institutional food services company. And yet they were so good. Perfect, really. A perfect snapshot of me 20+ years ago, buying a $1 red-and-white paper boat of tater tots with money I saved up just for the occasion.

And so this dish came from another long-ago memory. The Big Mac and its Special Sauce. Special sauce is probably a model recipe, a perfect representation of the salty-fatty-sweet trifecta. Even if I never eat a Big Mac again, I'm sure it's engineered to stay in my memory until I die.

My sauce breaks down the McDonald's recipe and translates the ingredients into something cleaner. The fish sticks are covered in flax seed meal, which give it a texture and nuttiness not unlike fried breading

Would you ever eat Flax Fish Sticks with "Special Sauce" at a baseball stadium or fast food restaurant? Never. But for a moment, you can be transported there, guilt trip not included.

RECIPE: 

Cut one salmon filet into dunkable pieces. Air dry on a plate, so the surface will toast rather than steam. Preheat toaster oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Meanwhile, in a blender mix 1 cup cottage cheese, 2 tablespoons ketchup, 1 teaspoon paprika, 1 slug of vinegar, and a pinch of onion powder. Add salt to taste. Remove the sauce from the blender and add 1 heaping tablespoon of sweet relish. Set aside.

Sprinkle flax seed meal on the fish plate and coat pieces thoroughly. Cook in toaster oven. Your time will depend on the thickness of your fish. I made them thin and cooked them for about 7 minutes.

Blackened Summer Salad

Summer in NYC is not normal, both in the "regular" and "consistent" sense of the word, and in also in the "standard" and "expected" sense of the word.

You might spend a day sunning dreamily in Prospect Park, then in a disturbingly balmy and fragrant subway platform. You might spend two days on the beach, then five days in a freezing office.

Many New Yorkers leave the city on the weekends, true. And sometimes the city can feel pleasantly sparse. Until you hit all the summer tourists.

This dish's ingredients say summer -- corn, basil, tomatoes. But the preparation says something else -- it's deep and charred and moody. It's NYC in the summer.

RECIPE: Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Mandolin one red onion. Slice kernels from one ear of corn. Drop in two handfuls of grape tomatoes. Toss with olive oil and salt. Roast for 40 minutes, until tomatoes burst and the veggies char. I use this stoneware tray that retains heat.

Take out of the oven and put in bowl. Add pesto and chopped parsley. Serves 1 as the main attraction, 2 as a side.

Chorizo Scallop Cabbage Pouches

Anything that requires wrapping is not an everyday food. Growing up, we only made "shambosh", a curry-beef samosa, on holidays. Grandma's yearly zongzi-making is reason enough to visit. From dumplings to spring rolls, tamales to tortellini, wrapped things are the stuff of special occasions.

But wrapped foods are a warm, loving gesture. Dim sum, after all, means "touches the heart." But with the right recipe, you can get the same effect ...without taking an entire day to get there.

This dish is simple, savory, and clean. Stuffed cabbage is another homey Grandma thing, but here the inside is simplified and purified.

I think in some cases, it's noble and grand to sacrifice your time and labor to feed someone. And in other cases, I think it's better to take it easy on the cooking so you can spend that time with that someone.

RECIPE: Separate 10 leaves from a small cabbage. The cabbage must be small because the leaves are more supple and the leaves fit the scallops better. Simmer them in a pot with 1/2 cup of chicken broth. Cook until they're translucent and pliant, like a swath of thick cloth.

Chop chorizo and add to one cabbage leaf, along with scallop. Fold the sides first, then the top, then bottom part, where the leaf met the base. Lay into a pan. When you've wrapped all your scallops, add the broth you used for the scallops. Cover and simmer for 5-8 minutes.

Season with sea salt and paprika.

Mushroom Shirataki Alfredo

When did you stop eating alfredo sauce? Maybe when you stopped eating mayo. Or started gutting your bagel before putting on your cream cheese.

Alfredo sauce seems like a vestige of a white bread, white sauce time. The last time I had pasta with alfredo sauce was at the Rainforest Cafe some 20 years ago. It came out over-sauced and semi-congealed, and since then alfredo has never been a must-order for me.

But somehow the memory has stuck. I eat shirataki noodles, but they're quite literally nothing. They have no calories, no nutritional value. All sensation and no sustenance.

Enter Alfredo. The sauce here is laughably dietetic compared to what alfredo sauce really is. But I think you'll find it's plenty creamy. The shirataki noodles just need to be caressed, not clobbered.

So the sauce is -- and I'm bracing myself for some alfredo purist backlash -- a blend of cream cheese and fat-free cream cheese. I mean, it's good. Slightly tangy, lusciously thick, and mercifully light in calories.

Mix it with some sauteed mushrooms and you have a dish that's an umami powerhouse. Enough to make you an alfredo eater again.

Strawberry Snack Mix

Necessity is the mother of invention. Or annoyance. Or disappointment.

FreshDirect, as you may know, makes a trail mix they call Rainbow Delight. It's raisins, peanuts, sunflower seeds, cashews, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and of course -- the source of the rainbow -- M&M-like candy.

Due to a shortage of some sort, there was a period of time when some bags, packed in some factory, replaced the rainbow candies with plain chocolate chips.

Oh. No.

So while we wrote to customer service and waited out the great rainbow drought of 2013 (the M&Ms have since been re-instituted), I made my own snack mix.

It doesn't have a name yet, but it's red. It's sweet and salty and -- something relatively new to the snack mix game -- a little squishy.

So what's in it? It's a mix of unsalted cashews, chocolate-covered raisins (I also tried blueberries, but raisins are more than sufficient), dried cranberries, salted peanuts, and freeze-dried strawberries.

It's a summery snack mix and sort of sexy, too.

I know this is true because recently in Paris I found that Pierre Hermé had his own version, based on his famous Ispahan rose-raspberry-litchi macaron.

His version is a little more refined, but that's not always what you want in your pre-meeting food grab.

Chia Kale Cappuccino

It's times like these that I really feel like a parody of myself.

But you know, I do like green smoothies. And I like chia. And I like kombucha and excellent latte art.

And yet, there's a part of me that rebels against that $12/bottle mentality. Or the imbalance of juicing for 5 days and gorging for 15.

I made the Chia Kale Cappuccino because I wanted something a little more substantial than a juice. But more vibrant than coffee. This is a Sunday-morning-after-a-workout sort of drink, the type of thing that you can sip virtuously, ponderously, tranquilly.

The chia seeds are the energy-bestowing base. The kale is the cleansing head. I never attempted latte art, but maybe I'll give it a shot with a kefir foam or something.

RECIPE: Beforehand, add 1/4 cup of chia seeds to 2 cups of the milk of your choice. I like unsweetened almond milk. Let the chia seeds inflate overnight. You'll have lots leftover for your other chia milk needs.

Next morning, make the kale smoothie to your liking. I put in some combination of apple, pear, orange, grapefruit, mango, pineapple, cucumber, bananas, and mint. If you're gonna go green, stay away from beets, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, etc.

Add chia seed milk to bottom of glass and gently pour kale smoothie on top. When you're making the smoothie, make sure it's less dense than the chia milk.

Note to chia neophytes: Should you wipe your counter of chia seeds, you will later find them sprouting in your sponge! Pretty gross, I know.

Broccoli Eggs Benedict with Tofu Hollandaise

Roasted cruciferous doesn't need much. Perhaps some tahini a la Maoz. Or with bacon a la every restaurant. Anchovies are also welcome.

But after an especially satisfying dinner of roasted cauliflower, I craved a reprise. Here the broccoli gets a breakfast treatment with a soft poached egg, a sourdough English muffin, and a vegan hollandaise.

I roasted the broccoli while I heated the water for the eggs. Then I whizzed up the hollandaise, a mix of silken tofu, turmeric, olive oil, cayenne, and liquid aminos (for the umami oomph). Then the English muffin went into the toaster while I poached the eggs. When it comes to breakfast, I seek a compactness of movement.

The slippery egg and hollandaise slips into the dry and deliciously burnt florets. It's a lascivious way to cook the otherwise staid broccoli. But really, it had it coming.

Chocolate Mint Kasha Buttons

The other day, I had a cupcake with wheatberry buttercream frosting. I made a joke that it doesn't seem possible. What's next, quinoa fudge.

And then I remembered this guy, which I made as a gift for someone who loves chocolate and mint. The crunch is similar to that of a Crunch bar, but with a bit of farminess to it, a taste of the soil along with the cooling green of the mint.

I added the tiniest bit of peppermint extract into melted chocolate, then mixed with the kasha. You can change it up with other small cereals of varying processing -- puffed wheat, Smacks. More chocolate for a bon-bon. More kasha for something like a granola bar.

I molded the chocolates in this mysterious porcelain tray I got from Fish's Eddy. The leaf adds something of a fern-in-a-fossil effect, which I may want to continue if I pursue this ancient grain-chocolate thing.