Beef Souvlaki Salad & Greek Vinaigrette

In case you’ve never read this blog before, I <3 Greek & Lebanese food.  It’s up there in my Top 5 Cuisines.  Alas, there aren’t many Mediterranean restaurants here in Springfield.  For some reason, they don’t seem to last, which is really, really sad.  I have to wait until I’m down in Louisiana (where you can find one on every street in Lafayette) or until the local Greek Orthodox church has their annual festival.

Dolmathes make me melt.

Lebanese food was another one of my “NOLA Firsts”.  Our meeting place?  Lebanon’s Cafe on Carrollton.  I drooled over my chicken souvlaki & Lebanese iced tea.  And I was hooked.  Greece also had the best food of our entire honeymoon (and cheapest, for the record).  There’s just something magical about that marriage of lemon & oregano and yogurt sauce.  But sometimes, you can’t get what you want…so you have to make it yourself.

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb lean beef, cubed or cut into 1 inch strips

1 onion, chunked

2 tbsp lemon juice

1.5 tbsp oregano (Greek oregano if you can find it)

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp Greek Rub (I get mine from Pampered Chef)

1/2 tsp red pepper flakes

1/4 cup olive oil

lettuce, tomatoes, feta , & kalamata olives (assuming your husband doesn’t hate them…lucky) for salad

VINAIGRETTE:

2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup good olive oil

DIRECTIONS:

Make the vinaigrette first, & refrigerate.

Then mix your marinade in a large container (or Ziploc) with the beef & onions & let marinate for about 12-24 hours. The acid in the lemon will help to tenderize the meat.

Heat a grill pan over med-high heat and then grill the beef & onions until no longer pink.

Serve over a bed of fresh veggies and top with your vinaigrette.

Not exactly like Athens, but definitely delicious!

NutriFacts:  (makes 4 servings)

  Calories 402.6

  Total Fat 29.4 g

  Saturated Fat 10.1 g

  Polyunsaturated Fat 1.0 g

  Monounsaturated Fat 7.7 g

  Cholesterol 83.9 mg

  Sodium 549.7 mg

  Potassium 559.8 mg

  Total Carbohydrate 12.3 g

  Dietary Fiber 2.4 g

  Sugars 1.4 g

  Protein 21.6 g

What your lunch says about your personality.

Or, at least: What MY lunch says about my personality.

Being in the professional world, I’ve become very familiar, through a series of HR-imposed team-building exercises, with the array of personality profile quizzes that are currently out there.  One of the more popular ones is the DISC assessment, which determines if you are Dominant, an Influencer, Steady, or Calculating.  It would probably shock no one who knows me personally that I fall under the category of Steady.  “Steadies” are fiercely loyal, friendly, sympathetic to others, and dependable.  Their primary weakness, however, is that they don’t deal well with change.

Introduce my lunch.  I forgot to bring anything for lunch today.  Happens at least 1-2x a week.  I keep a stash of food at my desk (i.e. canned ravioli and Ramen, which only technically passes as food in that it slowly kills you with sodium, rather than dying from starvation), but I try to reserve those for days that I absolutely cannot leave the office due to some emergency.  Other days, my go-to is Pizza Hut.

Seriously.

What is a food blogger doing at Pizza Hut, you ask?  Getting a salad to go, I answer.

Pizza Hut has “to-go” salads?  Yes, yes they do.  Something I’ve been familiar with since I was a kid, but is apparently news to 90% of Americans.  For $4.83 (give or take some tax) you can get a giant pile o’ salad from their salad bar and take it with you.  Weight doesn’t matter.  That’s the awesome thing.  See, Pizza Hut is 1.5 miles from my office; there’s a grocery store less than half a mile from my office that has a salad bar as well, but they charge $4.99 a pound.  At Pizza Hut, it’s like Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes—if it fits, it ships.  108 cubic inches of salad.  I’ve never weighed one, but I guarantee my average salad is at least a couple pounds, once you factor cottage cheese, dressing, and some sort of non-salad “salad” in there.

Growing up, my parents both usually worked weekends.  My mom got home on Saturdays around noon, and we would go to Pizza Hut to get salads & breadsticks to go, pick up a rental video, then come home, chow down while watching a movie, and then clean the house together.  P. much every Saturday, that was the routine.  So Pizza Hut has a very special place in my heart.  Plus…they all have T. Marzetti’s Honey French dressing, which makes my heart even happier.

Heaven in a bottle.

Anyway.  I drove to Pizza Hut.  Only to find out that their salad bar was BROKEN.  No salad.  O_o <-- If I could figure out a way to make that face cry, I would.

There’s a Quizno’s, like, RIGHT across the street.  Also, a Hong Kong Inn, a Sonic, and a variety of other fast food establishments.

But no…the heart wants what the heart wants.  And today, the heart wants produce.

I accidentally left my smartphone at the office, so I head out on a journey…to try to REMEMBER where the next-closest P.Hut is. (Ugh---how did we find anything before smart phones?)  I vaguely remembered another one on the northwest side of town, so I head that way.  And yes…there USED to be one, but it’s now Kenny’s Non-Pizza Hut Pub & Grill. *sigh* Here, we’re surrounded by Burger King, Pizza Inn, Papa Murphy’s, Papa Johns (I see now that P.Hut got squeezed out of the market, despite their superior salad offerings)… do I give up & settle for a Whopper?  Hecks no.  It’s freakin’ SALAD DAY!

Then I remember one on the west-central part of town.  So I head south.  Thankfully, that one is still there, and the salad bar is intact.  Thank HEAVEN!

My epic salad journey.  13.93 miles roundtrip.

And yet…it’s different.  Where is the cottage cheese?  Where are the little crunchy lo mein noodles that have no nutritional value whatsoever? Where did this cauliflower come from?   WHY ARE THERE NO CROUTONS?????  *takes a breath*  It’s okay, it’s okay.  We’ll deal.

And that, my friends, is how I logged 14 miles on my car to get THIS:

You’ll notice that conspicuously large piece of cauliflower in the  bottom right corner?  Yeah…that’s where I usually put the cottage cheese.  The cauliflower is really just a place holder.

But….in reality…completely worth it.

So, while I haven’t reached that Sheldon Cooper level of control where Monday is Thai Night and Tuesdays are always spent at the Cheesecake Factory… I fear it’s coming.

Oven "Fried" Fish, Macque Choux, and Creole Vinaigrette.

Okay, big entry! With not one, but THREE recipes. This meal was inspired by one of my favorite things: Missouri sweet corn:



Fresh corn was 4/$1 at the supermarket last week, so I got a HUGE craving for macque choux.

So, if you didn't grow up in Louisiana, you might be asking, "WTF is macque choux and why would I want to make it?"

Essentially, it translates as "smothered corn", or some refer to it as "cajun-style stewed corn". Imagine...the best creamed corn you could ever have. It's also one of my absolute favorite cajun dishes. Buttery, spicy, and creamy...and gawdawful for you, like most truly delicious things.

Thankfully, we have our good friend Chef Jude Theriot to the rescue!


If you ever stumble across this cookbook, I suggest snatching it up. It's 288 pages of pretty-doggone delicious stuff, and a staple in my cooking repertoire.

So, how do we get from a book, to THIS?


Well, since it takes the longest, we start with the macque choux. For 4 servings, you'll need the following:

4 ears of corn
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter (or, if you have it, bacon grease. I highly recommend the bacon grease; you'll get a ton of added flavor with the same amount of calories/fat)
1/2 yellow onion, diced
1/2 green bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large tomato, seeded & chopped
2 tsp cajun seasoning
1 tsp black pepper
1/4 cup skim milk

First: enlist your sweet husband to help with the chopping, including scraping the kernels off the corn. Be sure to get as much of the corn off as possible, including the liquidy "milk", as this will help with the creaminess of the dish.


Heat a large skillet over medium heat; add the olive oil & heat so that the pain gets well coated. Add butter (or bacon grease), onions, bell pepper, and garlic; saute until the onions are translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the corn & cook for about 5 minutes, stirring often.

Add in the tomatoes, cajun seasoning, pepper, and milk:

PREEETTTTYYYYyyyy...

Then reduce heat to medium low, cover, and simmer, stirring often until the corn is tender, about 10-15 minutes.

CORN = SMOTHERED.


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So--while that's cooking down, we move on to our fish. The recipe calls for four 6oz pieces of catfish, but any whitefish you have around the house will work fine--we used about eight crappie (which Louisianians refer to as sac-au-lait) filets.

You'll need a wet mix & a dry mix for your fish--but first, heat the oven to 450 degrees.

Wet ingredients:
1 egg white, beaten
1/2 cup skim milk
2 tsp hot sauce

Dry ingredients:
1/4 cup corn meal (um...yeah, I totally didn't have corn meal in the house, so I improvised with a box of cornbread mix...it worked okay.)
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tbsp flour (if you use the cornbread mix, you can bypass this ingredient)
2 tbsp cajun seasoning
1 tsp dried basil

Combine the ingredients in separate bowls, like so:


Wash the fish filets well, then pat dry; then place into the wet ingredient bowl. Move filets over into the dry bowl & coat well, shaking off excess before you move them onto a baking sheet. If you have a pan with a wire rack, you can use that, or, you can lightly spray a cookie sheet with Pam & use that. Lightly spray the tops of the filets with the cooking spray (butter flavored works best), then place in the oven for 12-14 minutes, or until the fish flakes when touched with a knife:


So while your fish & corn are finishing up, howsabout whipping up a quick creole vinaigrette dressing? (NOTE: this recipe comes from the 1971 Time Life cookbook I talked about in the last blog post.) Super quick & easy. You'll need the following:


This makes about 1/2 cup of dressing (about 8 servings):
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp Creole mustard (NOTE: I used Tabasco Spicy Brown mustard; Dijon mustard would also work just fine)
1/2 tsp cajun seasoning
6-8 tbsp olive oil
Salt (to taste)

Directions:
Combine all the ingredients except the oil in a bowl & stir to combine. Then whisk in olive oil slowly until no more oil is absorbed by the emulsion. Taste, & add salt if desired.


Serve over mixed green salad.

So what's the damage here?

Macque Choux
Calories: 125 (35 from fat)
Fat: 4g
Protein: 3g
Carbs: 23g
Cholesterol: 3mg
Fiber: 1.7g
Sodium: 115mg

Fish (per serving)
Calories: 388 (72 from fat)
Fat: 8g
Protein: 41.9g
Carbs: 32.6g
Cholesterol: 101mg
Fiber: 0.9g
Sodium: 952mg

Dressing (per serving):
Calories: 73.2
Total Fat: 8.1 g
Saturated Fat: 1.1 g
Polyunsaturated Fat: 0.7 g
Monounsaturated Fat: 6.0 g
Cholesterol: 0.0 mg
Sodium: 122.4 mg
Potassium: 9.8 mg
Total Carbohydrate: 0.3 g
Dietary Fiber: 0.1 g
Sugars: 0.2 g
Protein: 0.0 g

----

So, this was my first time trying all these recipes. Our verdict? The macque choux was to-die for. Already planning to make that again for Thanksgiving this year. The dressing was nice too--different, but in a good way. The bitter, spicy kick really went well with the salad. The fish we were kinda "meh" about--possibly because we used the cornbread mix. It just ended up being kind of sweet. If I had it to do over again, I think I'd make this pan-fried catfish dish from a previous entry instead, to tie into the flavor of the mustard in the salad dressing.

So, enjoy folks! Happy Eating!