A summer dinner, without the oven.

Byline: THE $10 GOURMET By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Tom Bollag, chef-owner of Chef's Kitchen, decided it's often too hot to cook in the summer, so for this week's edition of The $10 Gourmet, he fixed three flavorful dishes featuring raw foods.

His menu includes an appetizer of Pacific Rim Rolls - thin slices of halibut marinated like Mexican seviche but done in an Asian style and served wrapped in a chilled lettuce leaf.

For the main course, he prepared Zucchini Spaghetti Pomodoro using an unusual kitchen device similar to a woodworker's lathe that peels spaghetti-like strands off a zucchini squash. He served the zucchini spaghetti raw with an uncooked sauce of finely chopped tomato and onion flavored with garlic, rosemary, Chinese ketchup and a jalapeno pepper.

For dessert, Bollag served a sweet Birchermusli like his grandmother made in Switzerland. Although musli is widely considered a breakfast cereal, Bollag demonstrated that the uncooked mixture of oats, yogurt, honey, fruit, berries and nuts works well as a dessert, too. Children will love it, he said.

"I love fish," Bollag said as we prepared to taste his dishes. "I think fish should be part of a person's diet. And I find that making a seviche in an Asian style is just exciting. Just a fun thing to do is to meld two cultures together in a meal.

"So that's basically what we've done here," he said. "We've got pretty much a Swiss thing. We've got pretty much an Italian thing. And we pretty much have a Mexican-Japanese thing. When we put them together on a table, I think it's exciting for the senses."

The inspiration for Bollag's menu came from the "burning heat" in his restaurant's kitchen the day he began planning the menu, along with the raw food restaurants that he considers "the hip newest thing" in Napa Valley and Southern California.

Proponents of a raw foods diet say it is preferable because cooking destroys nutrients. They argue that you should let your digestive system do all the cooking. Bollag's menu includes raw fish; however, most raw food advocates are vegans who abstain from eating animal foods.

Bollag said he was trying to demonstrate that people don't have to turn on a stove to produce a tasty meal.

The $10 Gourmet is a feature designed to allow professional chefs to give menu ideas to home cooks. The chef does this by preparing a meal for two on a $10 budget. Small amounts of staple ingredients such as spices and condiments don't have to be included in the accounting.

Bollag spent $9.99 on his ingredients while shopping at the Lane County Farmers' Market, Wild Oats, Albertsons and Newman's Fish Co. He purchased only organic produce. And in many cases he talked the sellers into letting him buy only the amount needed for the meal - part of a basket instead of a whole basket of berries, for example - or to let him have a nearly overripe tomato at half price and a bruised apple for free.

A halibut cheek that cost $1.95 was his single most expensive purchase.

Bollag began preparing the meal by cutting the halibut cheek across the grain into paper-thin slices that he marinated in the refrigerator in lime juice, garlic, jalapeno pepper, onion, orange zest and two spice mixtures.

"Halibut cheeks, when you cook them, have the consistency of crab," Bollag said.

When he finished with the halibut, he put his cutting board in the sink to wash. He warned that boards used for preparing meat or fish shouldn't be used for other purposes for fear of bacterial contamination.

"Now we'll go to making the Birchermusli. That would be the next because you also want it to sit for a while," he said.

"Bircher was a doctor of medicine in Zurich around the '20s and '30s, and my grandmother knew him real well," Bollag said. "So when I went to Switzerland, we - in the summertime when it was hot - rather than get the stoves going and make the house even hotter, Birchermusli was the order of the dinner."

Bircher developed this recipe to feed patients in his clinic who were recovering from a heart attack.

"This was fed three times a day," Bollag said. "What it tended to do was clean your blood system of cholesterol."

Bollag made the zucchini spaghetti using a hand-cranked machine called a circular slicer.

"This one came from France from a place that's been a kitchen store for 200 years in Paris. But Sunrise (Market) has them in plastic for under $100. And they work," Bollag said.

Home cooks who don't want to invest in a rotary cutter can either shred the raw zucchini or cut it into a julienne. Serve the raw zucchini without any flavoring except the tomato sauce, Bollag advises.

"Absolutely no salt, no pepper, no nothing," Bollag said. "Zucchini, I have found, is best raw, with nothing on it."

Pacific Rim Rolls

1 halibut cheek

Juice of 1/2 lime

Pinch (less than 1/8 teaspoon) of Cafe Sole Gourmet Grilling Spice

Pinch (less than 1/8 teaspoon) of Nanami Togarashi (a Japanese spice mix)

1 clove garlic, smashed and minced

1/3 onion, sliced

1/4 red jalepeno pepper, no seeds, chopped fine

Zest of 1 orange, finely chopped or grated

Salt and pepper 

Butter lettuce leaves, washed and dried

Dipping sauce:

3 tablespoons soy sauce

1 teaspoon minced fresh or pickled ginger

1/8 teaspoon wasabi (Japanese horseradish)

With the knife blade held at an angle of approximately 30 degrees, slice cheek across the grain into paper-thin pieces. Discard end pieces containing nerves.

Place halibut pieces, lime juice, the two spice mixes, garlic, onion, jalapeno pepper, orange zest, salt and pepper in bowl and marinate together for at least 10 minutes and up to 4 hours.

Prepare the lettuce leaves by cutting out the lower portion of the central rib so the leaves will roll easily. Place some of the marinated fish and onion mixture on the leaf and roll the leaf up.

Serve with a dipping sauce made by combining soy sauce, fresh minced or pickled ginger and wasabi. Spoon the sauce into the roll immediately before eating.

Note: The proportions of soy sauce, ginger and wasabi are a matter of personal taste. Bollag made his sauce, and held down his costs, by using 3 each of the condiment packages that were left over when he purchased sushi-to-go for lunch at Sunrise Market.

Birchermusli

1 cup yogurt

1 tablespoon honey

3/4 cup oats

3/4 cup slivered almonds

1/2 cup raisins

2 tablespoons chopped dates

1 apple, grated

1 pear, grated

1 orange, peeled and chopped

2 cups mixed berries (Bollag used a combination of blueberries, raspberries, loganberries and black raspberries)

In a bowl, mix yogurt and honey. Add and mix in oats, almonds, raisins and chopped dates. Add grated apple, grated pear and chopped orange. Mix.

Add the berries, gently folding them into the mixture as you would fold egg whites into a cake batter. Try to keep the berries from becoming mashed.

Taste and add sugar if the mixture is not sweet enough.

Let stand, refrigerated, for at least 30 minutes to allow the oats to soften.

Easily serves 4.

Zucchini Spaghetti Pomodoro

1 large tomato, very finely diced

2/3 small sweet Walla Walla onion, very finely diced

2 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped

Juice of 1/2 lime

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Pinch raw sugar

1/4 red jalapeno chili pepper, very finely diced

2 sprigs fresh rosemary, finely chopped (don't substitute dried rosemary)

1 tablespoon Chinese ketchup (ABC brand Sambal Manis Pedas, hot and sweet chili sauce)

4 zucchini, 6 to 8 inches in length and a quarter to a half-dollar in diameter

Note: Bollag had planned to use some "distressed" fresh basil he was given free instead of rosemary in this sauce. He substituted rosemary from his garden after discovering he had left the basil at his restaurant. Either herb will work, although he would have preferred basil.

Combine all ingredients except the zucchini into an uncooked tomato sauce.

Using a rotary slicer, cut the zucchini into spaghetti-like strands.

Or, as an alternative, using a mandoline, a julienne peeler or a chef's knife, cut the zucchini into a julienne. Or shred the zucchini with a box grater.

Serve the raw zucchini with the uncooked tomato sauce.

Note: To julienne a zucchini with a knife, cut off the ends and then cut a thin slice off one side. Place the cut side down on a cutting board and proceed to cut the zucchini lengthwise into 1/8-inch-thick planks. Stack the planks and slice them lengthwise into 1/8-inch-square strips.

To purchase a Bron Rouet spiral cutter similar to Bollag's, visit the Web site Professional Cutlery Direct (www.cutlery.com). The price, with optional fourth cutter, is $206.98.

CAPTION(S):

Tom Bollag prepared a raw zucchini "spaghetti," a halibut and lettuce appetizer and a dessert of Birchermusli. Thomas Boyd / The Register-Guard Tom Bollag uses a circular slicer to create the zucchini spaghetti. A home cook might use a mandoline instead.