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Citrus Pork Loin

04 Mar

Crap. What the hell am I going to do with grapefruit & chard?  I love getting produce delivered to the house from Terra Organics, but on occasion I find myself with an odd assortment of produce that needs eating.  Many a dinner at my home begins with these circumstances.  Many a morning finds me with a search engine box full of random ingredients.  Mostly I am looking to see if these flavors have already been combined by someone who knows what they are doing.  I am not looking for a recipe, so much as permission to shove some things together.  And so begins tonight’s dinner.

Throw some parsley & chard in the bottom of the slow cooker.  Pour in a cup or two of wine.  Slice a head of garlic in half and toss it in with the citrus in wedges.  (I used grapefruit, blood oranges and Meyer lemons.) Got some onions or leeks, throw them in, too.  Make a pretty little bed for the pork roast.  Since it is going to sit up above the liquid, it is going to roast and steam more than braise.

Season up that bad boy.  Got a favorite house seasoning? Use it.  I used our favorite (from Costco) and some Kosher salt.  A little smoked paprika would have been a nice addition, or I could have gone a different direction and pulled out the Chinese five spice or herbs de Provence.  Whatever floats your boat, baby!  (Next time I am planning cumin & chili powder.)  Put on the lid, set it on low and go to work or something.  If you stay around the house you are going to be tormented by the tantalizing aroma.  Consider yourselves warned.

Serving idea: with brown rice and lemon blueberry sauce.

This whole thing was so easy, I feel stupid calling it a recipe.  The sauce is even easier.  A cup of blueberries, a half cup of wine, a half cup of Meyer lemon marmalade (could certainly use orange here.)  I have a little tiny Crock Pot that came free when I bought a full sized pot years ago.  They are great for keeping dip hot at parties, and worked wonders here. It has no settings.  Just On and Off.  I plopped the ingredients in when I started the roast and cooked it the whole time with the lid ajar so that it would reduce some.  A sauce pan on the stove would work as well.

See you next week for another episode of “What the hell is in the fridge and what the hell am I going to do with it?”

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Valentine’s Day Dinner

15 Feb

Beef Tenderloin with Caramelized Onion Balsamic Cream Sauce

Spicy Shrimp

Potato “Risotto”

Steak were seasoned simply and prepared on the stove top in a cast iron grill pan and finished in a 400° oven.

Sauce:

Thinly slice 1 sweet onion and cook over low heat with 2 Tablespoons of butter.  When onions are completely cooked and beginning to brown (which takes way longer than I think it should), add a pinch of kosher salt, a fair grind of black pepper, a splash of good Balsamic vinegar and a pint of heavy cream.  Allow to simmer and reduce for a few minutes.  Just before serving, add a handful of finely grated Parmesan cheese.

Potato “Risotto”

(Adapted from Epicurious)

2 Tablespoons butter

1 sweet onion (minced)

1 pound Yukon Gold potatoes (diced as small as you can!)

1 cup chicken stock

1/2 cup heavy cream

Kosher Salt, fresh black pepper and cayenne pepper to taste

Melt the butter in a sauce pan and cook onions until soft and translucent.  Add potatoes and seasoning and stir to combine.  Add chicken stock (1/2 a cup first and stir in.)  You want it just moist enough to cook, but not too soupy.  Cook 10 minutes.  Add cream and simmer another 10-20 minutes (take taste tastes to check for texture. )  You can add a bit of stock if it is too dry.

Spicy Shrimp:

Soak cleaned shrimp in brine of 1/2 Cup salt and 1/2 Cup sugar to each quart of water for 30 minutes.

Drain and discard brine.

In the now empty brine bowl, mix 1/2 Cup olive oil, 1/4 Cup Balsamic vinegar and salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper to taste (if you have any Tony Chachere Creole Seasoning on hand, just use it. )

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But wait, there's more!

18 Jan

Before there was Booze, Biscuits & Bacon, there was Get Some Hairapy!

You can find other great recipes (like this one!) there.  Check it out.  Type “recipe” or “recipes” in the search box.  (Surprisingly, they return different results!)

Re-creating a beloved soup from group memory

September 14, 2009

2009 09 14 001

When Azarra was young, we had a Thursday ritual.  Whomever wasn’t busy would drive downtown to O’Sheas and fetch enough New Orleans Artichoke Soup for the whole salon.  It was luscious.  And then O’Sheas closed.  They re-opened as a catering operation under new management (who claimed no knowledge of this magnificent soup!)  It has since become the stuff of legend. The soup against which all others are judged (and found wanting!)  So, as part of the culinary exploration project, we set out to re-create this soup from memory.  This was pretty dang close.  Enjoy! And if anyone reading this worked at O’Sheas back then and has the dang recipe, please let us know if we are missing something!

2 Tbsp Butter

1/2 cup chopped carrots

1/2 cup chopped celery

1/2 cup chopped onion

1 Tbsp minced garlic or shallots

3 Tbsp butter

1/3 cup flour

1 cup chicken broth

2 cups water

14oz. can quarter cut artichokes

1 bay leaf

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp. dried Italian seasoning blend

1 cup of warm whipping cream

Melt 2 Tbsp butter in pot, then add carrots, celery, onion. Saute 10 min (until soft) Add 3 Tbsp butter, then add flour and whisk together, simmering for about 5 mins. Add chicken broth, water, artichokes, and all seasonings.

Simmer for 30-40 minutes. Add cream, heat through, and serve.

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Simple tomato puree – then soup!

17 Jan

A stick of butter, a can of tomatoes and an onion.

That’s a recipe?

Yup.  I have been seeing it around online and people just ooo and ahh over it.

So here we go.

Grate, mince, shred or otherwise render a sweet onion into small bits and/or juice.

Add it and the butter to a saucepan and make it all hot & melty & aromatic.

Add (1) 28 ounce can of really good canned tomatoes (whole, diced or crushed and the sauce in which they are packed).  If you have canned your own tomatoes, by all means use them!

Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for a couple of hours. (This would be a good use for your slow cooker. It could go all day while you are at work.)

Use an immersion blender and whiz out any remaining chunks.

Now you have a nice tomato sauce that you can use for pizza or over pasta, etc.

But my favorite is to add it to a quart of hot stock and whiz it together to make soup!

If you are using boxed stock, you will need to add some seasoning because that stuff is always painfully bland.  Add a good handful of some tasty herbs and a bit of salt to taste.

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When life gives you Meyer lemons

17 Jan

These Meyer lemons did not grow on a tree in my rain sodden yard. Nor were they a loving care package sent from a friend in a place where such miracles grow.  They came from Costco. Two weeks in a row during the winter holidays I purchased a case of 12.  The first 12 went into everything I could imagine, but mainly they went into bourbon & soda.  Sometimes warm, sometimes over ice.  Always amazing.

When I had only six left from the second batch, I started to think about the day they would be gone. When there would be none to put in my roasting chickens or zested into gremolata sprinkled over braised boneless beef  short ribs (also found at Costco.)

Preserving food is something my mother did on occasion when I was a kid. Other than freezing things in Foodsaver bags, I had never tried. But these seemed too good, too special to let slip away.

First option: Moroccan style preserving in salt. Interesting idea, but it takes a while to work. No instant gratification.

Second option: Marmalade. The recipe sounds simple. They sell canning stuff at my local grocery store. While I am a little intimidated by the idea of canning, various sources assure me that this is a fairly safe way to try the concept.

So, it is decided.  I will follow directions and hope that no one gets poisoned.  Since I didn’t know if I ever wanted to do this again, I didn’t want to buy the big canning pot, funnel & tongs, so I bought short little 4 ounce jars so that I could use me big soup pot for boiling them.  (Needed the water to be two inches over the top of the jars.)

Here’s what I did:

Slice the ends off the lemons to remove the thickest part of the peel, slice in to thin wedges and slice the wedges finely.  I didn’t want big hunks of peel in the finished product.

The recipe I found called for equal parts (by weight) of lemons (6, which I had!) sugar & water, plus one packet of pectin.

Now, after the fact, I decided that I should have sliced the lemons into a colander and let the juice drain out so that I would have measured the weight of the fruit and used the juice as part of the water measure. But I didn’t. Next time.

Put the lemons & water in a pan and bring to a boil, keep boiling for ten minutes.

Add the sugar & pectin & boil at full tilt (you should not be able to stir down the boil) for another ten minutes.

Ladle the goo into your jars as directed.

(If you are new to canning, go here to get info on how to prepare your jars, etc.)

I had to do two batches in the water.

The jars made the popping sound that proves they are sealed quite soon after removing from the water. It made me nervous that I had done something wrong, but I went with it.

Because I am a giving soul, and because I am still not convinced that I haven’t created something that will eventually poison us, I gave half of the pots as gifts. The little jars of sunshine were happily received in the middle of the dark, dreary,  drizzly winter.

I envy those who live in climates where such treasures as Meyer lemons are commonly available.  Because they do not travel well, it is not something we see here regularly.  But keep yours eyes open and if you have a chance to get your hands on some there are worse things you can do than make marmalade.

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