What's Cooking (Take Four)

Yesterday, was a simple dinner of (a really good deal) pork chops with onion, lemon on top, and bbq sauce over, asparagus, and potatoes au gratin.

Sounds delicious Larry, my kind of food!

[Jenise]

Too much red meat this week (for a gout victim) so today we're vegetarians. Fortunately I picked up 400 grams of fresh wild mushroom ravioli yesterday at an Italian market in Vancouver. Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them,

[Jenise]

Too much red meat this week (for a gout victim) so today we're vegetarians. Fortunately I picked up 400 grams of fresh wild mushroom ravioli yesterday at an Italian market in Vancouver. Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them.

Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them,

How creative do you get with saucing ravioli? I suppose the gout might affect your decisions, but I always go simple, a bit of butter/oil, especially if the ravioli are good! (I suppose 'broth' is the lower-fat version)

A friend of the chef where I play the piano brought in some elk steaks tonight for him to cook. I had a sample taste of one. Yum!

For the ravioli:
Brown butter and sage comes to mind.
Piccata perhaps.
EVOO and gremolata.
Sauteed onions (...as if they were pierogi!).
Sweet red pepper pesto and pine nuts.

[Jenise]

Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them,

How creative do you get with saucing ravioli? I suppose the gout might affect your decisions, but I always go simple, a bit of butter/oil, especially if the ravioli are good! (I suppose 'broth' is the lower-fat version)

I actually did keep it fairly simple. Made a pan sauce with cooking water, olive oil, some parm and finely chopped pecans, then topped each plate with crumbled fried sage. Was fantastic.

Btw my sage plant, in a pot and now about ten years old, survived the winter amazingly well. It wasn't protected from the freezes though sadly my rosemary plant, which was, died. I'm surprised to learn that sage is this hardy.

I love browned butter but have never tried it on ravioli. A small community called Williams is about 90 minutes south of here off of 15 has a restaurant and bar called Ganzellis which has a very cool store that sells the best ravioli. At one time they were made by the family. The meat sauce is awesome and all our family has ever used. Our son and family love them deep-fried, they are amazing.

Redding's largest Farmer's Market opens this morning, and smaller markets will soon follow as the season progresses. Today I am making an easy sheet pan dinner. I have a large skin-on bone-in chicken breast which I will split. On the sheet pan will be baby, multi-colored potatoes, mini peppers, leek slices, red onion, and garlic all tossed with an Asian concoction which will include spicy chile crisp; I am also grilling asparagus tossed with sesame oil and fresh lemon juice.
An update: my Asian concoction ended up being low sodium soy sauce, Chinese black vinegar, rice vinegar, honey, fresh garlic, fresh ginger, pepper, hoisin sauce, and the chile crisp. Tossed the veggies in it, and the chicken is marinating in the same. Sure smells good! Oh, at Farmer's Market, I found a small head of cauliflower with the leaves still on, so I cut it up and added that to the veggies.

[Jenise]

Sounds great, Karen. I think we're having dinner with friends tonight, and don't have any lunch plans in particular. I really just want to eat the rest of that heavenly sauerkraut from the choucroute. I rinsed it before cooking, and seasoned it with slivered organic uncured bacon, juniper berries and grated apple. It cooked for an hour, then was piled on top of the smoked pork chops with further informed it with amazing flavor. I have a bunch of kale standing by to add and renew it.

Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them,

Sneak up on them slowly from behind, then hit them with the sauce when they're not looking.

-Paul W.

Not sure yet how I'll approach saucing them,

How creative do you get with saucing ravioli? I suppose the gout might affect your decisions, but I always go simple, a bit of butter/oil, especially if the ravioli are good! (I suppose 'broth' is the lower-fat version)

I actually did keep it fairly simple. Made a pan sauce with cooking water, olive oil, some parm and finely chopped pecans, then topped each plate with crumbled fried sage. Was fantastic.

Nuts, sage, cheese, hard to go wrong!

Breakfast this morning was a small omelet with sauteed green onions, pico de Gallo, white pepper, pink salt, and a little low-calorie buttermilk, topped with a sprinkle of parmesan Reggiano. A few raspberries, mandarin wedges, and a slice of pear on the side sprinkled with chile lime seasoning. The other half will be breakfast tomorrow.

[Jenise]

Dinner tonight will be Italian sausage tortelloni in a red sauce. Can't wait.

[Jenise]

Last night I made an excellent recipe from the NYT for a light, quick Greek-ish pasta sauce made with ground lamb, canned artichokes, garlic, mint and cherry tomatoes. Extra seasoning comes tomato paste, white wine, and red pepper flakes. It's something I'll make again and again, and I don't often say that.

Tonight I'll be grilling chicken thighs marinated with a West Indian-style dry rub from Schlesinger's The Thrill of the Grill. Tomorrow night will be pork lo mein.

-Paul W.

Tonight, we're going out for Taco Tuesday with a friend, then quaffing wine at home afterward. No cooking for me involved. Yay.

Last night I made an excellent recipe from the NYT for a light, quick Greek-ish pasta sauce made with ground lamb, canned artichokes, garlic, mint and cherry tomatoes. Extra seasoning comes tomato paste, white wine, and red pepper flakes. It's something I'll make again and again, and I don't often say that.

Jenise, I am not a huge fan of mint in cooking. However, I used to use Cross and Blackwell's mint sauce to marinate lamb chops for decades. I bought it recently and discovered that the company had discontinued making it. Is there another herb you would recommend for this dish? Perhaps fresh basil?

[Jenise]

Basil would definitely be second choice.

But I do love the mint in it. Right now I have a glass of iced tea on my desk that had fresh mint steeped with it. And last night I made one of the best dishes of recent memory, again using mint.

Yesterday morning I woke up with that tomato-mint flavor on the brain so I made a tabboulleh for lunch. Only, a friend of Bob's dropped by to work with him on something close to noon nd there went our midday meal. I'd been planning scallops for dinner but still had the tomato-mint jones, and last week I bought some Lebanese white wine and ! I put a ring mold in the center of plain white dinner plates, spooned some tabbouleh around the outside of it, and then piled five seared scallops in the center, which I topped with a fresh green onion 'jam' and some finely chopped peanuts. WOW. Definitely a 10.

[Jenise]

Meeting friends for dinner tonight so for lunch I made the meal I'd planned with the half of my brain that didn't remember that we were going out tonight and that talked me into buying fresh Ahi yesterday. Cut into a rectangle, seared and tiled over frisee and rice with ponzu and szechuan chile oil.

Of course, now I'm not hungry for dinner.

Jenise, I am not a huge fan of mint in cooking. However, I used to use Cross and Blackwell's mint sauce to marinate lamb chops for decades. I bought it recently and discovered that the company had discontinued making it. Is there another herb you would recommend for this dish? Perhaps fresh basil?

Curious, I looked it up. C&B mint sauce was discontinued in December, 2022 plus the whole company. But I saw a lot of recipes online that look easy.

Yes, I have seen all the recipes. I no longer grow mint. in our area, it is very invasive and needs to be planted in a strong pot. It takes over everything with underground roots that can break a pot. I have a waist-high herb garden in a tub just outside my kitchen and decided to plant mint in it but keep it trimmed. Ha! It took over the planter tub and I had a hard time getting all the roots out trying to kill the other herbs. It even sent roots out of the holes for drainage—terrible stuff. I hope to eventually find another mint sauce that is as good as the C&B.

I like mint iced tea and when in high school I convinced my dad to plant a small plot of common mint at one edge of the garden. When I went off to college, my dad decided that he'd had enough of the mint, which annually invaded both the lawn and the rest of the garden. Every spring he had someone come in to roto-till the garden. This year he didn't rope off the area where the mint was. He didn't tell me about this until after he'd done it. I told him I wish he'd told me about it first, because all he'd done is to distribute the mint over the entire garden. Sure enough, the mint grew everywhere and he spent the whole summer pulling up mint plants.

-Paul W.