Cook Along Thursday - Scallopini, or Possibly Pork Piccata

Want a laugh? Here's the recipe Nick originally sent me to post:

4 T wine
5 T lemon
5 T cream
1 cup butter
4 oz bacon
6 oz artichokes
2 t capers

Wine and lemon over medium until reduced by 1/3
Stir in cream and simmer until thickens
Add butter 1 T at a time
Keep warm
Cook protein

That's right. That's it. Luckily, we know each other (and our cooking styles) well. But given the fact that most people wouldn't know what exactly Nick was going for here, I had him beef it up a bit:

Lemon Butter Sauce:

1/4 cup white wine

5 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

5 tablespoons heavy cream

1 cup butter, chilled

salt and pepper to taste

Pork and Pasta:

1/2 pound dry farfalle pasta (cook the whole pound and add however much you want)

4 pork chops - cut off the bone and pounded to 1/4 inch thickness

1½  cups vegetable oil

2 tablespoon butter

1/8 cup all-purpose flour

1/4 cup panko bread crumbs

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 eggs – lightly beaten

Extra flour set aside

salt and pepper to taste

4 ounces bacon

6 ounces artichoke hearts, drained and halved

2 teaspoons capers, drained

Directions:

To make the sauce, pour the wine and lemon juice into a saucepan over medium heat. Cook at a low boil until the liquid is reduced by 1/3. Stir in cream, and simmer until it thickens. Gradually add the butter 1 tablespoon at a time to the sauce, stirring until completely incorporated. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from heat, and keep warm.

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to boil. Add pasta, and cook until al dente, about 8 to 10 minutes. Drain, and set aside.

To make the pork, heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. In a bowl, stir together flour, panko, cayenne, salt, and pepper. In a separate bowl, coat the pork in the extra flour then dip the chops in the beaten eggs. Lightly coat the dredged pork with the panko and flour mixture. Without crowding, carefully place pork in hot oil. (If necessary, cook in batches.) Fry until cooked through and golden brown on both sides, turning once. Remove the pork to paper towels. In a separate skillet, heat the butter over medium heat.  Stir the bacon, artichokes, and capers into the butter and cook until the bacon is done.

To serve, place pasta in a large bowl. Stir the bacon mixture into the pasta. Taste, and adjust seasonings. Stir in additional lemon butter sauce as desired. Toss well, add pork chop on top of pasta and enjoy.

Monday Dinner - Skirt Steak with Roasted Root Vegetables

Tonight I stuck to the plan and made the Skirt Steak with Roasted Root Vegetables from this month's Food Network Magazine. There are times that I feel magazines/recipes severely misestimate the amount of time it will take the average person to prepare something - cough - Rachael Ray - cough - but this recipe was spot on, even giving a little breathing room. I highly recommend this recipe for weeknight cooking. If you've got 40 minutes (at the most) you can have a healthy, delicious, protein and veggie rich meal on your table easily.

Here's what I like about the recipe:

• It uses skirt steak. For beef, skirt steak is an affordable option that cooks up quickly. Plus, it's delicious. We cook a lot with flank steak and skirt steak for this reason. I find skirt steak to be a little more tender than flank, though, so I favor it a little.
• I already talked about the quick cooking time, but this is huge for us. We could make this on a a workout night with no problem.
• The flavor is great. The rosemary, garlic and worcestershire all work great together.
• Veggies. I love roasted veggies. We do a lot of roasted asparagus (for Nick, I think it's blech) and carrots, but we don't do much with parsnips. That's not true. We don't do anything with parsnips. This was our first foray into parsnips, and they were yum, especially alongside the carrots. I especially liked the skinny ones that were a little burnt, but I'm weird like that. In the photo, you may notice that there are a lot of veggies, and that's not your eyes playing tricks on you, I doubled them. Kind of. I just used the whole bag of both the carrots and parsnips and it ended up being about double. Which we ate all of. If you're doing a salad or something on the side I don't think you'd need the extra veggies, but if this is all you're doing, I'd double the veggies.

I highly recommend this recipe. It's delicious, it's fall, it's fast.

Tastes Like Home - Black Beans Sunday

Today I made the Black Beans with Creole Tomato Salsa. This is one of my favorite recipes, but it's definitely a weekend recipe. Taking at least two hours to cook, plus eight hours of bean soaking time, it's not exactly a quick fridge-to-table dinner. What do I love so much about it? To begin with, beans are one of my favorite foods. Growing up the child of a father who could best be described as a picky eater for health reasons - he was at times vegetarian, pescitarian, flexitarian and vegan - we ate some odd things as kids. Or at least, what other kids would consider odd. To us, they were just dinner. To this day, when I'm home sick, I don't crave fried chicken and mashed potatoes or spaghetti like my friends do. I crave pinto beans on rice cakes with salsa and mayo or my mom's "hummus" (which, according to Nick isn't hummus as it doesn't contain tahini) in pita with cucumbers, salsa and mayo. Always with the mayo - preferably homemade, but jarred will do in a pinch.

But back to the black beans. For the first hour, the beans simmer on their own with only a bay leaf, leading you to believe that they won't be very flavorful. But then it all comes together quite quickly. Once the sauteed veggies and spices are added and start to simmer with the beans, a whole 'nother dimension is added and the whole house starts to smell amazing. But let me tell you. Oh, let me tell you. The final step with the garlic is divine. Be sure to get the oil nice and hot before you add the garlic (hot but not smoking) and continuously stir the garlic to keep it from burning. You'll want to keep it cooking until it starts to turn brown and then immediately dump it into the beans. Everyone perked up when the garlic step started. It smells incredible!

A tip - it's best to start working on all getting all of your veggies cut and prepped as soon as the beans get cooking. I cut up everything needed for the salsa while prepping my other veggies and prep it simultaneously. A lot of veggies are required and the hour goes by a lot more quickly than one might think. Plus, the more time the salsa has in the fridge, the better it is.


When serving be generous with the salsa. It is yummy, cooling, spicy and refreshing all at the same time. Serve the beans atop rice. I prefer brown, but white is good too. There is something so comforting about this dish. It's truly a big bowl of home, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

What's Cooking This Week

Things are looking delicious this week. We'll be cooking Monday, Thursday and Friday this week. We tend to cook three to four times a week; we have a weekly dinner with family friends most Wednesday's, and Tuesday's have recently turned into Mutt's nights.

Tuesday is Skirt Steak With Roasted Root Vegetables from the October 2011 issue of Food Network Magazine. I have a bit of what could be considered a food magazine habit. I subscribe to Food Network Magazine, Real Simple and Rachael Ray, Nick has a coworker that sends home copies of Food and Wine with him every month, and still, if left unsupervised in the checkout line, I cannot be trusted to pass up any special recipe edition Southern Living, Crock Pot Cooking or Holiday Cookies mini-booklet that crosses my path. A lot of the recipes we use here will be from magazines.

Nick's making his signature Scallopini on Thursday. This is the first meal that Nick ever cooked for me, and it's still one of my favorites. He'll be posting the recipe, but you'll need either shrimp, chicken, veal or - as we are using - pork chops. From what I remember/what we bought at the store today you'll also need lemons, artichoke hearts (we bought two small jars), capers, unsalted butter, cream (we bought a pint) and pasta (we use farfalle). I think we're breading the pork, so we'll probably use an egg wash, so I'm thinking you'll need an egg or two and panko bread crumbs. Again, Nick will be posting the actual recipe, but I think if you have all of the ingredients I just listed, you should be good to go. I'm sure at one point, Nick probably included parsley in the recipe, but since I am not a parsley fan, he leaves it out now.

Friday will be Grilled Flank Steak With Tomatoes, Red Onion and Balsamic from skinnytaste.com. I love Gina's recipes. They all include Weight Watchers Informations, which, while we aren't on WW, I find comforting when trying to eat healthfully.

Check back to see how things turn out!

The Payoff - Saturday Gumbo

After a hectic Twilight ticket acquiring afternoon, Nick got the chance to make his gumbo for dinner this afternoon. And - just like Shake and Bake - I helped. We try to help each other out in the kitchen while leaving one person clearly in charge (this tends to stave off the head-strong difference in ingredients or technique fights that we have otherwise. But we - ahem - mostly I - still have trouble keeping our mouths shut sometimes. But we work on things and we grow, right?). Anyway, I prepped the veggies and then headed out back to watch some backlogged The Rachel Zoe Project while Nick took care of the rest. I have some awesome timing, because I returned just in time to put the rice in the rice cooker.

Nick will be posting his thoughts on the gumbo over on the OKGastronaut, but let me just tell you, it's yummy friends. Be careful with the roux, though, because it go from chocolate to burned quickly. Which happened a little with this, but not too badly. Still delicious.

Sunday Recipe - Black Beans with Creole Tomato Salsa

From The Gumbo Shop Cookbook
1 lb. black beans
2 quarts water
1 bay leaf
1 tbsp olive oil
1 3/4 finely chopped onion
3/4 cup finely chopped red bell pepper
3/4 cup finely chopped green bell pepper
1 tbsp finely chopped jalapeno pepper (seeded)
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup minced garlic
2 tsp Balsamic vinegar
2 tsp salt

Rinse the beans well and pick through to remove any small rocks and debris. Place them in a large pot, cover with the water, and refrigerate for at least 8 hours.

Set the pot over medium heat and slowly bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to simmer. Add the bay leaf and cook until beans are tender, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours, adding more water if needed.

Meanwhile, in a large heavy skillet heat the olive oil over medium high heat and saute the onions, bell peppers and jalapenos until tender. Stir in the white pepper, black pepper, cumin and oregano and cook for one minute. Add to the cooked black beans and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Heat the 1/4 cup olive oil in a small sauce pan and add the minced garlic. Stir and cook until the garlic is evenly browned then immediately stir into the beans. Add the balsamic vinegar, then the Tabasco and salt to taste. Simmer for another 15 minutes. Serve over rice, garnished with about two tablespoons of Creole Tomato Salsa per serving.

Creole Tomato Salsa
1 lb Creole or other vine ripened tomatoes, chopped
1 minced jalapeno pepper, seeded
1 tbsp fresh lime juice
Tabasco to taste
1 tbsp fresh basil or parsley, chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup diced green pepper
3 tbsp minced shallot

Combine all ingredients and refrigerate for at least one hour.

What's Cooking This Weekend

We'll be doing a lot of cooking this weekend. Nick and I had a deal. I wouldn't cook any "major" recipes again until he got to make his favorite gumbo. This is what happens every time the weather changes. When summer hits we're competing over who gets to make the first ice cream, sorbet, pasta salad and the like; with the cool weather that's heading in, it's time for us to start competing for stove time again with hearty soups, stews and gumbos. I snuck in the first dish (red beans and rice), with the agreement that Nick's gumbo would be next. The only problem is, I'm really craving my favorite black bean dish, so in order to keep my promise while also getting my way, he'll be making his gumbo on Saturday and I'll be making my black beans on Sunday. Want to cook along? Here are the recipes:

For Saturday:

Shrimp and Chicken Etouffee originally from Food Network Magazine
Feel free to swap out the shrimp for crawfish, which we often do. Sometimes we leave out the seafood altogether if we know we're going to have leftovers, since it doesn't reheat in the microwave well. You may have noticed in the post that I'm referring to this as a Gumbo but the recipe refers to it as an Etouffee. That's Nick's call. He's pretty emphatic about it. I'll let him explain, but either way, it's delicious.

For Sunday:

Black Beans with Creole Tomato Salsa from The Gumbo Shop Cookbook
Delicious, comforting, and as a bonus, vegetarian. If you're into that kind of thing.