Pasta with Corn pesto

Tonight, dinner was pasta with corn pesto. We substituted frozen corn, and that made the recipe go a lot faster. Even though it’s the weekend, we needed a quick dinner. With the frozen corn, it took longer to boil the water and cook the pasta than get the pesto made! Dinner was ready in 30 minutes and it was delicious…our youngest threw a fit because he wanted more, luckily I had saved some from my plate.

Polynesian Pork

I was looking for a way to use pork shoulder that didn’t involve a crock pot, and came across this recipe for Polynesian pork. But this doesn’t have any veggies, so we made our own version:

For the pork, follow the recipe:

4 lb. Boston Butt
2 c. apple cider vinegar
1/4 c. sugar
2 tsp. salt
1 c. soy sauce
2 tsp. ground black pepper
2 tsp. ground red pepper
10 cloves garlic
1/4 c. wine
Cut meat into 1 inch cubes; mix remaining ingredients together. Marinate meat cubes for at least 8 hours. Place on wooden skewers and grill until done. Serve with rice and green vegetable.
While the pork is cook on the grill, stir fry a bag of veggies (snow peas, broccoli, etc). Remove the pork from the skewers and mix in with the veggies. Serve over rice.
The vinegar from the marinade imparted a great flavor. It was also nice to fire up the grill after not using it much for the winter!

Beer-glazed [pinto beans] with [andouille] and orange

Earlier in the week we made the beer-glazed beans with chorizo and orange from Mark Bittman’s book. We used andouille sausage and some pinto beans that we had left over from another meal.  We cut the amount of beer a bit so that it thickened faster and was ready sooner. Turned out really good and was a fairly quick weeknight meal.

Meals for Feb 5-11, 2010

  1. Salad with Butternut Squash, Lentils,  & Feta, from DALS, using the salad greens on sale this week and omitting the pecans.
  2. The Indonesian Chicken from last week didn’t work out…dried out in the crock pot. So this week, we’ll try Polynesian pork. Rice and mixed veggies on the side.
  3. Crisp rice cakes with stir fried vegetables and chicken (TFMCB, p. 324)
  4. Beer-glazed [pinto beans] with chorizo and orange (TFMCB, p. 397, and kind of like this)

Pork Shoulder Ragu

This appeared on Dinner A Love Story, one of my favorite sources these days. The original recipe called for braising in a dutch oven for 3-4 hours. Given that we don’t own a dutch over (why do they cost so much!?!) and it is much easier to put stuff in the crock pot and go off to work and come home to a tasty meal, I adapted it for the crock pot…or more truthfully, I just followed the recipe, it didn’t need any adaptation! YUM!

All I did was brown the pork shoulder in a skillet first as directed. After putting the pork in the crock pot I put the red wine in the skillet to deglaze and get all the browned bits scraped up. Add that and everything else to the crock pot and cook on low for a while, I did 9 hours because that’s how long it was until dinner time!

Came out yummy! Thanks for the recipe.

Crisp and Spicy Chickpeas with Ground Beef

This is from Mark Bittman’s The Food Matters Cook Book (p. 410, also posted on this blog).

We made this last week, but with sleep overs, and other things, it’s taken a while to get photos uploaded and this posted…

This was really good! The crisp chickpeas and beef had a great texture.

Quinoa pumpkin pancakes

OK, so it looks like most of my favorite meals are breakfasts. It is true that on most weekends I’ll come up with an idea based on some ingredient we have and Google around until I find something that looks good.

Today we had some pumpkin left over from last weekend and just found out about quinoa. I saw a few recipes around the similar to this, but they either didn’t have pumpkin, or used quinoa flour. So here’s our version:

Quinoa pumpkin pancakes

Cook 1/2 cup quinoa (1/2 c raw + 1 c water, bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10-15min. Start it and mix the rest of the stuff and it will be ready to add in at the end.*)

In a bowl mix:

  • 1 cup flour
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/2tsp ground ginger

Add in:

  • 2 eggs
  • 3 tbs melted butter or oil
  • 1 cup pumpkin puree
  • 1.5 cup milk
  • 1.5 tsp lemon juice
  • And the cooked quinoa

Mix it all up and adjust the consistency as needed. Cook in pan, top with maple syrup or whatever you like.

* Under normal circumstances it probably wouldn’t take 10-15 minutes to mix this up, but this morning we had a standoff in the kitchen with the kids arguing over who got to add the baking powder: Kid 2 brandishing the open container of baking powder, Kid 1 refusing to relinquish the measuring spoons! My attempts to mediate the situation were futile and kids were banished from the kitchen…

Sweet and Sour Pork

Based on this recipe, we made some really great sweet and sour pork.

1 c. flour
2 lb. pork tenderloin
3 beaten eggs
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. vinegar
1/3 c. pineapple juice
1/4 c. catsup
1 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. cornstarch
2 c. pineapple chunks
1 bag stir fry veggies (broccoli, snow peas, etc.)
  1. Put flour in one pie dish and eggs into another
  2. Cut pork tenderloin into 3/4 inch cubes.
  3. Dip meat into egg, then into flour.
  4. Fry pork in vegetable oil (360 degrees) for 6 to 9 minutes, until done; drain on paper towels; keep warm.
  5. In wok or skillet stir fry  veggies until almost done.
  6. Combine the sugar, vinegar, pineapple juice (reserved from draining pineapple chunks) and catsup. Add to veggies and heat.
  7. Blend 2 tablespoons cornstarch with 2 tablespoons water. Stir into skillet. Cook, stirring until mixture is thick and bubbly.
  8. Add the pork and pineapple. Heat and stir about 5 minutes. Serve over rice.