My Herb Garden

As I thought about throwing away an old gas grill, I thought again, and repurposed it as an herb garden.  Original plan was to put the soil right in the firebox, but it was too rusted away on the bottom.

Mara took this picture

Breakfast for Dinner Last Night

Scrambled eggs with chives and cheese, and bacon.  Hardly noteworthy except for two ingredients:

• Zingerman’s Jowl Bacon, made from the pork cheek rather than the belly.  I know people are all over re-discovering bacon, but this was unusual and pretty damn good.
• First chives of the season from my re-purposed gas grill herb garden (I had hoped to include a picture, but can’t find it in my labyrinthine picture archive

My Tuna Noodle “Casserole”

I was home alone last night.  Debbie was in California.  Everyone else – of course – over the hill and far away.

I got it in my head to make a tuna noodle casserole.

Here’s how it was.  I bought a boatload of canned tuna some weeks ago as part of a low-carb diet notion, and have to keep reminding myself of ways to use them up.  So tuna.  Then I saw some yogurt in the fridge, so I looked up “canned tuna and yogurt” in Epicurious and a couple of other online sources.  Got not so much.  But relaxing the criteria to a mere “canned tuna” surfaced, as you might imagine, a number of cuts at tuna noodle casserole.

I noticed at this point that there was maybe a cup of leftover pasta from Debbie’s and my last meal together, so things were beginning to look good.  And I even found a can of Campbells Cream of Celery soup in the basement.  The fundamentals were in place.

Ultimately, I just improvised.  I put together canned tuna, used pasta, cream of celery soup, grated cheddar cheese (had that too), canned sliced olives, frozen peas, and, as a Crummy flourish, a couple of tablespoons of harissa.

 

Here’s how it looked coming out of the oven (not the best picture, sorry).

Actually pretty tasty.

Adobo-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Black Bean Pico de Gallo/Mushroom Soup

Debbie was back from the Left Coast last night, so we cooked together (a first!).  She can be a bit bossy in the kitchen, but this worked out very well. Either she’s changed or I have, or both.

I made the pork tenderloin from Epicurious.  I picked this one mainly because it didn’t have any fruit or fruity sauce in it (still carb-sparing old Crumster here).  We’ll try a fruity one at some point soon.

As it turned out, making an adobo rub was interesting (although it almost depleted our paprika), and it was great on the pork.  The combo of searing the pork and then finishing in the oven made it not dry out too much.

Here’s the adobo rub.

Here’s the finished product, pork underneath the black bean pico de gallo.

Debbie made a mushroom soup sans dairy, so no cream or even milk.  Just stock, mushrooms, onions, and a bit of sherry.

Here’s the finished product.  It was terrific.

Catfish with Green Olives

On a whim I bought catfish at Whole Foods yesterday evening.

Well, not exactly a whim.  I’d had catfish for the first time in my life last year, and, to my surprise, it tasted pretty much like any other kind of smaller white fish.  A tastier kind of tilapia, so to speak.

So I wasn’t afraid to buy it anymore.

But when I got home, the bulk of the recipes in Epicurious involved breading it and frying it.

I like frying as much as the next person, but breading in tabu on my current diet, something between a low-carb and a slow-carb diet, somewhere to the left of South Beach.  So breading was out.

I found this recipe, however, and it spoke to me.  I like olives.  I had parsley (and like it well enough).  and I’m always intrigued to use new kitchen junk, so the idea of putting a circle of parchment paper on top of the cooking fish-and-olives tickled me.

(Debbie’s away until tonight, so I had only myself to please here.)

There’s how the picture in Epicurious looks.  I didn’t get my own home photos because the phone was upstairs and I was downstairs (I know, it’s  a First World problem, but then I’m a First World guy).

Really tasty.  I had it with a big old salad and was quite pleased with myself.

South Beach Mock Satay

Debbie and I are doing something very much like the South Beach diet lately, and I actually went and bought one of the South Beach cookbooks (in Kindle format).

Tonight we had a pork tenderloin, and it seemed close enough to the South Beach recipe below that we made the sauce, the marinade, etc. and just applied it to the tenderloin.

Screen clipping taken: 1/17/2013 1:56 PM

The cashew sauce was actually pretty good, kind of a mock satay.

Or maybe it was just the fruits of diet-induced deprivation.

Broiled Fish Redux (but with a picture)

Same drill this week as last: stop off at Black Salt Fish Market on the way home, pick up whatever looks most glistening, and prepare it simply as part of the Great Circle of Life.

This week the fish that called to me was barramundi, and I got a beautiful sweet-smelling fillet for Debbie and me.  And I accompanied it with Israeli couscous and a salad (not shown).