Happy June 1st! Here in Northern California it starts getting light around 5 AM and the temperature will vary from lows in the 50s to highs near 100 this week. It will be our first taste of summer. To celebrate the summer we had a dinner of seared scallops, mashed potatoes, and asparagus.
Seared scallops, mashed potatoes, and asparagus
John did a great job searing the scallops while I heated up the leftover potatoes from yesterday, cooked the asparagus, and made a sriracha tartar sauce. I think the dinner took 10 minutes in total to prepare. Scallops are one of my favorite proteins so it always seems like an occasion when we have them.
Grilled flank steak with mashed potatoes and broccoli
I have to admit that the flank steak got a little more medium than medium-rare. Nonetheless it was super tasty. I had scored two packets of mashed potato mix at Grocery Outlet for $.50 so I mixed that up with some water, milk, butter, and sour cream. I probably would not buy the dehydrated potatoes again since the texture was not really potato-like. But $.50 for two packets is hard to pass up. We also had some steamed broccoli with fried onions.
To complete our dinner John opened one of our “good” bottles of wine, a Ledson 2015 Malbec. It was lovely!.
Stuffed red bell peppers with ground beef, rice, and homemade tomato sauce
Stuffed red bell peppers is a dish I make about once a month. Growing up my mother always made them with green bell peppers but I find that riper peppers are easier on my digestion. I make a fairly thick meat sauce and use half of it for the peppers and save the rest for a pasta dinner. After microwaving the pepper shells for around 5 minutes, I add cooked rice to the sauce and then stuff the peppers with it. I top the stuffed peppers with a little plain tomato sauce from a can. The peppers bake in a 350F oven for 40 minutes. Then we enjoy our stuffed pepper dinner and have enough leftovers for a couple of lunches.
On Sunday we decided to get some takeout Chinese food but it was not to be. Our favorite restaurant had decided to use this weekend to renovate their kitchen! What to do? We opted for pizza. Make a phone call and pizza arrives at our doorstep in 1/2 hour.
Our favorite, tomato and cheese with Italian sausage
Seriously it is nowhere near as good as Italian pizza or my hometown pizza from the Jersey shore but it’s pretty okay and so easy!
On to Monday! Today is Memorial Day and John is grilling hamburgers and I have made Texas caviar as a salad. Texas caviar is a two bean salad, black beans and black-eyed peas. All cut to about the same size as the beans are carrots, bell pepper, tomatoes, scallion, corn, celery, and onion. It has a vinaigrette dressing spiked with a few shakes of sriracha or Tabasco and a sprinkling of cilantro.
Grilled hamburger and Texas caviar
Finally on Tuesday we had tilapia tacos and Southwest bean salad. We used stand-up taco shells, oven baked tilapia, salsa verde, onions, cabbage, and mango. The Southwest bean salad was a repurposing of the Texas caviar. The Southwest flavor came from adding chipotle powder.
Tilapia tacos and Southwest bean salad
So that is our long weekend plus Tuesday dining. Wednesday I will make stuffed peppers and then we are having a family celebration on Thursday for the graduation from high school of our granddaughter.
Looks like this is going to be a no-cook weekend! We headed up to Sonoma County and enjoyed an olive oil tasting at the Olive Press which is in the Jacuzzi Winery and then some wine sipping at Imagery Winery. We settled on a late lunch at the Yeti Restaurant which serves Himalayan and Indian food. I chose prawns and basil curry and John had Rogen Josh lamb. We shared some basmati rice and naan.
Both dishes were yummy. I especially liked sopping up the curry sauce with the naan.
A combination of Miser Wot (red lentils), Kik Alitcha (yellow split peas), Atakelt Wot (cabbage, potatoes, carrots), Gomen Wot (collard greens), miser kitfo (more lentils) and ye-beg tibs (sautéed lamb with peppers and onions) served on and with injera, Ethiopian bread
We love going out for Ethiopian food. In fact we have eaten it in Venice, Amsterdam, and Basel. We always seek it out when we travel. Tonight is our local favorite, Zeni Restaurant, in San Jose. Their rendition of a veggie combo includes five vegetable dishes served on and with injera, Ethiopian bread. We also ordered sautéed lamb with onions and peppers but forgot to add the salad which is usually served in the middle of the platter.
The food is spiced with berbere which gives it a distinctive Ethiopian flavor. Your utensil is a small piece of injera that you use to pick up a portion of the meat or vegetables. Injera is a spongy, sourdough-tasting bread which complements the spicy food. All in all it is a very tasty interactive meal.
We started watching Ciao House this week. The culinary area of this competition* is Puglia, Italy. We have spent a lot of our visits to Italy in Puglia and watching the show made us want to prepare an Apulian dish. One of their iconic dishes is orecchiette with broccoli rabe. Sometimes sausage is included. Since we wanted to keep this vegetarian (vegan if you use non-dairy cheese or omit the cheese), we made ours with mushrooms and substituted kale for the broccoli rabe since that is what we had on hand.
Our orecchiette took a long time to cook (15 minutes) since it was quite thick. We used a whole grain Italian brand called Manta that we bought through Amazon. Next time we will just get Barilla. Anyway, between the time we had getting the salted water boiling and then the 15 minutes cooking we had ample time to make a sauce.
First in olive oil I sautéed the mushrooms and then added chopped onion, then garlic and red pepper flakes. When the pasta was nearly done I added the kale and some pasta water to the mushrooms etc. Finally we drained the pasta and added it to the pan of vegetables with more pasta water and additional olive oil. Very enjoyable!
*Last year when we watched season 1 of Ciao House the less talented chefs got together and voted off the better chefs. So it really was not much of a competition. It was more like a culinary manipulation. We were not sure that we would even watch it again but since they would be showcasing Puglia and Apulian food we are giving the show a second try. Hopefully the chefs will be less manipulative this season.
I have been willing to make pho just with beef broth and its usual accompaniments. But the we saw Jet Tila make a quick pho broth on his show, Ready, Jet, Cook and decided to give it a try. Here’s his recipe.
We took a few shortcuts like using deli roast beef torn into bite size pieces. I also made the rice noodles separately in cases we had leftovers. I have had rice noodles disintegrate overnight in the broth. LOL, as if we would have leftovers.
Our accompaniments along with the noodles and roast beef were basil, cilantro, green onions, bean sprouts, and jalapeños. It turned out very tasty and we ate the whole pot of soup.
I am a little late getting our menu posted this week. I am doing better than last week though when I never figured out what we were preparing for dinner until the day of.
Omnivore 