Tonight’s installment of what-to-make-for-dinner-when-it’s-hot is a combo of store-bought hummus and crackers plus a couple of homemade salads. The tabbouleh is parsley, tomatoes, some sort of grain and a lemony vinaigrette. My daughter offered to help me make it and took care of all the prep on the parsley. (It is really the most tedious part!) The cucumber and tomato salad were produce that came from her plot at the community garden!
This is my take on the French salad from Nice. I replaced the green beans with edamame and added carrots because John wanted carrots and artichoke hearts because I wanted them. Otherwise it’s a pretty true representation—salad greens, potatoes, canned tuna, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, and olives dressed with olive oil and white wine vinegar.
I boiled the potatoes and eggs around 8 AM and laid out the components buffet-style at 7 PM. This is one of my extremely-hot-weather dinners. I’ll be making most of my minimal cooking meals this week and probably try to find some new ones too as this really hot weather shows little sign of let up. Sigh.
Tonight I tried something different from my usual egg dishes. I microwaved a chipotle black bean veggie burger, crumbled it up, and mixed it with a scrambled egg. In addition to the two main components of my tostada I used shredded cheese, salsa, chopped onions, and shredded cabbage. I served all this on corn tortillas that I had toasted over the open flame of our cooktop.
I am experimenting with gluten-free eating to try to eliminate some digestive problems. Since I am a carb intensive person with wheat based products such as bread, pasta, and pizza being my real favorites, this has been kind of difficult. It is amazing how many foods have gluten in them! Corn is on the safe list so goodbye sandwiches and hello tacos! I really enjoyed my supper tonight!
It is forecast to be a rather hellish week here with the temperatures in the upper 90s for the first part of the week and cooling to the upper 80s towards the end of the week. I have planned quite a few no-cook or minimal-cook meals. Towards next weekend John will be cooking a few things out on the grill.
Since this dish involved some cooking and it was a hot day I made the stuffed pepper and tomato sauce in the morning and merely reheated everything in the microwave for dinner.
I like to make my own tomato sauce since I can control what goes in it. It is basically onions, garlic, oregano, a shake of red pepper flakes, a bit of tomato paste, and a large can of whole or diced tomatoes. Of course I add some salt and maybe a quarter teaspoon of sugar. The sauce cooks for 1/2 hour.
The stuffing is a combination of rice, ground beef that has been browned along with onions and garlic, and some of the tomato sauce. For 6 half peppers I used 1 cup of cooked rice, 4 oz. of ground beef, and a cup or so of sauce. I halved the peppers and microwaved them until they softened.
The stuffing goes into the softened peppers which are waiting in a square glass baking dish. I add a little more of the sauce on top of each pepper and bake them in a 350F oven, covered, for 25 minutes and then uncovered for another 10 minutes. The broccoli was sautéed in a little oil and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese right before it was time to eat.
When it was dinner time what a delight it was to have made almost everything in advance! Although I only used 4 oz. of meat the peppers had a nice meaty flavor. There were no leftovers!
Tonight’s dinner was a big success. The combination of guacamole and tomato/mango salsa went really well with the shrimp. In addition the slaw made of chopped cabbage and broccoli (same family) with some sweetness from carrots and the zing of pickled onions (leftover from Monday) plus some of their juice and mayonnaise was a real winner.
Because it has been hot lately we have not eaten this lentil dish in ages. The weather has been pleasant the last few days so I thought it would not seem overly heavy and since it cooks quickly the kitchen would not get too hot.
Basically you just start with some coriander seeds in a little oil and when they smell fragrant add in minced onion, ginger, and garlic. I use my mini-prep food processor which does a great job with the mincing. When the onions are soft stir in turmeric, cumin, and a dash of cayenne. After a minute add the vegetable stock or chicken stock and lentils.
Red lentils are quick cooking so the dish is ready in about 15 minutes. We serve ours with kale in the bottom of the bowl, then rice or in my case a rice and riced cauliflower mix, and then the lentils. Garnish with a squeeze of lemon and if you like a squirt of sriracha and some sprigs of cilantro.
The original plan for dinner tonight was the tilapia with polenta and broccoli. However, for the second time in three days the power went out at about 5:45 pm. The text I received said it should be back on by 10:30 pm. Although we talked about going to get some sort of take-out, I was hoping that it might come back on in an hour or so since that is what happened two days ago. Luckily power was restored by 7 pm but at that point we didn’t want to start cooking polenta with all its stirring.
We settled on cooking the already defrosted fish, making a salad kit, and heating a cup of microwaveable rice with red quinoa. It was not quite what I had anticipated but tasty nonetheless and ready in about 20 minutes.
We saw this recipe, https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1024375-poc-chuc-citrus-marinated-grilled-pork?smid=ck-recipe-iOS-share, on the NYTimes cooking site and decided to try it with pork tenderloin. Pork tenderloin is notorious for cooking up tasteless and dry. To counteract that John took the pork and cut it into 1 1/2 inch pieces and then pounded them out to about 1/2 inch. He then marinated the pieces overnight.
When it came time to grill, he put the pieces down in a pre-heated grill and cooked the first side for 3 minutes and the other side for 1 minute. The pork came out tender and delicious!
We ate the pork with corn tortillas. John ate his like a taco and I ate mine with a knife and fork. It takes me longer to eat when I do not go the hand-held route. For condiments we had a chunky up avocado, fresh tomato salsa, shredded cabbage, and quick pickled red onion. (There are lots of recipes for the onions on the internet.)
I made the black beans by draining a can of Rotel and adding the tomatoes and half of the liquid to a drained and rinsed can of black beans. The other half of the liquid went into the salsa where I used some tomatoes from our daughter’s garden and a Serrano chile.
We were really pleased with the outcome of this dinner. At last we have found a good recipe for pork tenderloin!
We have been having a spell of pretty hot weather the last few days, in the 90s. Complicating the hot weather was a power outage mid-day so no AC or fans. Thus our house was warmer than usual at dinner time even though the electricity was back on. A tofu bowl with almost no cooking was the right meal for the day.
John marinated the cubed, extra-firm tofu in soy sauce, ginger, garlic and red pepper flakes. I cut up the veggies and made a vinaigrette of soy sauce, a splash of water, vinegar, ginger, and garlic. No oil at this point. I serve the oil separately so each person can use the amount and type of oils, olive and/or sesame, that they want. I also heated up the riced cauliflower for me and a container of microwave basmati rice for John. This is always a family-pleasing dinner at our house.
Tomorrow it is cooling off and we are trying a new dish featuring pork tenderloin. Hopefully we can make it taste flavorful and not dried out!
Omnivore 