Kitchen Sink Pasta

Thank god for leftovers.

This is one of the house favorites, Kitchen Sink Pasta. We also make Kitchen Sink Soup, Kitchen Sink Salad, etc.

Leftover pasta with Stuff

To make this particular dish I dry-fried some onions cauliflower and carrots. When they were slightly burned I added the asparagus, diced smoked pork and a bit of olive oil and orange zest. I let it cook for a few minutes then turned the heat off and threw in the leftover campanelle and some toasted almonds.


On top is some shaved fennel and dried apricots.I squeezed the juice of half the orange over the whole thing.


You can make this kind of dish in just a few minutes. I try to include different textures and colors and cooling foods like the fennel and rich savory tastes like the almonds. This dish improves if you let it sit a while.

You can easily make it vegetarian by leaving out the pork. You could add shredded tofu or smoked tofu. You could substitute fish for the pork or bbq chicken or whatever you have. If it's dull add some flavors and colors and crunch or juice or something!

Ravioli in the Garage

Teaching, practicing, playing Brahms and going to the dog park doesn't leave a lot of time to make lunch. I ate in the garage today taking bites in between doing other stuff.

Apples and walnuts with walnut oil, ravioli with home smoked pork and peas

I had a box of locally made ravioli so I poached them and in another pan I sauteed some onions and tomatoes in olive oil, threw in some peas, rosemary from the garden and some thin slices of home cured and smoked pork. The salad is just apple and walnuts with a little walnut oil and lemon juice and black pepper. Dash of salt on the salad but the ravioli didn't need it.

My wife loved it. I scarfed it. Cost per serving: about four bucks, mostly for the ravioli.  Time to make it: about 20 minutes.

Crazy, rainy day means Turkey

It's been one of those days - I played two concerts at a high school this morning and on my way back I got a call from my dentist. My 18 year old son fell ill as they started to work on him. Rats!

I dashed over there picked him up and ran home. The pediatrician's office was closed for another hour so I slapped lunch together, called them and they gave us an appointment for late in the afternoon. I canceled all my students. As I was getting lunch on plates they called back and said to bring him right it.

The good news is that he's fine and it was probably a one time event. The bad news is that I had to eat in the car.

Sorry about the lousy picture - had to rush to the doctor..

Today I make potato and onion soup and turkey tenderloins. The soup is really easy. I sauteed up a large onion, put 5 potatoes in cut into fourths, with the skin and added boiling water. Today just for kicks I added some dried porcini mushrooms. It simmered while I made the turkey. When the potatoes and mushrooms were soft I used a stick blender and pureed it. Add some salt and pepper and it's ready. I garnished it with a little of my home smoked pork belly.


I love the contrast of the rather bland soup and the strong flavored pork.

I had some turkey tenderloins, which is really part of the turkey breast and not a tenderloin at all, but tenderloins sounds expensive so that's what they call them. They have virtually no waste. I just rinsed and dried them, poured olive oil over them and some of my spice rub. I browned them in a cast iron pan and finished them in a hot oven. Let them rest a few minutes and away we go.

Total cost for today's treats: about 2 bucks.

I don't like to eat before concerts or rehearsals so I will have a snack around 6 then eat a light snack when I get back. Tonight's Symphony Silicon Valley concert is special by the way: Thursday concerts never sell well so they have opened the house to the public for free and will be asking for donations to help the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

A Thrown Together Lunch - 30 Minute Spaghetti and Meatballs

Charlie on his first day with us.

It's going to be one of those crazy busy weeks. I taught this morning until 1, played with Charlie, our lab, smoked a batch of bacon, and drove my daughter to ballet and back then went to rehearsal. I hadn't really planned on what to have for lunch and my time was limited.
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I had some ground chuck so I decided to make spaghetti and meat balls. I sauteed up some onions with some onions and peppers. I threw in some ground cumin and some celery seeds and a cup of cheap red wine.

Pretty darn tasty for something thrown together.

I toasted a couple of slices of sourdough and whirled them in the food processor. I mixed those crumbs with the chuck, more cumin, salt and pepper and some juice from the can of tomatoes I was using for the sauce.

I chopped a handful of parsley. I added the chopped stems to the sauce and the leaves to the meat balls.

There were three things cooking at once (pasta, sauce, meatballs) but they all take about the same amount of time.


Total cost for today's lunch: About 3 bucks.

Slabs of pork sides. It's like really meaty and smokey bacon

I also had the smoker going today and here is the result. I used to call this bacon but it's side pork which is like bacon but there is a lot more meat than bacon. Bacon comes from the bottom of the belly of the pig, side pork is from the side.

I lightly cure it then smoke it pretty heavily so the texture is not too dry and the smoke flavor is strong.

We like to use it as a garnish for soups and salads and sauteed vegetables. I made some onions and Brussel sprouts with bits of the smoked pork and even my kids liked it!

Now if you don't care about things like your aorta, you can cut the rind off the pork and cook it in a heavy bottomed frying pan with a light weight (like another pan) on it. You'll render out a lot of the fat and get crisp smoked pork rinds. So bad for you but sooooo tasty.

The Cure for Bland Food

Today I was inspired as I set slabs of bacon to cure in my fridge. I actually took my son out for Japanese food for lunch today. More on that later.

I know what a lot of you are thinking - there's a lot of sodium in them thar foods. It's true of you ate nothing but cured food you'd be in salt overload but that's not how I eat. These foods are condiments or sides designed to make other food taste good.

Well known cured foods include ham and salami and lox.

Some of my favorite cured foods

 

Curing is the rubbing or soaking food in substances that remove moisture from the cells of the food and through osmosis replaces the moisture with a solution that is downright inhospitable to bacteria. Usually it's sugary or salty. It's a method that has been used for thousands of years to preserve and improve food.




Pickled foods are almost always cured. Pickling is the action of acetic acid (vinegar) on foods. Some pickles don't list vinegar as an ingredient. In that case the vinegar comes as a result of the action of beneficial bacteria created in the salty environment.

My mom used to make great pickles in a ceramic crock in the garage. She's British and the spiciest thing I ever saw her eat is ketchup - except for those pickles, which she cured with jalepeños. 

Here we have some of my favorites including my ubiquitous peppers and onions, boquerones, salt-cured capers,  Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers and my mother's recipe for quick cucumber and onion pickles.

Salt cured fish are wonderful. Not only do they have a wonderful flavor but the enhance the taste of other food.  These boquerones aren't too fishy, like some anchovies or oilier fish like herring or mackerel. 

These fish also bring umami to your food. Umami is the mouth-watering flavor that seems to have the effect of bringing out the savory qualities of other food. It's found in many seafoods including oily fish, clams, seaweed, etc.

Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers are a nice treat. They are spicy but not really frightening. The liquid they come with is a handy seasoning, a little bit spicy and sour from the vinegar. I love to eat them with fried chicken or well cooked meats.

Capers are a fun food, at once flowery and salty. They are the unripe bud of a small bush. I planted two of these in my backyard last month. It will be years before I get any buds.  The ones in the picture are salt-cured, just packed in salt with no water or vineger. They taste more flowery than the ones packed in water or vinegar.

Of course you see one of my favorite cured foods, onions and peppers.

The cucumbers on the plates here were pickled overnight in a solution of salt and sugar. I make it like my mom did, simply slicing the cucumbers and onions and adding salt and sugar to the water until it tastes right. I've never measured it but you can tell when you taste it if is right. There was almost always a bowl of these in the fridge when I grew up.

Slabs of my home cured, hot almond smoked bacon

Note: For lunch my wife and son and I went to one of our favorite local restaurants, a place serving Silicon Valley for many years. Tomisushi has the usual Japanese menu items but the qualtity is there in everything.

It's the kind of place where everybody at the table says 'you have to try this' when the food arrives. Even the miso soup is delicious. Chicken teryaki tastes smoky and not too sweet. The sushi is always high quality and the fried foods come out greaseless and crunchy.

One of the World's Best $2.50 Lunches

Beautiful, cheap and delicious. Just like me!

Oh yes, here it is. The chicken is really high quality fresh chicken I bought at my favorite Chinese Market.


I poured some olive oil in a bowl and mixed in some of my spice rub. I rolled the chicken around in it and rubbed it into the skin. I put it on a foil lined tray and into a 425° oven for five minutes, then I turned the heat off.


When they just firm and done all the way through I took them out. Simple and delicious.

Cost: at $.89 a pound they were a real bargain. The two cost about $.60. Let's add a tablespoon of olive oil and some spices and call it $.70.

Lettuce is really expensive right now and quality is difficult to find. But I found these little gem lettuces for $1.59 each. It's dressed with hazelnut oil and a 10 year old balsamic vinegar. Not trendy right now but very tasty. On top for a quirky garnish is some enoki mushrooms and below is a few sliced almonds to add some depth.

Cost including the few drops of expensive oil and expensive vinegar and the mushrooms and almonds: about $.85

The sourdough was toasted over a flame and topped with onions and peppers and boquerones, those fishy little fish from Spain.

Cost: about $1.

Yum factor is very high for this meal. Cost is really low. I made a big pile of this chicken since the whole family is here all of a sudden. While the chicken was in the oven I made the onions and peppers.  When the chicken was done I cooked the Branzino I had for lunch yesterday. There were a lot of good textures in this meal too. The chicken skin was cruncy and flesh nice and moist. The bread was really crunchy and had a flame-toasted flavor. The lettuce was cruncy too and the little bit of hazelnut oil on it make the almonds taste really nutty.

Good stuff all around. Glad I got to eat it.