Sunday Night Steak Out

Ahh Sundays...since my Pittsburgh Steelers failed to make it to the post-season, I have even more time on my hands where I can either mope around that I have to get up early the next day or make something delicious to eat.

Today Kara and I were looking to use up few items from our last share.  Originally we were hoping to grill our steak since the weathermen promised us a sunny and 70 degree day, but yet again we were led astray by a weather forecast fail; so that was out of the question.  Instead, we decided to work around this by sous-viding our buffalo strip steak. We're not fortunate enough to own an immersion circulator, so we simply threw our vacuum-packed steak into a dutch oven filled with water heated to about 130 degrees for about 40 mins.  Once it was cooked through to a nice medium, I removed it, seasoned it with a little roasted garlic salt and black pepper, and seared it in a grill pan for about two minutes a side.

 

Next up was the kohlrabi.  We were simultaneously thinking "awesome" and "WTF?!?!" when we learned we were getting kohlrabi this week.

A brief search through the interwebs led us to this fritter recipe .  We subbed the besan for good old-fashioned flour.  One tip when squeezing out the excess water from the shredded kohlrabi...place it all in a dish towel, and just wring it out.  You'll be able to squeeze a lot of water out without losing any kohlrabi down the drain.




The fritters were pretty easy to put together...shred the kohlrabi, chop up some scallions, mix in the spices, and you're good to go!

What about those greens? Why we sauteed them with some garlic, shallot, and the rest of our spinach.

The meal was really starting to take shape, but rich steak and starchy pan-fried fritters needed to be paired with a fresh component.  Luckily, we had lettuce from our CSA and decided to throw together a little salad.  During a quick jaunt to Trader Joe's, we picked up some mini portabella caps, which we roasted with some goat cheese, and some orange muscat vinegar to round out the salad...plus some decent $2 beer to boot.

We were only missing one thing...a tasty sauce to compliment our greens and meat.  I'm a huge fan of red meat and Bearnaise sauce, and I like putting my own spin on this classic sauce by subbing the tarragon for other herbs, deglazing with liqueurs etc.  Since we had the dill, I simply used it in place of the tarragon.

It all came together quite nicely, and we truly made the best of an otherwise dreary day by relaxing with some quality food and drink.

Tressed to Kill

Tonight's dinner is brought to you by the letter P, for pork and polenta!

Since we have apples from the CSA, and pork tenderloin was on sale this week, it was a match made in heaven.  We've experimented before with a recipe for pork chops stuffed with apples, hazelnuts and blue cheese, so we made a few tweaks, substituting in walnuts rather than hazelnuts, and rolling it all up into a pork tenderloin.

I got to work chopping up 2 gold rush apples and toasting the walnuts.  We seasoned the pork with salt, pepper, and chopped rosemary.  Then we stuffed it with the apples and walnuts.  Our blue cheese is currently MIA, so we had to forgo the cheese.

 Justin had the pleasure of tressing the pork and making sure all the apples and walnuts stayed up inside the pork.  And since all of the apples didn't fit inside the tenderloin, we just put them in the dish around the pork while it cooked.

For our side dish, we went with a butternut squash polenta gratin.  The bulb of the squash was roasted, while the neck was just peeled and sliced.  While the squash roasted we whipped up the polenta.

The roasted squash was added to the polenta, along with a bunch of parmesan cheese.

I only had a loaf pan, so we made layers of polenta and sliced squash.  This was all topped with more cheese, some black truffle oil, and truffle salt.  Then we popped it into the oven with the pork to cook.  About 30 minutes later, dinner was ready!

The pork was perfectly cooked, the apples added a nice sweetness, and the walnuts had a nice, toasty crunch.  I did miss the tang of the blue cheese though.

With the unseasonably warm weather on the docket for this weekend, we're hoping to fire up the grill, so stay tuned to see what we do with the bison steak and kohlrabi!

Taco Night

It hard for us to resist the Korean tacos from Takorean.  The bulgogi steak, topped with crunchy, spicy kimchi, and wrapped in soft corn tortillas is a combination that's hard to pass up.  Since we've had a tub of homemade kimchi in the fridge, we thought we'd try our hand at making our own version on them.

We started with some top sirloin.  Justin cut it into strips, while I made the marinade.  I found this basic recipe online, and luckily I already had the ingredients on hand.

The marinade consisted of soy sauce, sesame oil, a little sugar, garlic, ginger, and toasted sesame seeds.  Once everything was whisked together, you simply add the meat, some green onions and some yellow onions to the bowl and massage it altogether.

We let the meat marinate in the fridge for a little while we made the cilantro lime crema.  I had about half a container of sour cream leftover from when we made chipotle sour cream, so we thought we'd make a nice little topper for our tacos.

We chopped up a bunch of cilantro that we had left over from a previous CSA, added the zest of 1 lime, and the juice of half.  Mix it all together, and you have a delicious crema!  I also chopped up a bunch of the kimchi so it'd be more the size of cole slaw, and easy to put into our tacos.

It was finally time to cook the meat and assemble our tacos!  The meat cooked up pretty quickly, and then it was time to fill our warm, soft tortillas!

Then came the kimchi, and cilantro lime crema.  We'd reserved some of the toasted sesame seeds and chopped cilantro to sprinkle on top of each taco.  And to really finish them off, they each got a drizzle of sriracha.

 

They turned out to be quite tasty, and a great way to use some of our kimchi.  To quote Justin, "They're my 2nd favorite half Asian thing."

Going Stir Fry Crazy!

Its Tuesday...Tuesday...gotta get down on Tuesday...

Ok, I guess it doesn't quite have the same ring to it as Friday, but it brings the same excitement since we finally had a CSA share to pick up.  It feels like an eternity since our last share, and we were both chompin' at the bit to see what we'd get today.  So ...without further ado...

Wouldn't it be our luck that we got ANOTHER cabbage!  We're really excited about our meat share...the bison NY strip steak and the pork sausages.  For the sausages we had a choice between ham with cider, or pork butt and pork bellies.  It was an obvious choice here.  I'm pretty excited about the purple carrots and the kholrabi as well.  I don't think I've eaten kholrabi, so it will be fun experimenting with it.

And since its been a while since we've whipped something up in the kitchen, we're bringing you tonight's meal...free of charge!

We thought ahead for once and defrosted some chicken overnight, knowing we'd need a protein to go with whatever veggies we picked up tonight.  To keep things simple, and since I scored a new wok for Christmas, we settled on a Thai peanut stir-fry.

So here's what we started wth...the purple carrots, broccoli, a sweet potato, spinach and some dill from the share.  The green onions and mushrooms were leftover from the weekend and needed to be used.  So  got to peeling and chopping the sweet potato and the purple carrots.

Look how pretty these carrots are!

While I finished chopping everything, Justin was busy cutting the chicken breasts into chunks.  Then he lightly coated them in some seasoned flour.  We used coconut oil to cook everything, so that went into the wok with a few cloves of minced garlic.  Once that was nice and aromatic, we threw in the carrots and sweet potatoes, since those would take the longest to cook, along with the chicken.

Once the chicken browned a bit, we threw in the broccoli.  As the chicken continued to cook, we threw in the mushrooms, spinach, and green onions.  We also threw in a bit of sesame oil for an added layer of flavor

Once the spinach wilted, it was time to make the sauce.  We started by adding the coconut milk.  Then came the peanut butter.  

We just kept mixing and stirring until the peanut butter had melted down and everything was coated in sauce.  To top off the dish, we toasted up some sesame seeds, drizzled on some sriracha, and sprinkled on some chopped dill.

It was a great way to kick off this week's share!

CSA Recap

I know its been a while since you've been inside our kitchen...we were out in California for the holidays...New Years happened...and then I had a friend visit this past weekend...we haven't been in our kitchens very much.  But we'll be picking up our next CSA share tomorrow, so you'll be seeing new meals from us before you know it!

So before we get to the new share, I wanted to give you a quick recap of how we used the food from our last share.  Here's a refresher of what we picked up:

And here's what we cooked up:

• Linguine with clam sauce and roasted brussels sprouts
• clams
• brussels sprouts
• Tortilla with kale
• kale
• green onion
• potatoes
• Oyster po' boys (we'd already posted about our 1st foray with them here, so we didn't post again)
• oysters
• Spaghetti squash with meatballs
• spaghetti squash
• Sauerkraut 
• cabbage

Justin and I split the apples to take for lunch during the week.  All that was left before the holidays were the butternut squash and sweet potatoes, so Justin took those with him down to NC for his family to use.  We figured by the time we got back from CA, they'd be mush, and I'm sure his family put them to good use.  The garlic was used for a few different meals since we love garlic on pretty much everything.  We were slightly disappointed that we missed a drop while we were in CA because it featured Jerusalem artichokes (and no cabbage either!), but we're looking forward to picking up tomorrow's goodies. We'll be back tomorrow to share our share with you!

Oh!  Before I forget.  For those of you that have been following along since the beginning, you may have remembered me referencing a picture of Justin with a giant bowl of cioppino from his dating profile.  It was one of the many things that initially caught my eye.  Well...here's the picture!

How delicious does that look?!?!