Xan: Ribeye Cap!

Catherine's grandpa gave us a gift certificate to Publican Quality Meats.  So we put it to good use!  Here is a ribeye cap steak, spinach with slab bacon, and olive bread:

Oh, ribeye cap, how I love you.

Actually the beef, bacon and bread are all from Publican.  The lamb in the last post was also Quality Meat.  We really enjoyed all our meats.

Also, the butcher at Publican had a tattoo of a cow on his forearm, with the different cuts of beef.  If a customer wants to know where a cut is from, he can just point at his handy diagram.  That's dedication!

Xan: It's scallop time!

I came home rather tired from work but mom was thawing scallops on the counter so I could not resist cooking them:

Delicious despite lame cell phone camera.

Because I never cooked scallops before, that's why.  Of course I looked up doneness temperatures on the interwebs and used a meat thermometer, which is how come they came out perfect despite the fact that I never cooked scallops before and have no idea what I'm doing.  I love the 21st century!

This was really easy.  Also I managed to make this using only ingredients I could find in my parents' kitchen.  You should be very impressed, as I am a bad finder and I didn't get any help from mom.  The only thing she told me was that we didn't have any spinach, which wasn't even true.

I chopped up some bacon and rendered out the fat, which I then seared the scallops in.  I deglazed the pan with white wine vinegar and a bit of lemon juice.  Because that was the first vinegar I found, that's why.  Also it is the obvious choice according to xan's cooking heuristics.  I then added some garlic and crispy bacon bits and wilted the spinach and that was it really.

The spinach was really good, even though I don't usually enjoy cooked spinach from my parents' kitchen, but that is probably because they don't cook it properly, i.e. with bacon.

By the way, let me just say that cooking with bacon is not the same as cooking with an unhealthy amount of bacon.  A little bacon can go a long way!

Provocative Claim: It is self-defeating to force feed your children steamed vegetables when you could simultaneously increase their vegetable intake (and hence overall health!) while decreasing your eternal efforts to police their vegetable intake, simply by making vegetables a little less healthy and a lot more delicious by adding some bacon.  It is probably even better to just get some browning going, but surely we can at least say that bacon trumps steam.

(Discuss).

Linden's Butternut Squash Lasagna

Dude. Dude. Hold up.

 

Now I know I'm usually not one to toot my own horn, but today I'm going to go ahead and make an exception. I bought a squash the other day, because winter is coming and butternut squash is the food of winter, and I am getting myself psyched up for another healthy winter full of goodness and empty of simple carbohydrates.

And I discovered that with the addition of cheese, not only does butternut squash become very attractive, it is also super delicious. I'm seriously not kidding, Chris said this was better than my full-of-italian-sausage lasagna.

Now, I'm not taking that seriously, because like Papa he tends to be overcome with thoughts of goodness, and inexpensive ingredients, so his

I did all the prep and assembly on Sunday afternoon, and then popped the whole thing into the fridge. Came home from work tonight, put it in the oven, and 40 minutes later a delicious cheesy dish of goodness! Like magic, or more accurately, foresight, hard work and planning.

It's really, really good. And it looks really good, perfect for autumn!

Full of Goodness: Linden's Tart, Wegetables, and Pasta Casserole

To continue posting food cooked months ago, here are dinners from mid-may. We have a cauliflower and caramelized onion tart, which is both delicious and not new to my repetoire. This time I did change the crust though - instead of trimming the edges and being left with (1) pie scraps and (2) a cooked tart whose edges have receded (like Papa's ... is this too mean? I think it might be.), I folded the extra back down over the crust, so the edges are double-layered. This has two benefits - leaving it overhanging a bit is okay, since there's more holding up the extra crust, so you can get a less shrunken crust, and, more crust per slice.  Other delicious highlights of this meal are that you roast the cauliflower beforehand (roasted cauliflower is delicious) and caramelize the onions. Everything that goes into this tart is delicious on its own! And they go really well together.

I submit that this fulfills half the requirements of goodness, since it is vegetarian and has cauliflower, and that we can round up and call this goodness. (I know this is sort of cheating, since it also has enough cheese to kill a wild Xanbeast, but I use skim milk.) Plus, we ate it with asparagus and salad, because I believe in wegetables (and because knowledge is beliefs that are true, I also knowledge wegetables):

Concurrent to this, since there's some occasional waiting with this recipe (even once you've made the crust and it's chilling, you have cauliflower roasting in the oven, and onion caremelizing on the stove, neither of which require much attention. So, I made a second dinner, which I divided up into meal-sized portions and froze, because the life of a student sometimes calls for freezing.

So, because I was feeling slightly bad about the whole tart thing, I made a pasta casserole with a higher goodness-cheese ratio. This one features spinach and almonds. I know, you say, spinach? and almonds? with pasta? how could this work? How could it possibly taste good? Like this, gentle readers:

You add cheese (fresh mozzarella, because that's how we roll here and studentchez-Linden). It was slightly bland, but the addition of pepper and fresh basil post-thawing whenever I ate some improved matters, and it made me feel very virtuous, which is almost as good as feeling decadent.

Kathleen's Lentils with Spinach

This is one of the few new recipes I've tried in the last few months, made in an effort to figure out a healthy but tasty dish for my diet. The main components are lentils and spinach, and apart from this, the biggest flavors were lemon, ginger, and salt. The recipe called for way too much salt.

Unfortunately, it was a flop. It tasted nice enough when it was warm, but called for way too much oil, and there's so much spinach in it that what amounted to a points-acceptable serving was really not enough to fill me up. So I probably won't be eating it again. Still, it was interesting.