Leftovers

Friday 6 August

Beans from Sunday, and Indian eggplant from Tuesday. It's multi-ethnic clean out the fridge night.

Luau in your Living Room: Hawaiian Meatballs

Thursday 5 August

We bought and chopped up a pineapple for Saturday's tropical salsa, and though it had kept well (once we had sprinkled on a little Water of Life, otherwise known as Triple Sec), we had to use it or lose it. So we decided to go retro, and make Hawaiian Meatballs.

Our go-to-guys for retro cuisine are Jane and Michael Stern, whose Square Meals is lots of fun. But their recipe was just a bit too midwestern (carrots? really?), so we improvised.

For the meatballs, mix up:

1 lb. ground beef

1/4 onion, minced

1/4 cup breadcrumbs

2 tsps. soy sauce

1/8 tsp. allspice

salt and pepper

I would also add a beaten egg, if I had it to do again.

Mould these into about a dozen round patties; they are panfried in oil until browned, and it's easier to panfry patties than globular meatballs.

Set out the meatballs on plates, and in the same pan, start the sauce:

Half an onion, chopped

Half a stalk of celery, chopped

Sauté these until tender.

Add a a cup of chopped fresh pineapple, with some juice (and triple sec), then:

1/2 tsp. ground ginger

2 Tbsp. cider vinegar

1 Tbsp. soy sauce

Taste and correct the seasoning; you could add some brown sugar if you wanted it sweeter, but we didn't. It turned out as a chunky salsa-style sauce, and went well on top of the meatballs.

Sole and Salmon Timbales

Wednesday 4 August

We had some little scrappy bits of sole left over from Monday, so we decided to whip them into timbales. Sole is an ideal fish for mousses and moulds, as it is slightly gelatinous, but it has very bland flavor, so we kicked it up with a package of Trader Joe's smoked salmon pieces.

Our guide was Julia Child's Way to Cook - and it really is the way to cook.

First, Holt made a choux paste - not a polish, mind - using:

1/2 cup water

1/2 tsp. salt

2 Tbsps. butter

1/2 cup flour

2 large eggs

If you've never made choux paste, it's sort of magical. You can watch how it's done on web videos like this.

At the end, we added a tsp. of fresh thyme leaves (we used lime thyme).

In the meantime, we whizzed up the following in the robot-coupe:

5-6 oz. sole

4 oz. lox pieces

Mix in about a half cup of heavy cream, and then a dribble more at a time with the machine on pulse, till it's smooth.

Then all the choux paste when it was ready and cool.

Season with salt, white pepper, and yet more lime thyme leaves.

Put the resultant fish mousse into buttered ramekins, set them in a water-bath in a 350-degree oven, and let them bake for around 40 minutes till puffy. You can then let them cool for ten minutes and unmould them, but we just ate them out of the ramekins, and they were fine.

But we also did a little experiment. The mousse looked nice and stiff, so we took some extra and spooned it onto a silpat sheet in the same oven the ramekins were cooking in. After 30 mins, it made a nice brown puff, and tasted great.

We served our timbales with the tail end of the corn relish we made on Monday. Basically the same ingredients went into both meals, but they tasted different - and delicious - each time.

Indian Feast: Chicken and Eggplant

Tuesday 3 August

Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking is one of our standbys, and she had the idea of pairing these two dishes. They take some advance preparation, but you can intersperse bouts of cooking with weeding trips out to the garden. Believe me, with the swelter outside, it's cooler to slave over a hot stove.

We started with The Lake Palace Hotel's Eggplant Cooked in the Pickling Style. You can get the recipe here.

Barbara had it ready by the time that Holt got home, so he was ready to tackle the Malai wali murghi, or Chicken with cream.

We used two chicken breasts, and though we didn't have any garam masala to add at the end, the result was still creamy smooth and luscious.

Sole with Corn Relish

Monday 2 August

We've been eating a lot of fish recently, as it is light and quick to cook in this long, sweltering summer. In landlocked Ohio, we depend on Trader Joe's frozen fish, which is now making the praiseworthy transition to using only sustainable sources. We defrosted a pound package of dover sole fillets, which gave us four tiny fillets (to be panfried) each, plus leftovers to use on Wednesday (above).

On the side, we made a fresh corn relish by stripping three boiled butter-and-sugar cobs of their kernels, and adding some chopped red bell pepper and a shot of lime juice.

Long-simmered beans with sage sausage

Sunday 1 August

We love our giant crockpot from Canadian Tire, as it lets us spend the entire day elsewhere and come home to a house perfumed with savory cooking smells, not to mention an immediate dinner.

In this case, we had cannellini beans soaking since yesterday night, and this morning we drained them, fried up a tube of sage sausage, a couple of chopped onions, and a handful of fresh chopped sage leaves, and put it all in the crockpot with water to cover by a half inch. When we got home it was perfect, with the sausage risen to the top and browned.

Blue Marlin steaks with Tropical Salsa

Saturday 31 July

Barbara missed out on the fresh bluefish in Findlay Market, so Holt bought something else blue - marlin steaks, to be quickly panfried. They are sort of like tuna steaks, so we did them medium-rare, so they'd be tender on the inside. And since those are from Florida and the Gulf, he visualized a tropical-fruit salsa to go alongside. It was made out of pineapple, mango, red bell pepper, and cilantro, (all from the market) doused with lime juice. Very Caribbean.