BBQ Pulled Pork Quesadillas

When one of our friends came over to hang out the other night we celebrated her recent move to New York by ordering BBQ from Rack & Soul on the UWS.  Now I haven't tried everything that Rack & Soul has to offer yet, but I can say that everything I have tried has been delicious.  Their fried chicken was phenomenal, and their ribs and pulled pork were nothing to scoff at either.  The only thing I didn't like from there was their collards, but I am very very picky where collards are concerned.  Anyway, after ordering ourselves a serious BBQ feast we had a few ribs leftover, some sides, and a ton of pulled pork (the only measurement I can think of is sandwiches and we had enough left for roughly 2 nicely stuffed pulled pork sandwiches).  The first thought that came to mind as I tried to come up with a way to use the rest of that pulled pork was to make quesadillas with it.  Actually, what first came to mind was tostadas, but that thought quickly passed and the idea of quesadillas replaced it.  Then I had to decide whether to make my quesadillas more Mexican-inspired, or stick with a BBQ flavor profile.  In the end I chose to go with Mexican-inspired, so we added jalapenos, garlic, cilantro, scallions, red onions, and cotija cheese.  If I had decided to stick with BBQ-inspired quesadillas I was thinking Monterey Jack cheese, red onions, garlic, and greens of some sort (speaking of collards, we have those in the fridge from the CSA too).

Generally I am a big fan of cooking up my quesadillas in a frying pan on the stovetop, but this time I decided to try to cook them in the oven.  Since I didn't leave the office until 7pm and we had a long evening ahead of us I wanted to get all of our quesadillas cooked as soon as possible (and with as little effort on my part as possible).  Except I forgot to spray them with Pam before I threw them in the oven so they were a little drier and crispier than I had intended.  Oops.  We tried topping the quesadillas with Tabasco, tomatillo salsa, and Korean BBQ sauce.  Somehow we were out of both regular BBQ sauce, regular salsa, and sour cream.  Alex and I both agreed that the tomatillo salsa was definitely the way to go.  BBQ sauce was just too sweet and the Tabasco totally obscured the taste of the pork filling.  Perhaps in the future we will use a mix of cotija and Monterey Jack cheeses so that the quesadillas have more melty, gooey cheese in the filling.  While I love the taste of the cotija, it's more like Parmigiano-Reggiano in that it never melts and forms a gooey cheese filling.  If you have leftover pulled pork or some rotisserie chicken in the fridge, this is a really nice, easy meal that you can throw together with very little effort.  If we had any sweet corn left it would have been a perfect side dish if tossed with some lime juice, tomatoes, avocado, and maybe a pinch of dried cumin.  Maybe next time!

Recipe after the jump!

Sweet Corn, Spring Onion, and Heirloom Tomato Salad

 

What could possibly be more summery than corn, basil and heirloom tomatoes?  I literally can't think of a single thing.  Nor can I think of anything more delicious than fresh sweet corn in the summer.  Growing up we had corn growing in the backyard and every summer I would stuff my face with as much corn as I could possibly handle.  Yes, I know.  That's a wonderful mental image, but it's a fairly accurate description.  As far as I am concerned there are very few things that you can do to really improve upon sweet corn.  Simply steamed (or grilled) and spread with butter and salt it is delicious.  If you want to get creative you can make the Corn with Green Onion Oil that I made earlier in the week, or Mexican Grilled Corn (aka elote).  There are a lot of corn salad recipes out there that involve other summery combinations like avocado, lime, and black beans, or various other things.  But I wanted something simple that purely tasted of summer, so this was the recipe that I came up with, and summer is exactly what I got.  Alex got stuck making this dish for himself because I got held up at work after I swore I would make it home for dinner at 7:30 pm (oops - sorry hon, I owe you one).  And then he even took pictures for me.  Isn't he the best?  But this salad makes a perfect side dish - one that I will enjoy all summer long.  The combination of the corn, tomato, spring onions, and balsamic is a little on the sweet side, but in the freshest and most summery way possible.  I think it would be perfect served with some chicken paillards or some really nice seared sea scallops.  Yum.

Recipe after the jump!

Shrimp and Zucchini Orzo with Lemony Basil Pesto

Up until about a year ago I had never made homemade pesto.  Instead I just used the pesto that comes in a plastic container or a jar at the grocery store.  And then after I made homemade pesto there was no going back.  It is so simple and easy, and the flavors are so much purer and fresher than anything you can buy at the store, not to mention so much more vibrant.  With all of the fresh basil that we have been getting from the CSA recently this pesto was the perfect way to use up some of it.  We also have a monster zucchini in the fridge still waiting to be used, but I can only use one monster zucchini per night.  I thought about whipping together a quick zucchini bread this evening to use up the other monster zucchini, but that is going to have to wait until tomorrow.  Or maybe Friday.  But enough about that, back to tonight's dinner.

I loved the addition of the lemon to the basil in the pesto, and then the touch of heat from the red pepper flakes.  As much as I love spice, I wouldn't use more than a small pinch of crushed red pepper flakes because you don't want the heat from the pepper to overwhelm the summery flavors of the pesto.  With the combination of the pesto, the zucchini, the shrimp, and the ozro, the dish tasted like summer on a plate to me.  It there had just been some heirloom tomatoes and summer corn then it really would have been summer on a plate!

Recipe after the jump!

Corn with Green Onion Oil Recipe

Many of you probably don't know this about me but I have an obsession, literally an obsession, with grilled corn.  My obsession started in China when street vendors with little portable charcoal grills would set up outside bars and sell skewers of grilled meat and vegetables to the waiting crowds.  I'm not sure exactly what the blend of spices was that they sprinkled over the meat, but boy was it phenomenal.  Ever since I tried their version of grilled corn I have been on the lookout for new grilled corn recipes to add to my repertoire.  This dish was adapted from a recipe I saw on Momofuku for 2 (which is an absolutely amazing food blog based out of Vancouver).  As always, I decided to play with the recipe a little bit and adapt it to my tastes.  I didn't have a red chili, so I used a jalapeno instead.  And then I wanted to throw in some cilantro because I just love cilantro.  After the experience with the fried corn at the New Amsterdam Market, I decided to try to pan-roast/pan-fry the corn in a cast iron skillet in some grapeseed oil.  I chose grapeseed oil because it has a high smoke point and also because I wanted an oil with a completely neutral flavor.

The green onion oil that goes with this corn is fabulous.  The fish sauce gave it just the right amount of salt and flavor to complement the fresh flavors of the scallion and cilantro, and the very slight heat from the jalapeno.  Combined with the sweet corn it was just fantastic.  In the future I will probably cut the kernels off the corncobs so that the green onion oil is more evenly distributed through the corn.  With the corn on the cob, there were patches where the oil really stuck and gave the corn great flavor and then there were patches where the oil with the green onions and cilantro slid right off.  I didn't want to cut the kernels off this time because I didn't want to take the time and risk the corn getting cold (plus it's just a pain to do), but I will just suck it up in the future because this recipe is totally worth it.  So I'm writing the recipe like I did cut the kernels off, but you can grill it whole instead of pan-roasting the kernels if that's your thing.

Recipe after the jump!

Turkey Kebabs with Tomato, Onion, and Cilantro Relish, and "Dry" Potatoes with Ginger and Garlic

I have been craving Indian food on and off for the past few weeks.  Rather than going out to eat Indian, I decided to use one of our Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks to make something since I got home early from work this evening.  Of course once I opened up Indian Cooking there were only about a dozen recipes that appealed to me.  But we had some ground turkey so the decision on what to make for our entree was fairly simple - Turkey Kebabs.  Madhur recommends serving these kebabs in pita pockets with cilantro chutney, or wrapped in parathas.  Since we grilled burgers the other night at a friend's place, I wasn't really feeling what sounded entirely too much like an Indian turkey burger.  Instead I wanted to eat it solo topped with some form of chutney or relish.  The relish that sounded the best to me with the combination of spices and ingredients in the turkey kebabs was her Tomato, Onion, and Cilantro Relish.  Then to go with it I originally wanted to make the Spicy Cucumber Wedges, but then we realized that our English cucumber had seen better days.  So I went back to the cookbook and picked out the "Dry" Potatoes with Ginger and Garlic.  We had some of the world's teensiest and most adorable new potatoes left from our CSA haul last week that I wanted to use and it seemed like a great side dish for our kebabs.

I think that Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks are among the most successful cookbooks I own.  I am very rarely disappointed when I try out one of her recipes.  The kebabs were intensely flavorful, not to mention moist.  I loved the interplay between all of the flavors.  With the addition of the relish they were amazing.  I am a ridiculously large fan of both these kebabs and the relish.  Alex said that the relish at first reminded him of a standard pico de gallo, but then you get hit with the taste of cumin and cayenne and you realize this is no pico de gallo, but something else entirely.  Delicious.  The potatoes were pretty good too, but I'm just not a potato lover - unless of course those potatoes are in really good french fry form.  Alex is a potato lover, but his complaint was that the potatoes didn't carry quite as much of the "spice flavor" as he expected.  Although the potatoes weren't exactly a smashing success, this Indian meal was more successful than some restaurant Indian meals.  Madhur Jaffrey is officially my hero.

Recipes after the jump!

New Amsterdam Market

Even though it was blazing hot outside yesterday, Alex and I decided to visit New Amsterdam Market down at the South Street Seaport.  Although I have only been to the market twice (due to the fact that it is currently a monthly market and it's quite a trek to get there), it is one of my favorite places in NYC.  There are so many great restaurants that serve food there, as well as a ton of other farms, vendors, cheesemongers, etc. with amazing products for sale.  So we wandered on down there Saturday and had a delicious lunch, and then bought some random stuff.  By the time we got down there we were hot, sweaty, and starving so the most important order of business was food and something cold to drink.  The first thing we got (and potentially my favorite thing we ate there) was the fried corn (pictured above) from Marlow & Daughters.  They served the corn with some cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh chives, and a nice slice of watermelon.  It was delicious and oh so summery.  The corn had a wonderful texture and taste from being fried, and the fresh tomatoes and basil just lightened and brightened it all up.  I loved that corn.  Then we followed up the corn with another of our absolute favorite summer meals - lobster rolls from Luke's Lobster.  I'm not sure if the lobster rolls that they serve at the market are as good as the ones they serve at their restaurants, but if not, they are damn close.  Luke's consistently has the longest lines at the market, and once you take a bite of one of their lobster rolls you totally understand why.  We capped off our lunch with a mini porchetta sandwich from Porchetta, zucchini flatbread and blackberry-basil lemonade from Great Performances, and a barlett pear shaved ice from People's Pops.

Then we swung over to Third Rail Coffee so Alex could pick up some Stumptown coffee, and I wandered the market tasting things and buying random things.  Courtesy of my randomness we now have some fantastic sweet corn, a gorgeous heirloom tomato, two confit duck legs, and some hot Italian sausage in the fridge.  Yum.

More pictures after the jump!

Spice-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Baby Carrots and Spring Onions

What do you do when your CSA keeps supplying you with carrot, after carrot, after carrot?  Particularly if you don't generally like cooked carrots?  You try cooked carrots again - in a new and more interesting way and hope that you like them better this time.  My typical problem with cooked carrots is the texture.  The texture tends to be somewhere between mushy and toothsome and reminds me of a combination of baby food and old people food.  And unlike fingerling potatoes or parsnips (or any of the other vegetables that you typically roast with a pot roast), carrots never get that nice crust on the outside.  They just sit there and get mushy.  This pork tenderloin just sounded so good and we had so many carrots that I couldn't resist this recipe.

This recipe made me a little nervous because there isn't much salt in it.  And it definitely needed just a little more salt.  Once we sprinkled some sea salt on top of the final dish the flavors all came together and the entire dish was just that much better.  So I have adapted the recipe to use the amount of salt we really should have used for optimal flavor.  Even after adding more salt, Alex and I both agreed that the flavors in this dish were nowhere near as vibrant as they could have been.  Don't get me wrong - I voluntarily ate roasted carrots which is huge in and of itself.  And the carrots were actually quite good.  But they weren't as good as they could have been when seasoned with jalapeno, cumin, ancho chile powder, garlic, etc.  With all of those spices I was really expecting a real burst of flavor and instead I got just a little taste.  So all-in-all I would give the recipe a solid B or B-.  With a few modifications it might even make it to a B+, but it definitely isn't quite there yet.

 

Recipe after the jump!