Fish, Veg, Veg, Veg

Menu: baked wrapped tilapia again * eggplant relish again * three-tomato salad * tilapia-influenced coleslaw

I don’t usually re-run recipes quite so quickly, but we enjoyed the baked wrapped tilapia from my first post so much that I went ahead and did it again. This time instead of the chile garlic sauce, I used fresh hot peppers from this morning’s farmers market run, but otherwise it was unchanged.

I used a few of the ingredients … the wasabi oil and chopped garlic … to make a dressing for shredded cabbage for slaw… I added some chile garlic sauce, a little bit of Steen’s cane syrup for sweetness, Steen’s cane vinegar, a splash of mirin, and finally a spoonful of Miracle Whip light to finesse the line between creamy slaw and vinegary slaw.

For the eggplant relish, again, I roasted two small heirloom ivory eggplants from the farmers market in the same 400-degree oven with the fish packets and a red bell pepper. I chopped the peeled pepper and eggplant together and stirred in a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. That was it.

Finally, I sliced three kinds of heirloom tomatoes purchased at the market this morning, ground fresh sea salt over, and sprinkled a chiffonade of basil over.

I would definitely do it again.

Beef, Legumes, Tubers, Roots

Menu: Cuban brisket with black beans * roasted beet salad * baked sweet potato

The farmers market yielded yellow squash, okra, three kinds of cherry tomatoes, white eggplant, Italian zucchini, salad cucumbers, and peaches. All to be planned into menus for the week. I still had a handful of beets left from the previous week, so roasted those up, pulled out a packet of pre-cooked brisket (another H-E-B timesaving trick) and a can of Goya beans, and rummaged a huge sweet potato from the pantry.

Cuban brisket
A fancy name for a process that entails heating up beans in olive oil in a large skillet, adding the brisket, pasilla chile powder, and fresh lime juice, then simmering. Serve over yellow rice, with tortillas, or plain.

Roasted beet salad
4 beets, greens and tail removed
leafy herbs (choose one like mint or basil; tonight I used Mexican marjoram)
nuts (choose from walnuts, pine nuts, pepitas, hazelnuts; tonight, pepitas)
crumble-able cheese (choose from feta, blue, even tiny mozzarella pearls; tonight, feta)
specialty vinegar (choosed from balsamic, champagne, cane, white wine, etc.; tonight, Steen’s cane vinegar)
oil (choose from olive oil, walnut oil, hazelnut oil, etc.; tonight, olive)
fresh-ground salt
fresh-ground pepper
garlic (fresh-ground, very finely diced)
Preheat oven to 400. Wrap each beet individually in foil; bake 45 min to 1 hr. Let cool; peels will rub right off. Cut into quarters; slice each quarter in thin slices. Toss in bowl with salt, vinegar, oil, and garlic. Add nuts, cheese, and herbs to taste. Will change anyone’s mind ever about beets.

Sweet potato
Roast whole in jacket in oven (while roasting beets). Peel, mash or puree. Can be served plain, with spices (crushed red pepper ground over is good, as are Indian spices), or with sweets (a drizzle of Steen’s cane syrup being our favorite). Tonight’s was already sweet enough on its own, so we served it plain and found it delicious.

For dessert, we put Bailey in the back seat and drove up to Amy’s Ice Cream, where I had a tiny of coffee amaretto and M had a small of mocha almond chip.