menuinprogress

We had Pork Chile Verde a few days ago: Leftovers became "breakfast for dinner" last night - Huevos Salseados:

Thanks, Bruce! The dish was our take on Tex-Mex (hence the unapologetic liberal use of yellow cheese). The sauce was a Chili Gravy recipe from Robb Walsh's "The Tex-Mex Cookbook". I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but it was very good.

Smoked turkey enchiladas with chili gravy, rice, beans and salsa fresca:

Kung Pao Bay Scallops with Green Beens:

Man that looks good! I've never thought to do a grilled egg sandwich.

Ricotta Gnocchi with Sausage and Fennel - from the Lupa recipe.

Working with barracuda for the first time, we did some fish tacos with black beans and rice: My internet research on barracuda turned up pretty mixed reviews, but we really enjoyed it. It had a soft texture and a really good fishy-but-not-too-fishy taste.

You are off to a great start with that fried rice, and I'm really looking forward to following the rest of your blog.

Those look fantastic! I love breakfast tacos.

We had an extra pork tongue left after making a batch of head cheese, so we decided to try smoking it. We brined it and threw it on the weber at the same time as some bacon we were smoking. It came out really well. Last night we had some slices served with a bit of vinaigrette:

Beet salad, with some cucumber and tomato hiding underneath.

I'm also interested in the catfish/octopus in caramel sauce technique. We've made squid in caramel sauce before and while it was quite good, we didn't get the nice, dark color you achieved. I think the squid gave off enough liquid to dilute it.

Homemade cheese as in you made it yourselves and have this wonderful recipe which you would be delighted to share....? The recipe we used is from Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll. We did a blog post on the process a while back which you can find that here. If you scroll down to the end of the comments on that post, there is some more information on the ingredient details.

We picked up a crate of freshly roasted Hatch green chiles on Saturday, and spent the rest of the day processing them. Last night, we began to reap the rewards: Chiles rellenos with homemade queso fresco.

We do the mix the yolk in at the end method. Before mixing: and after: I love the stickiness of the egg coating the spaghetti. Oh, and the pork fat is pretty good, too...

I was just going to say methi - amazing scent. Used some in an impromptu tomato sauce for pasta just last night and the kitchen still smelled like fenugreek this morning...

Pan-cooked grouper with sesame noodles: We usually do this dish with salmon, but I liked it even better with the grouper.

Another thumbs up for Rancho Gordo's Mexican oregano - I definitely prefer it to the Mex. oregano from Penzeys.

Real smoked barbecue. Anyone with a cheap smoker can put out a better product than what passes for barbecue at restaurants in most metropolitan areas where they either can't or can't be bothered to do it right.

Tonight's dinner was using things that needed to be used. Leftover smoked chicken. A hash of sorts with corn, zucchini, pancetta, onion and Anaheim chile. And in the background some leftover Balthazar crushed potatoes.

"tesa" means stretched, or taught, indicating it's flattened, nor rolled. Yep. We normally make the rolled version ("pancetta arrotolata"), but wanted to see how it would do flat. We also normally cure in our meat-curing fridge, but dried the tesa in our regular fridge to see how it would do. Pretty darn good, it turns out. It isn't as pretty as a nicely rolled batch, but it tasted great, was very simple to do and required no special equipment.

We recently did up a batch of pancetta tesa and came up with this as a dish to highlight it: Potato, zucchini and corn hash with pancetta tesa lardons, tomato jam and a fried egg.

Yeah - it is prime beef that we get from a local supplier at our farmers market. The marbling of fat in it is fantastic. You've got me craving a smoked tri-tip taco right now...

Scrambled egg sandwich with morel mascarpone sauce

I love smoked chicken. Yours looks great - makes me want to get one on the smoker right now!