Tuna and Crappie With Lemon Butter Caper Sauce & Toe Update

I had some tuna in the freezer that I wanted to cook for Cindy and me, while cooking something else for Pat, Bev, and neighbor Pat.  So, I turned to the web for sauces to use with tuna and the second one I saw was a recipe for Lemon Caper Sauce from “Food & Wine” which is also our favorite sauce for crappie, so I cooked it for the others.  I used my usual sauce recipe times 1½ to get the one below.  The last time I made tuna, it was more of a burgundy color but these came from the grocery store and had received the treatment to make the flesh bright pink.

Toe Surgery

After two knee and two hip replacements over the past seven years, you may be thinking “this guy must like to have surgery,” but I assure you this is not the case.  Arthritis destroyed the soft tissue in my knee and hip joints and I have a hereditary issue that has caused the three middle toes on each foot to dislocate toward my little toes.  As a result, I can only wear sandals without pain and a pair of very wide SAS shoes for a few hours without pain.  Here is the x-ray and you can see the screws in my left foot from a failed first surgery.  I know, I have ugly feet.

Chile Verde Empanadas

We had some rolled pie crust in the fridge that I wanted to get out of there and some leftover Chili Verde that needed to be eaten or frozen so I decided to try combining them.  I’ve been wanting to try making empanadas with our two formers (6" & 3") for a very long time but have never gotten around to it.

Slow Cooker Ginger Beer Barbecue Baby Back Ribs & Brisket

The title of this post which contains the words Slow Cooker and Barbecue is about as close to blasphemy as one can get for us BBQers, but when I saw the recipe from Dennis on his “Ask Chef Dennis” blog, I decided to give it a try with a little twist – a little smoke first.  For the original recipe and some great how-to pics, click on the above link.

Grilled Salmon From Alaska, Taste Test, and Salmon Breakfast

A couple of weeks ago, we made low country boil for an past co-worker we hadn’t seen in a long time and he brought us some Coho salmon from his recent fishing trip to Alaska – he brought back 100 lbs. of mixed fish.  Coho is also known as Silver Salmon and is one of five varieties found in Alaskan waters with the others being Chinook (King), Sockeye, Chum (Keta), and Pink (Humpback), which is the most abundant.  To package, they cut the salmon flesh, folded it in half and sealed it in plastic.

Our First Homemade Kraut In Several Years & Chicken Salad Breakfast

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since we made a big batch of kraut and since then we’ve been buying it from the Mennonite market.  While theirs is very good, it has still been processed (cooked a little) which takes away from the flavor somewhat and while you can buy theirs raw, you have to order it in advance which we haven’t done.  When I mentioned to Bev that we should order some she insisted we make our own so we bought some of their cabbage instead and after trimming, we had 10 pounds.

Chili Verde Supper & Breakfast and Top Gun: Maverick

Thanks to be introduced to it by our Colorado friend, Chef Lea Ann (Cooking On The Ranch blog), we made our first batch of delicious Chili Verde eight years ago and I could not find we’ve made it since then and I can’t believe it.  So, it was time to change that and I decided to make a batch for our Friday get-together but first I needed some pulled pork.  Our first batch of verde turned out so well using BBQ pulled pork (rather than oven roasted) I opted to go that way again and just happened to have a pork butt in the freezer.  See previous post.

I made the chili using the same recipe as previously but I used fire roasted tomatoes and chicken broth for this batch.  You can click on the link for the recipe I used so I won’t reproduce it here.

BBQ Day (Pork Butt & Chicken) and Eliza on July 4

It’s been a while since I had a BBQ day so I smoked a pork butt, a spatchcocked chicken and a half dozen thighs on Thursday in prep for our Friday get-together.  Both meats were rubbed with a 50-50 mix of Billy Bones Original and XXX Cherry.  

Greek Baked Zucchini and Potatoes (Briam) & Inept Airlines

I had made my first attempt at smoking beef short ribs for our Friday group but I will need to work on my process before I blog about them.  The next day, we had some that weren’t yet done, so I braised them in a covered pan for three hours to get them tender for supper.

That morning, we had discovered a bag of yellow crookneck squash on our porch swing and Bev went in search of new recipes to use them coming up with one from All Recipes for Briam and we decided to give it a try.  We made several changes to the recipe so just click on the link for the original - some folks get very fancy with the dish as this shot from the web shows.

Awesome Greek Chicken Ala Pam

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

I’m a big fan of Mediterranean dishes and when I recently saw Pam’s recipe for Greek Chicken with Roasted Vegetables & Lemon Vinaigrette, I didn’t know which appealed to me more the looks of the chicken or the sound of it.  

I had planned to make it several days ago but had no feta until Bev went to Sam’s club and bought this 2½ lb. block which I cut into six pieces and froze five of them.

A Summertime Southern Meal From The Garden

We made a trip to Tellico Plains the other day to meet some friends for lunch and on the way down we stopped at the Tellico Community Market for some produce, so while our meal ingredients didn’t come from our garden, they did come from the gardens of this Mennonite community (except the onion from our neighbor’s garden).