I'm making a pasta sauce with...
Fresh tomatoes blanched and peeled.
Freshly crushed garlic.
Freshly chopped onion.
Sweet peppers.
Italian herbs.
Kalamata olives chopped.
Olive oil.
Ghee.
Salt.
Shot of Marsala.
Freshly ground black pepper.
Cooked in order of necessity.
Onions.
Garlic.
And so on
Tomatoes last.
Put lid on.
No added water.

I'm also cooking a pichania steak.
This time from frozen to in the sous vide water at 115°F for 1 hour and then to let cool to room temperature.
Once cooled off kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper was put on all sides..
Magnalite skillet heating up as we speak.
Will cook steak in homemade ghee.
I haven't made my mind up as to what shape pasta I'm going to cook but the sauce is cooling to room temperature.
The hot pasta will warm it back up.

Pasta with mostly dried principe Borghese, plus Japanese Black Trifele, pink tiger and black cherry tomatoes, grated Parmigiana cheese, half and half, fresh minced lorz Italian garlic, fresh spinach, paprika, finished with a topping of fresh red freddy genovese basil. Tomatoes, garlic, paprika, and basil all spent their formative period out in the garden.

First recipe use of the dried tomatoes I made, they were delicious. Results like this encourage me to grow more drying types. I might try a fall crop of these small paste drying type tomatoes.

The beauty of Principe Borghese is they tend to ripen at once and then even the stragglers that don’t, they hold well and for a good amount of time on the counter so enough can be accumulate make it worthwhile to dry in the dehydrator. They also dry pretty quickly.

have been awol while doing crazy amounts of things. But i made birthday party fare.

I’m about 8/10ths tomato at this point of the season. Lunch today was a kellogg’s breakfast tomato and a Carbon tomato, with cottage cheese and a bit of cantaloupe. The Kellogg’s Breakfast won by a mile over Carbon. Might have cut the Carbon a day or two too early, but it was heavy on the acidity and light on sugar, whereas the Kellogg’s Breakfast was rich, sweet and delicious. Cantaloupe was from the garden also. Good, not great. Next year, I’ll move these cantaloupe to a better spot where they will sweeten up more.

Tonight I made a batch of Black Beans with Bacon and Tequila, that I saw I saw an Instant Pot recipe for in Milk Street magazine. 10 cloves of garlic, and I used up some of last year's garlic cloves, and a couple from the smaller ones I harvested a couple of weeks ago. Turned out really good, but I'm not sure what flavor the tequila gave to it - I'd have to taste it without, side by side, to compare.
Black Beans with Bacon and Tequila, from Milk Street. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

Last night I had my leftover pasta with a sausage.

I finished off the Pollo Asado and pineapple today at lunch.
Been eating on it all week for lunch.
Back to classic peppers onions Juliet tomatoes and sausage with a twist.
Pancetta cumin seeds fennel seeds Kalamata olives.
Cumin spices and fennel cooked in ghee and pancetta drippings first.
Sweet peppers onions and a bunch of fresh garlic.
Sweet Italian sausage sous vide at 140F for 30 minutes.
Usual Italian seasoning like basil thyme oregano.
Cooked in ghee and the drippings from the pancetta.

BLT for dinner. BST actually. Bacon, baby Spinach leaves and Tomato on toasted sourdough bread. Five, wait 4 1/2 thin slices of crisp bacon, dog got the other 1/2. Toasted the sourdough bread in butter in the skillet, then fried the bacon. Fresh baby Spinach was leftover in the bag from dried tomatoes pasta dish a few nights ago. Bread was the bakery sourdough bread and was one or two days beyond best by date. Tomato was a Polish and a Beefmaster that I cut thick slices from each and piled them high on the bacon. Toasted Bread had cooled off from the buttery skillet toasting and to that toast I added a big smear of mayo.

Ate it all standing up in a drippy delicious mess. Wife was out at book club eating homemade king ranch chicken and she got home about the time I was hunching over for my first bite. By the time she changed into her pajamas, I had polished off the Polish/Beefmaster BST. She’s like where’s your sandwich, I said I ate it.

Last nights supper.
And I have enough for tonight too.

Grilled Drei Brüder Jalapeño and Cheese sausage made in San Angelo, TX. Grilled DJ’s Boudin, I think that is from Beaumont, TX Suyo Long and Monika Cucumbers, Pruden’s Purple tomato, 1015 Legend onion, Lorz Italian Garlic, plus fresh cilantro and parsley dressed with sour cream, lemon juice, lime juice, ground cumin, and seasoned salt.

Great summer dinner with fresh garden produce.

There's nothing like the smell of fresh garlic in the morning.
Browning the fresh pork hocks in virgin olive oil with black pepper and salt.
Took hocks out.
Put the onions carrots and celery in to cook, soffritto.
Yeah I know the French word but let's not go there.
Added two cloves of garlic and some herbs de provence.
House smells like heaven.
Put hocks back in and added about 4 or 5 cups of water, two tablespoons of Knorr tomato bullion powder.
Italian herbs.
1/2 cup of Anasazi beans.
Let come to good boil for about 10 minutes reduce heat put lid on and wait for a good long time until hocks fall apart.
That will be when I come back to finish the process.

Fajitas tonight. Marinated Chicken thighs and marinated beef skirt steak on the grill. I’ll put a chunk of seasoned mesquite on the lump charcoal for flavor. Flour tortillas, the fresh ones that need to be toasted and finished on a hot skillet. Fresh pico de gallo. Caramelized Sweet Yellow onions and Bell peppers. Sour cream, I’ll make some guacamole.

Fajitas are one of my top ten favorites, I’m not sure what the other nine are, but in the summertime, fajitas are a must make dinner. I’d take fajitas over a fancy steak dinner any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Fajitas check all the right boxes. Savory, the meat, heat, the peppers in the pico, sour, the lime in the pico and sour cream, sweet, the peppers, onions, tomatoes, herbal, cilantro, cumin, avocado, smoke, the lump mesquite charcoal and mesquite chunk, Umami, meat, tomatoes.

Hard to imagine a life without great fajitas.

@karstopography
Yes fajitas and carne asada are a great meal any time of the year.
I personally like the corn tortillas, few but some restaurants offer corn instead of flour and it's always going to be a real Mexican restaurant that offers them.

Something I totally forgot for my soup.
I had to pull the hocks back out and score the skin into little squares.
The other thing I forgot was my homemade pancetta.
I sliced off 1/4 inch of it and diced it up into 1/4 inch dice.
The pasta is going to be mini penne pasta.

@worth1 I love corn tortillas with fish and street tacos and in general with almost any mexican dish on the side in the tortilla warmer, but with fajitas, I still like the fresh flour tortillas. Definitely not the old packaged flour type found in the bread aisle that last for a month. Those are worse than nothing at all and warming them up in the skillet can’t save them from being awful.

karstopography wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 8:57 am @worth1 I love corn tortillas with fish and street tacos and in general with almost any mexican dish on the side in the tortilla warmer, but with fajitas, I still like the fresh flour tortillas. Definitely not the old packaged flour type found in the bread aisle that last for a month. Those are worse than nothing at all and warming them up in the skillet can’t save them from being awful.

That's the ones the common chain restaurants use.

Since this all began with the ministone I've added my custom touch.
Naturally it involves peppers of some sort.
First I put a good amount of sweet paprika in the soup.
Next I chopped up some fresh squash and tomatoes.
And lastly I diced up two giant red jalapeno peppers that I cleaned out
This is all in a big bowl with salt added waiting for the last moment to go in.
I don't want it to be over cooked at all.

Cooked the penne pasta for 9 minutes.
But first I removed the hocks from the soup and turned the heat to low.
Put the pasta and the raw squash and peppers into the soup.
Added some pasta water and turned heat off.
Put the hocks in the pasta water plus more water to cook for about another hour because it wasn't quite done to my liking.
The raw veggies cooled the soup off and are done to my liking just by being in the hot water of which is crunchy.
In an hour I'll chop up the hock meat after it's cooled and add it.
It's an unplanned method due to a mistake of being in a hurry with the pasta.
I was supposed to put it in another bowl but retain the water for the soup.
The soup will be cooled enough for summer eating.
Here's the soup now before adding hock meat back.

Been getting the meat and skin off the bones chopping it up and putting it in the soup but not cooking anymore.
Bones going back in the broth to continue cooking.
That concentrated bone broth will go into the soup.
There won't be enough left of these flavorful bones for a fire ant to be interested in by the time I'm through.
This porky flavor only cost me 4 dollars for 3 big meaty pork hocks.
2 something a pound.

Small sample for lunch.
Big cool bowl for supper with picorino romano on top.