Sirloin pork roast

I did not have an approved sous vide recipe for a pork loin roast. Recipes on several different reputable sites suggested that you could cook a 3-5 pound roast anywhere from 135 to 150 degrees anywhere from 2.5 to 12 hours. Christ.

I settled on a compromise. I am cooking a 2.5 pound roast at 140 degrees for five hours.

Then I'm going to douse it in a butter, apple cider vinegar, herb mixture and roast it at 450 degrees for at least ten minutes, maybe more. We shall see.

Granted, internal temp has to be right, or we may have to roast it for longer at a lower temp... here's hoping. Results to be reported.

Update 1: the bag broke sometime after an hour and a half. I rebagged it, cleaned the sous vide, and got it going again. Don't know how long it was in a hot water bath, but, well, them's the breaks.

Update 2: Followed instructions. Pork came out tough. Okay, but the bone in sirloin was a pain in the ass to cut. Need a new recipe, frankly.

Swordfish Sous Vide

One swordfish half can typically be turned into three or four steaks. For a quick weeknight meal, here's my preparation:

For the marinade and sauce:

3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp mirin
3/4 in. ginger piece
garlic clove

microplane the ginger and garlic into the mixture. I typically do this sauce up on the weekend while doing bulk food prep, but it only takes a few minutes.

Cut swordfish, bag it with the sauce, and let it marinate for at least fifteen minutes. Meanwhile,

• Fill pot of water and heat to 128 degrees.
• Toast sesame seeds. 
• Set aside and let the saucier pan cool. 
• Measure out 1 cup of medium or short grained sushi-style rice, prepare 1 1/4 cups water
• Snap the stalks from asparagus, put on a cookie sheet, prep with olive oil, salt and pepper
• heat oven to 425 degrees (you can broil them in the summer time when you don't want to heat up the interior)

Add swordfish, with marinade, to the water when it is properly heated and cook for thirty minutes.

After ten minutes, put asparagus into the oven.

After twenty minutes, start rice.

In saucier, prepare 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp plain rice vinegar, 1/2 tsp salt. Stir and cook until combined. Set aside.

When swordfish is finished, remove, and pat dry. Put sauce into a small saucepan and prepare to reduce on the stove.

Heat an iron skillet, add one pat of butter and a touch of olive oil, and sear the swordfish for thirty seconds on each side.

Plate the suckers. Then add the asparagus. Then add the rice, after coating it with the vinegar mixture. Drizzle sauce on the fish. DONE.

Blueberry Shrub

We had frozen blueberries, needed to make a cocktail to take to someone's house, and in a panic tried to make a blueberry syrup. The result was pedestrian and unbalanced, something akin to cobbler. But my hosts were, or pretended to be, delighted. They called it a shrub.

So I made a shrub the next time around.

3 cups of frozen blueberries
2 cups of apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp. (scant) chile flakes
3 cinnamon sticks
2 bay leaves

First up, take the blueberries to a food processor with enough apple cider vinegar to keep it moving. Then drop it into a saucepan along with everything else, and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook for one hour, with the occasional stir.

Take it off heat, put it in a water bath to cool it down. Remove the cinnamon sticks and bay leaves.

Put it in the Vitamix.

This part is tricky. The heat from the shrub will make blending it hard. You have to do it with the top off, and you can't turn it up too much. I would really have preferred to put it on high for ten minutes, but we ended up on a middle speed. Oh well.

Strain it back into the saucepan. Simmer and reduce. It took me at least an hour to do this, and in the end I reduced it by 1/3. This gives you, almost a glaze.

Cocktails to try with a shrub:

• Shrub and bourbon. Top with soda water.
• Gin and Shrub. Top with soda water.
• Blueberry soda (just soda water!)
• Tom Collins, just substitute the shrub. 

Those are remarkably uninspired...

Brazino, Whole Brazino

I'm kind of a big deal...

preheat oven to 425.

Sear the Branzino, three minutes per side, in olive oil.

Stuff the Branzino with lemon wedges and a rosemary sprig.

Put on a rack and roast for 10-15 minutes.

Remove. Turn off the oven, stupid.

Serve with caper butter.

UPDATE:

I really can't abide the searing. It just took the skin off.I also cooked this on a rack, but it was a rack designed for a chicken, and it was difficult to get the Branzino off of it without it falling apart. One could hoist it on onion rounds or lemon rounds, although the moisture would prevent crisping I imagine. This is clearly something I still need to work on...

swordfish sous vide

Here's a super easy weekday swordfish meal.

One steak, cut into thirds. Not too thick. Quick trick: if you are saving it, put it straight in the freezer bag and freeze it.

Marinade:

3 parts soy sauce
2 parts mirin
microplaned garlic and ginger to taste. One clove garlic, a good one inch piece of ginger.

Sous vide: 130 degrees for 30 minutes.

Pull it, dry it, sear it.

Reserve the sauce. Reduce it by half, pour back over the swordfish to serve.

Weekday Meal Schedules 2020

Middle age brings all kinds of challenges, none more annoying than the slightly more delicate stomach and the tendency to keep on weight. So, working up some New Years' Resolutions, and one of them will be to make sure that we have a weekly meal schedule. I let this slide a bit this last Fall.

Never again.

Sample schedule, to match my wife and daughter's rigorous schedules.

Sunday:     Chicken (or some other leftover producing food)
Monday:    Salmon and asparagus and couscous (or other fish)
Tuesday:    Pasta (vegetarian) and broccoli (Also: prepare Tuna for Wednesday)
Wednes.:   Tuna and/or leftover pasta
Thursday:  Leftovers (Sunday food) plus greens
Friday:       Nice meal. Or frozen pizza. Depends on weekend schedule.
Saturday:   Wildcard.

I'm going to experiment with other dishes and add to this post some other schedules. Frankly, I would like one more vegetarian option in here.

chuck steak

Here's one that could become a standby, although it is a bit much for three. We ate it for two nights, and still have leftovers.

Chuck Steak.

I did not even know there was such a thing, truth be told. I was familiar with the chuck roast. With ground chuck But as a steak? The front shoulder is the hardest working part of any cow. It is flavorful, to be sure, but needs slow roasting to break down the fibrous tissue. Steak hits the grill and comes off within ten minutes (maybe fifteen, depending on whether it is two or three fingers thick). No dice.

So, enter sous vide.

I seasoned the steak heartily with four seasons rub, but then added additional salt and a ton of cracked black pepper.

Then I dropped this steak into a hot water bath the night before at 129 degrees and set the timer for twenty-four hours. Come morning I added about two cups of water to the pot. It had lost another two by the twenty-four hour mark.

The grill was prepared to high heat. I melted some butter in a pan, added olive oil, salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. The steak got the hot treatment for about three flips, one and a half minutes a side.

The cutting board got an olive oil pour, salt, and chopped parsley. I dropped the steak on that, flipped it, and sprinkled the remaining parsley over it.

The result: a tender, tasty, meaty steak. Easy for a weeknight meal. One can pan sear it rather than start a fire, to save on time and trouble.

Tahini Dressing

A batch of tahini dressing:

1/2 cup tahini
1/2 cup water
6 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp tumeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
3 tbsp olive oil

whisk the batch together. start adding salt and correct the other proportions until you have your desired flavor.

I ended up adding a good bit more tahini and water, because the lemon juice was strong. Olive oil on top of lemon juice is not the best idea either. I'd recommend some walnut oil or hazelnut oil to neutralize it out, although some olive oil is fine.

I also added more tumeric.

weeknight dinner: ahi tuna

Ahi is expensive, but extraordinarily easy to prepare. It also can produce leftovers for lunch salads, giving it real bang for the buck. ADDITIONALLY, if you are making ramen, you can create the soup base at the same time by microplaning some additional ginger. Nothing like doubling up on prep.

Here is a simple recipe:

For the marinade:

1 tbsp lime juice
1 inch ginger, sliced into rounds
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame seed oil

Mix the marinade ahead of time, allow to blend.

Marinade tuna steaks 15 minutes before cooking. Do not marinate longer than 15 minutes.

toast some sesame seeds. Shake them into a single layer on a small plate.

After marinating for fifteen minutes and preparing the vegetables, sear the tuna steaks on very high heat, in an oil that won't smoke like there is no tomorrow. I've tried olive oil (bad) and sesame seed oil (not much better), so now I'm going to try peanut oil or, probably better, grapeseed oil.

Sear for about 1 minute a side. Finish with a torch if necessary, but it shouldn't be.

Set the tuna steaks, one at a time, in the sesame seeds, to give it a crust. Thinly slice the steaks with a sharp sharp knife.

Possible sides:

sushi rice or steamed cauliflower or some kind of starchy vegetable
asparagus or broccoli fried with ginger and garlic. Blistered okra!

Weeknight Ramen

Ramen ought to be an easy meal. I'm not there yet. Here is where I am so far.




STEP 1: THE BROTH

2 quarts water
2 strips kelp
1/2 cup bonita flakes

Simmer the kelp in the water for ten minutes, then add the bonita flakes, simmer another five. Strain out the kelp and bonita flakes. Turn off heat and over.

STEP 2: PROTEINS

I used a sous vide preparation for soft boiled eggs at six minutes, 194 degrees followed by an iced water bath. Then I cracked the eggs and dunked them in warm water and peeled. It was a disaster. The eggs were almost formless. NEXT TIME: cook a touch longer then let them rest at room temperature.

UPDATE: skip the ice bath, and it works really, really well. Eggs were a little too firm, if anything, so maybe a warm water bath?

STEP 3: THE SOUP BASE

the base

2 tsp microplaned ginger
3 tsp microplaned garlic
2 tsp sesame seed oil
3 tbsp soy sauce (low sodium, as it happens)
2 tbsp mirin




Add the base to the broth and heat on low.
Then add: Shitake mushrooms

This is our broth.


STEP 4: FINISHING

Cook noodles (we tried cooking them in the broth and it predictably ate up lots of the broth.)

We added greens to make it a one pot meal.