Tonight is an easy one from my normal rotation - bacon wrapped pork tenderloin medallions. Pork tenderloin, cut into medallions/rounds so about 1.5 inches thick, wrapped with a half-strip of good bacon, seasoned with Santa Maria blend, and topped with a teaspoon of apricot jam in the last few minutes of air-frying. Plus a nice sweet potato (no butter, no sugar, just a touch of cinnamon and cloves).
I find the bacon does a great job of keeping the tenderloin from drying out when using a hot-fast method like air-frying. I did a second batch that’s prepped but not cooked, and all the leftover bits of tenderloin are soaking in a mix of ginger, citrus, garlic and soy sauce with some fried chili oil to make into a stir fry later in the week.
I love sandwiches, and for the last few days I’ve been in Sandwich Heaven, starting with a smoked turkey sub and tomato soup. Sometime I pick up a deli pack of Black Forest ham, bologna, and salami, and make sandwiches on white bread with all three (and an extra slice of one or another) along with Dijon mustard, sliced vine tomato, lettuce, and mayo.
The lettuce is key. I won’t even bother getting the deli pack if they don’t have my fave lettuce – a tub of baby butter leaf lettuce from Little Leaf farms. It’s organically grown in greenhouses without pesticides, and the ads claim “untouched by human hands” and that it needs no washing. It’s a crisp, delicious hybrid of iceberg and romaine, and the “needs no washing” bit is a major feature for me, becuase I can just plonk a few big leaves onto a sandwich without having them drip water all over the place.
I made a pig of myself last night (well, I guess it was this morning) by plonking a piece of beer-battered haddock in the oven at about 4:00 AM and then (why not?) doing some fries in the air fryer. Dousing the whole lot in malt vinegar and some tartar sauce on the side.
So not very hungry right now but just for something different, the menu tonight is a comfort-food salisbury steak TV dinner with some extra sweet corn on top of the corn and air-fryer fries on top of the steak to soak up the gravy!
ETA: And before anyone asks, no, I don’t normally have breakfast or lunch. I am a dog. I typically eat once a day, according to a schedule governed by my internal canine clock!
Yeah, it was pesto chicken pizza here last night with mushrooms, grape tomatoes and onions, thanks to pizza dough I made over last weekend.
The best reason to have pizza, though, is because I’m heating solely with wood during a heat-pump-killing cold snap, and it was nice to have a reason for an extended 500F oven preheat to heat the stone. I appreciated the residual oven heat after the pizza was baked to give the wood burner an assist in home heating efforts.
This cold snap has been ongoing now for a week and all this wood-schlepping has gotten old.
The pizza was really delicious, too. May have to do another tomorrow night, when overnight temperatures are forecast to get down to the mid-20s.
Good luck with the igniter! I’ve had 2 go out on my stove over the past 20 years.
Got the igniter sorted. The hardest thing was one of the screws that holds the burner in place was stuck, and the Phillips head stripped. So I took my dremmel and turned it into a flat head screw. Once that was done it was a 5 minute fix.
Since it was the last time we’re probably going to be able to get out of the house safely, we had a fantastic cheese pizza ( the Rosemont ) from Cenzo’s Pizza.
Tomorrow my sweetie is going to make Sunday gravy with a pork roast we have, and she’s going to go crazy and make two pans of focaccia bread. One with pepperoni and cheese on it, the other with rosemary and smoked olives.
If we freeze to death, we’ll do it with full bellies..
Still pondering - last night I started a nice batch of slow cooker steel cut oats with apricots, golden raisins, and pecans, which was breakfast and lunch. My wife was going to bake fresh bread, probably a challah today, but after the latest news from Minnesota (no more on that!) had a couple of glasses of wine and is napping, so now I’m torn between a nice green chili cheeseburger with Tillamook pepper jack cheese and a roasted sweet potato, some ginger-garlic marinated pork strips, stir fried with broccoli and peppers, or just a nice grilled cheese with Kirkland coastal cheddar and some spruced up canned New England Clam Chowder.
Since I did get my oven sorted I’ll be making pizza tonight. My dough got a little too excited and popped its lid in the fridge, but it seems fine. 4 cheeses and pepperoni, and I think I’ve got some sun dried tomatoes. Maybe an anchovy or two…I think I’ve got a tin in the cupboard.
I kinda feel like pizza, too, but yours sounds much better than mine. I’ll put in a frozen wood-oven pizza with pepperoni, mushroom, and green pepper to which I’ll add some extra pizza sauce and some chopped white onion and maybe a few thin slices of tomato, although the onions already add a lot of moisture. They turn out quite well on a pizza stone preheated in a hot oven, and then under the broiler for no more than 2 minutes so all the toppings are bubbly.
I went to a candlelight vigil and haven’t had time to make the pork tenderloin roast I’d been planning on, so I think I’ll just cook up a blue cheese burger and dig out some acorn squash from the freezer.
And … my refined technique for turning a pretty good frozen pizza into an excellent pizza with the extra ingredients and a good hot pizza stone worked out great on this cold and snowy night. But I especially love onions on pizza which many may not, but I love both the flavour and the added moisture it imparts to the pie.
There is more than half left over so tonight I apply another one of my techniques to heating the leftovers. This is thin crust pizza so I can’t say how well this works with thick bready crusts. Preheat a non-stick crepe pan until hot, then nuke the desired quantity of pizza slices in the microwave until the toppings are hot and bubbly. The crust will be very soft and goopy, so the trick is to toast it on the hot crepe pan until it toasts and maybe browns a little more.
I’m very happy with this reheating method. An air fryer works OK for reheating pizza but for my taste, this method is better and faster. I just lift the pizza slices with a spatula until they firm up, and the result is perfect reheated pizza – hot toppings and a toasty crust! I wish I had some anchovies to throw on just for extra zing.
I had my first unsuccessful launch of a pizza from my peel last night. It turned into some lovely almost burnt cheese with toppings and some bready stuff. I think I didn’t flour the peel enough. Gonna try again this evening.
