Pork Chops with Caramelized Leek Spaghetti, Shredded Beef Stuffed Potatoes, Sweet & Sour Meatballs, Orange Chipotle Shrimp & More!

This What’s Cooking round up is all about variety with all kinds of different proteins — pork chops and shredded beef and chicken meatballs and shrimp and goat ribs!

And the veggie sides were solid, too with caramelized leeks for a creamy spaghetti dish, plus crispy roasted greens and sautéed mushrooms, fresh salads with pickled radishes, beets and crispy scallions, roasted potatoes, purple sweet potatoes and turnips and steamed carrots and more.

Caramelized Leek Spaghetti…

As soon as we got the first leeks of the season in from River Queen Greens, I was dreaming about making a pasta like this. And it really came out well!

I started by sautéing the leeks until they were soft and starting to brown and then adding flour, mushroom seasoning and a little more butter to make a roux. I had some turkey and chicken bone broth on hand, so I added that after the flour was a little toasted but before I started adding the milk to deglaze the leeks and add some flavor and umami.

I then slowly added whole milk until the sauce thickened to the consistency I was going for. Then I added spaghetti and some pasta water to emulsify it all together. It was perfectly creamy and had a really nice flavor. Pure comfort food.

… With Pork Chops, Pan Sauce, Mustard Greens & Sautéed Mushrooms

But since we’re big on protein and fiber, the pasta couldn’t stand alone, could it?

I had found a few older packs of pork chops in a box at the backup freezer, so even though the vacuum seal was perfect, I figured it reason enough to take some for ourselves!

I did a simple sear in a cast iron pan with them, seasoning with mushroom seasoning, sea salt and black pepper.

I also had sautéed some chestnut, pioppino and shiitake mushrooms prior to cooking the chops, so I deglazed the pan with a little sherry and bone broth to make a pan sauce to drizzle over the top of the chops and added the mushrooms back to that sauce.

And I had roasted some kale and mustard greens in the oven while everything else was cooking on the stove, so it all came together with the leek spaghetti, pork chops, crispy roasted greens and mushrooms with the pan sauce. It was so good and great as leftovers all week, too! I just sliced the chops thin once cooled for easy reheating.

Instant Pot Shredded Beef (for Stuffed Potatoes, Quesedillas and Tacos)

Since our beef is limited and we don’t have many more cattle to process this year, I haven’t been taking much beef for us to eat lately. But we’re always eating the “scratch and dent” cuts and I found a pack of stew beef and sirloin tip with loose vacuum seals. I was very excited to make some shredded beef with them!

Sirloin tip can be a deceiving cut. It’s very lean and has a finer “grain” compared to skirt or flat iron or Denver steaks. So it looks like it might be more tender than it is. But it is from a more working muscle group so it definitely can’t be treated like filet or ribeye. It’s a cut I like to cut into strips from stir fry or curry or stroganoff, but it’s also a good one to slow cook and shred since it’s lean and you won’t be dealing with a lot of excess rendered fat.

So I cut it into similar size pieces as the stew meat, which is cut from another lean, tougher cut, the round.

I seared the pieces in batches in cast iron skillets to built flavor, then added tomato paste, garlic, herbs and seasonings and deglazed with bone broth and a little apple cider vinegar.

Then I transferred it to the Instant Pot to cook on high pressure for an hour.

It was perfectly easy to shred (I did set it and forget it and let it depressurize on its own).

The first night we steamed some large Yukon gold potatoes in the Instant Pot and filled them with the shredded beef and cheese, alongside a salad with fermented radish salsa and avocado. But the rest of the week, the beef came in handy for quick quesadillas and tacos, too! I’m usually fine eating the same thing a few days in a row, but the versatility of something slightly different with the same protein was nice!

Sweet and Sour Chicken Meatballs with Rice, Roasted Turnips, Salad & Kimchi

Grant has been hard a work processing roosters we hatched from our breeding flocks of egg layers and since we already had a high quality meat grinder, we’ve been using most of the meat for ground chicken. It’s just so versatile and since the roosters grow so much slower than typical broiler chickens, the leg meat especially is much tougher and darker. We’ve also been experimenting with primal ground chicken, including the heart and liver in the ground. It’s really good!

Sweet and sour Asian fusion type meatballs are one of my favorite ways to use ground chicken. These were more a Korean flavor profile with gochujang and Korean barbecue sauce. I added a little of both to the meatball mix along with garlic and onion powders, breadcrumbs and an egg.

I did my usual method of starting the meatballs in the cast iron pans on the stove and transferring to the oven. Once they were browned and cooked through, I combined them into the bigger pan and made a sauce in the smaller pan, using Korean barbecue sauce, broth and rice vinegar and a little arrowroot to thicken.

We ate them with Jasmine rice, roasted hakurei turnips, homemade kimchi and a salad with crispy scallions. It was all so good together — really any kind of chicken meatballs never disappoint!

Orange Chipotle Shrimp with Beet Salad & Purple Sweet Potatoes

Before citrus season was over, I wanted to do a version of this orange chipotle shrimp I’ve made a few times before. I started by lightly sautéing some red onions and then adding dried off gumbo size shrimp and seasoning with sea salt, chili lime seasoning and chipotle powder.

Then I added in a bunch of orange zest and juice, garlic, tomato paste and some water. I let the shrimp cook through and then added a cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce.

We had it topped with cilantro with brown and red rice, plus some chioggia beets and goat feta in a salad and some roasted purple sweet potatoes on the side. Very tasty!

Mediterranean Goat Ribs with Roasted Potatoes, Carrots & Beet Kraut

I am a firm believer that goat meat goes best with Mediterranean flavors — oregano, rosemary, garlic, parsley, lemon zest and coriander especially.

So in the past I’ve made coconut curries with ribs or roasted them with tamarind based barbecue sauce and while it can work, for me personally, the bright and punchy herbs are garlic are best with goat!

So these were pretty simple. Knowing I would roast them in the oven for a bit afterwards, I didn’t bother searing them before putting in the Instant Pot. The base liquid was just water with a splash of Meyer lemon vinegar and I seasoned the ribs with garlic and onion powders, black pepper, coriander, and fresh oregano and rosemary from my garden. I just did about 12 minutes in the Instant Pot and then transferred to pan with a rack inside.

I already had potatoes roasting on a sheet pan at 400 degrees, so the ribs joined those to get a little brown and crispy on the top. I also steamed a batch of rainbow carrots in butter and finished with a splash of Meyer lemon vinegar and green onion microgreens. And to bring it all together, I made some of my favorite almond cashew sauce with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, avocado oil, garlic, soy sauce and coriander and paprika for seasonings. It was a really nice combination!

Clean Out the Freezer Fruit Crumble

I almost always have lots of late season Louisiana strawberries in my freezer and since we’re already well into the next strawberry season, I’m hustling to use them up!

This year I also have sliced plums and nectarines in my freezer, too, and we’re getting ever closer to stone fruit season again, as well.

And there was a small bag of blackberries, too, plus some of my homegrown roselle hibiscus petals. Those add a deep red color, sour punch and slightly floral flavor to any baked fruit dessert.

So plum, strawberry, blackberry, roselle crisp it was! I tossed the frozen fruits with arrowroot, a little flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice and let that start baking four 30 minutes or so while I prepared the crisp topping. One thing I have learned in years of making crisps, crumbles and cobblers from frozen fruit is the longer you bake it the better. It will eventually reach a point where it gets really jammy and luscious, it just takes patience. And if you already have the topping on, sometimes that can start to burn if you bake it for too long. So I’ve started giving the fruit a long headstart and then adding the topping 30-45 minutes in.

For the topping, I just did oats and stone-milled flour and brown sugar and pulsed it in the food processor with butter. The fruit got so bubbly and jammy that it submerged parts of the topping, but in the best way! It came out so delicious.