Burger Salad & Ranch Fries, Indian Inspired Keema, Dal & Squash, Pesto Pasta Salad, Tomatillo Salsa, Peach Breading Pudding & More!

We’ve got a variety of cuisines and flavors going on this week with some burger salads and homemade waffle fries with ranch seasoning, a summery take on Indian meal prep including a bright, minty ground goat keema, pesto pasta salad with fresh mozzarella and smoky fish dip for guests, salsa verde steak rice bowls and roasted peach bread pudding.

Burger Salad with Ranch Waffle Fries & Roasted Shishitos

I got this idea from Pinch of Yum — it’s great when the veggies are abundant (and we even have salad greens in the summer) and you want burger vibes without the bun! I adore Bellegarde’s brioche buns, but burger salads are for when you want things a little lighter (and you still want fries!).

Starting with the fries, we made waffle fries cut with a mandolin (I guess they’re not actually waffle without the criss cross cuts and holes, but those end up too thin with the specific mandolin we have!). Once the fries were cooked through and starting to brown, I added in a little butter and some ranch-esque seasonings, including Credo Farm’s herby Mineral Seasoning, asiago cheese powder, dried dill and onion salt. They' came out pretty tasty!

For the burgers, since we’re out of regular ground beef, I just poked holes in some slider patties and seasoned with Worcestershire sauce, sea salt, onion salt and ALL CAPS Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning and seared them in a cast iron.

I also made the burger sauce pretty similar to Pinch of Yum’s recipe. For the salads, we did arugula, salted/seasoned tomatoes and diced fermented dill pickles.

I was already roasting jalapeños and shishito peppers for a white bean popper dip for the next day, so we had some of those, too, and I had also made two whole chickens for meal prep and buffalo chicken dip the next day as well, so we had the wings from those birds with it, too. The whole meal was giving sort of like healthier decadent vibes and we were here for it!

Indian Inspired Red Lentil Dal with Tomatoes, Coconut Summer Squash & Mint Onion Raita

One of the few cookbook I still regularly cook from (versus blogs or just googling ingredients and a rough idea of what I want to make) is an Indian home cooking book I got in college. I love a spread like this with lentils or beans or some kind, plus lean meat, veggies and yogurt sauce because there’s lots of bold flavors and variety and everything gets better as leftovers, making it perfect meal prep.

So this is a peak summer version of that!

For the dal, I soaked some red lentils and cooked them with kombu, turmeric and sea salt. I like dals where you impart most of the flavor from a tempering oil, along with lime juice and herbs added at the end.

This tempering oil had coriander, cumin and fennel seeds and then fresh minced garlic and ginger. After the lentils were cooked, I decided to add in some yellow beefsteak tomatoes, too, why not?

The summer squash recipe was meant to be done on the stove, but sometimes I think that’s hotter and definitely more messy and time consuming than just turning on the oven, even in the summer! I cut the squash into roughly 1/3 inch half moons and then tossed with avocado oil, cumin, coriander, mustard and nigella seeds, along with ground turmeric, finely diced green chili and shredded coconut. It all added a nice flavorful punch to my usual sheet pan roasted squash.

And for the raita, I often do a cucumber raita, but I didn’t have enough cucumbers, so I went with a red onion and mint version that included some fresh jalapeño, too.

Mint & Tatsoi Goat Keema

The main protein was this take on keema made with our ground goat meat. I usually love goat meat with garlic and Mediterranean herbs like oregano, parsley, rosemary and thyme. Sometimes the warm and earthy seasonings in Indian, Jamaican and Mexican cuisine can be too much for me paired with the flavors of goat meat itself.

But this relied on similar bright flavors of mint, so I went for it and it was so delicious, possibly one of my favorite meals with ground goat!

The recipe calls for a “green paste” made with spinach, cilantro and mint, but I used Homegrown in Folsom’s sweet and mild baby tatsoi greens in place of the spinach and extra mint in place of the cilantro and it still came out absolutely delicious.

The dish also includes sautéed onions, ginger and fresh diced green chili (I used my homegrown jalapeños), plus whole cardamom pods and cloves and you finish it by whisking in plain yogurt, plus black pepper and garam masala.

I also cooked some whole roasted okra to go along with it (basically the only way I prepare okra, it’s so easy!) and it all came together as a really delicious, filling and yet still brightly flavored and summery meal.

Pesto Gemelli Pasta Salad with Tomatoes, Artichokes & Fresh Mozzarella

For some friends coming over after an afternoon on the Bogue Chitto, I wanted to have food ready to go since I knew we’d be hungry. What is it about being in water or swimming that does that?

The main event was this pistachio pesto pasta salad. I harvested a bunch of basil from my garden and made a delicious, simple pesto with garlic, the pistachios, parmesan cheese, olive oil and lemon juice.

I added the pesto to fresh gemelli pasta, along with diced cherry tomatoes, marinated articles and sun-dried tomatoes. After it was cooled, I also added fresh mozzarella cheese.

It was really great that evening and then served as great meal prep, with leftover chicken for protein!

Smoked Fish Dip

I made a bunch of dips for the post tubing hang out, but this is the only one that is being included because I didn’t get a finished photo of the buffalo chicken dip or white bean jalapeño popper dip — we came home, heated them up and devoured them!

I used some smoked fish portions from Anna Marie Seafood. These are alligator gar but they use the same brine and smoke method on the Almaco Jack, Amber Jack and Barracuda we regularly have in stock. And apparently they recently updated their brine recipe and I can tell you, it’s even better than before.

For the dip, I just crumbled and broke up the fish portions before putting in the food processor with some creole cream cheese, mayonnaise, dijon mustard, prepared horseradish, lemon juice, onion salt, smoked paprika and Worcestershire shire.

It’s simple and easy and as delicious as the other two more involved dips were, this was probably the fan favorite. We ate it with tortilla chips and toasted Bellegarde ciabatta slices, along with cucumbers and lunch box peppers.

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa with Jalapeños & Cilantro Microgreens

I had a bunch of tomatillos I wanted to use up and what else do you do with them besides make salsa verde, right?

I took the husks off, rinsed them off and then halved to roast along with some halved and deseeded jalapeños.

Then I pureed them in the blender (only adding some of the jalapeños at first to make sure it wasn’t too spicy). It wasn’t, so I ended up adding more of the jalapeños diced up, along with fresh diced white onion. Then I finished it with more sea salt to taste, lime juice and cilantro microgreens from Rose Wagon Ranch.

Here’s the thing though… it kind of had a bitter aftertaste! I looked it up and it could have been from not washing the sappy substance off enough, from overcooking or undercooking or blending too much or a few other things.

It was a big batch, so I tried to troubleshoot by adding a little honey and more lime juice, which did seem to dull the bitterness a little. Mixed with other things and with avocado or other creamy sauces, it was still good with a nice flavor, but it wasn’t going to be devoured just with chips and maybe that’s for the best! ;-)

Steak with Rice, Squash & Salsa Verde

The salsa was delicious mixed with medium rare sliced NY Strip and Ribeye steaks, chili lime seasoned squash and brown rice though!

This was a quick mid week meal to make it through the rest of the week with leftovers for lunches and it came together pretty easily, just seasoning and then searing and resting the steaks, cooking the rice and slicing and roasting yet more squash!

Roasted Peach Bread Pudding

For some dinner guests on Saturday, we have lots of our Local Cooling Farms eggs to use up and plenty of frozen fruit in the freezer, so I was going to make another round of my berry lemonade bars that use pie crust and a lemon curd type filling. (I’ve done pink grapefruit, strawberry lemonade and blackberry blueberry lemonade versions in the past, all delicious in their own way.)

But I also had plenty of fresh peaches and a whole loaf of ciabatta to use up, with my freezer pretty full of sliced ciabatta and country loaves already! And I had some heavy cream in the freezer, too.

So instead I looked at recipes for peach bread pudding and combined a few for what I ended up making. It also uses nearly just as many eggs as the lemon bars and the flavor came out even better than it maybe looks in the photos!

I started by cutting five large peaches into cubes and roasting with a little butter and brown sugar. Then I cubed the ciabatta bread and made the egg mixture with five eggs, two cups of heavy cream and a cup of whole milk, adding more brown sugar, maple syrup, vanilla and almond extracts, cinnamon, nutmeg and a little sea salt.

Then it just bakes in the oven for about an hour. I did pull it out and smoosh the top cubes of bread down a few times to make sure as much of it as possible got that cakey, almost custardy texture when finished. It was fantastic and now I have one fewer leftover ciabatta loaves in my freezer!