Jalapeno Poblano Dip, Sheet Pan Fajitas, Gochujang Chicken Thighs, Carbonara, Fruit Galettes & More!
Lots more cooking in my farm kitchen this week, including an epic cooking day to host another pizza party for friends.
And the rest of our meals featured lots of peak summer produce like various peppers, more eggplant, green beans and cherry tomatoes from the garden and more!
Baked Jalapeño & Poblano Popper Dip with Bacon
Decadent, spicy and delicious, I make this whenever we have a bounty of jalapenos. I often add other peppers if I have them and this time dark green poblanos went so well with red and green jalapeños from my garden.
I started by slicing a pound of our bacon ends into smaller pieces and cooking in a big cast iron on the stove.
Then, I cut the seeds and pith out of the peppers. The jalapeños were pretty spicy and I like for the pepper/vegetable to cheese and bacon ratio to be high, so this way you can tolerate more peppers!
Next I roasted them in the toaster oven at 450 degrees for 15-20 minutes or so. Once they cooled a little, I pulsed them in the food processor with some of the bacon, plus goat creole cream cheese, a little mayonnaise, nutritional yeast and garlic and onion salt.
I have put cheddar cheese in the blend before, but this time I saved it only for the top, along with pieces of bacon, homemade breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese.
We didn’t have any tortilla chips and while it is really good with toasted ciabatta or baguette (and I always have tons of both in the freezer), since we were having fajita bowls for dinner, I cut up some flour tortillas, brushed with a little of the bacon fat and made some chips instead! It was so good and we had a hard time not devouring too much to have room for the rest of the meal!
Sheet Pan Beef Fajitas with Black Beans, Rice & Sweet Corn
I’ll be honest, this was a good concept in theory and I love having tons of leftover fajitas, beans and rice for meal prep for the week, but the marinated tenderized round steak did not work out well on a sheet pan in the oven.
Because of all the holes/tenderizing marks, it is a good cut to soak up a marinade. But I should have dried the steaks off more before putting them in the oven, because they just kind of steamed and did not brown.
So then I took them out, got a cast iron pan really hot and seared some of them. That helped, but they were far more well done than they needed to be!
With the delicious peppers and onions, Instant Pot black beans (always soaks for at least 24 hours and cooked with kombu seaweed for digestibility), brown and red rice, plus roasted sweet corn, some of the creamy pepper dip and my beloved fermented radishes, it still made a great meal, but there would be tweaks for a future attempt on a sheet pan!
Roasted Gochujang Chicken Thighs with Green Beans, Rice & Salad
This was a take on Miso Chicken Thighs I made few weeks ago, but with gochujang as the salty, fermenty paste in place of miso. The recipe is inspired by It’s A Flavorful Life, with even more tweaks than last time.
I also wanted to sliced some of the leftover chicken for Korean BBQ chicken pizza the next night, so seasoned accordingly.
I mixed up melted butter with gochujang, rice vinegar, a little soy sauce and honey (I used jalapeño fermented honey) and I also used the last of some homemade artichoke miso gifted by a friend. Then coated the thighs with the sauce and roasted in the toaster oven for about 25 minutes at 425 degrees, flipping twice. They come out crispy and caramelized and so delicious!
With it, we had the last of the brown rice from the fajita meal prep, some steamed green beans that I tossed with butter and halved cherry tomatoes (both the beans and tomatoes from my garden) and a salad with Faust Farms spring mix, cucumbers, chevre, crunchy chickpeas, tempura seaweed crisps and the last of the really good carrot ginger dressing I made a week or two prior. It was all so good together.
Another Pizza Party — with Greek Salad & Baba Ganoush, Too!
We’ve always got a pizza party up our sleeves since getting the Ooni oven in April.
And although I absolutely love the convenience and quality of Bellegarde’s frozen dough, I did start making my own!
I combined a few recipes and used a combination of Barton Spring All-Purpose 00 flour, Bellegarde’s stone-milled white wheat and King Arthur Bread flour, along with a little vital wheat gluten to help get bubbles and stretch!
Seeing dough exponentially increase in size is always fun, right?
This was a big batch, enough for six pizzas for the pizza party, two small portions Grant took out during the week to do quick pitas for leftover gyro meat and then two more pizzas on Friday night!
For the party, we did a cheese pizza for the kids and between my bubbly dough and the limited toppings not weighing it down, it bubbled and puffed more than any pizza we’ve done yet!
For the adults, we did:
A lemony kale and artichoke with goat cheese
An olive salad, sweet picnic pepper, Andouille and provolone
A goat gyro with sun dried tomatoes and feta
The Korean BBQ chicken with red onions and gouda
And a decadent final pizza with fig preserves, bacon and blue cheese.
I also made a big batch of fresh basil and pistachio pesto, along with baba ganoush made with roasted eggplant and black garlic. And we had a Greek salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, feta and oregano, too!
Linguine Carbonara
One of my friends at the pizza party loves pasta carbonara as much as I do! So I planned to make it to go with our pizza.
I sliced up two pounds of our bacon ends and cooked those down and even whisked up the egg yolk, parmesan and black pepper mixture before everyone got there and then we were in the midst of making our fifth out of six pizzas when I realized I never boiled water for the pasta!
We all decided that the pizzas, salad, pesto, baba ganoush and Nur’s Kitchen hummus were plenty, but then I still had most of the bacon (not used for the pizza or snacked on), plus the egg mixture in the fridge, so I made it the next day instead.
It never disappoints. And as an egg and pork farmer, it’s sort of the perfect decadent meal. I saved some pasta water that I didn’t end up using when mixing/tempering the egg mixture with the hot linguine.
And since it was an entire pound of carbonara, that turned out to be a great liquid to use to gently reheat the leftovers throughout the week! I ran out for the last portion of pasta water for the last portion and used whole milk, which worked well, too.
Strawberry Rhubarb and Blackberry Blueberry Galettes with Homemade Ice Cream
For the pizza party, I also continued my galette era with not one, but two fruit galettes!
I had plenty of Louisiana strawbwerries, blackberries and blueberries in my freezer, along with chopped Wisconsin rhubarb from my parents’ garden.
So I did a strawberry rhubarb galette and a blackberry blueberry one.
For the strawberry rhubarb, I used a little whole wheat flour and for the blackberry blueberry, a little rye.
I cooked the fruit with sugar and cornstarch on the stove first to help it gel in the oven better. I added lemon juice and vanilla to the strawberry rhubarb combination and a little rosemary to the blackberry blueberry mix, which Grant especially loved. He told me it was the best galette I’ve ever made!
I didn’t have any cream or half and half and we were even low on whole milk, so I gave the tops an egg wash with some coarse sugar and flakey sea salt, which gave both of them a deeper golden bronze hue when finished.
They were both delicious but I agree with Grant on the blackberry blueberry one being superior. Next time, I’d up the strawberry to rhubarb ratio. I love the sourness of rhubarb, but this was giving a bit of savory vibes, too.