Chili Garlic Noodles with Pork Chops, Sweet Potato Biscuit Breakfast Sandwiches, BLTs & Caprese, Nectarine Fig Galette & More!

It’s summer and it’s too hot to be outside so much of the day, so I’m cooking more than ever in my new kitchen with all the views of the farm and very well functioning HVAC system and fans and hood vent! ;-)

In actuality, so much cooking time is all the chopping and assembling that it’s really heating up the house anyway!

These were the hits of the last two weeks, with another blog coming next week since there’s too much to fit here.

Pork Chops with Chili Garlic Noodles & Salad with Ginger Carrot Dressing

Ok, dang. This was meant to be a quick Wednesday night meal to test a batch of pork chops and try a quick fusion chili garlic noodle recipe. Then I decided to make a ginger carrot dressing to celebrate late season greens and carrots and the whole thing turned out to be one of the best things we’ve eaten in the last couple of weeks, maybe better than some of my more elaborate weekend concoctions!

I started with the dressing. With a powerful blender like a Vitamix, it’s pretty easy! You just throw carrots (orange and yellow in my case) into the blender along with ginger, avocado oil and toasted sesame oil, rice vinegar, lime juice and honey. The recipes I looked at didn’t call for it, but I was already using miso for the noodles and pork chop glaze, so I through some in, too, for saltiness, umami and body. It came out so delicious!

The noodles were inspired by It’s a Flavorful Life, but I used miso and gochujang instead of soy sauce. And of course, I used Il Supremo’s fat hand cut fettuccine, which was an amazing choice with the glossy sauce.

For the chops, I had a few chops with failed vacuum seals to take out of inventory and some from a recent batch to test. I just dried off, seasoning with Smokey Shiitake and Black Garlic Seasoning and seared in cast iron pans. Then I added some miso and rice vinegar to the pan to deglazed and make a little pan sauce.

The chops with the pasta and the zing from the carrot ginger dressing were amazing together! We also put cucumbers and crispy tempura seaweed crisp in the salad and I had thrown some green beans in the pasta. Amazing meal all around.

Sweet Potato Biscuit Breakfast Sandwiches with Chicken Sausage Patties

It was time to try A&A Acres chicken breakfast sausage patties so I wanted some biscuits with them.

But then we have so many sweet potatoes to cull this time of year, so I went with a sweet potato biscuit recipe! It mostly involves adding pureed roasted sweet potato to a classic buttermilk biscuit recipe. And it adds sweetness and flavor. The downside is the moisture and weight of the sweet potato does make them a bit denser and less flakey than traditional buttermilk biscuits.

The dough was easy to work though, so it’s always fun folding and rolling out biscuit dough over and over again to get those nice layers!

For the breakfast sandwiches, I cooked the chicken sausage patties in cast iron and added eggs once the patties were cooked through.

Then we layered the sandwiches together with some basil vinaigrette, chicken sausage patties, the fried egg and arugula. They were really delicious. And we liked the leftover biscuits with pecan butter almost as much or more!

Steak & Sheet Pan Veggies with Kimchi Mayo

I have made a sheet pan “stir fry” with sliced steak and veggies and kimchi mayo several times before and it amuses me that even when I set out to make it again, I always change it for one reason or anything to where it’s a pretty different meal!

This time I had some NY Strips from an older cow that I was going to slice off the outer gristle and into strips and stir fry or tossed with a sauce and cook in the oven like I have in the past. But then I chopped so many veggies than I just decided to sear them and slice them afterwards — much easier!

For the veggies, I started with hakurei turnips and put those in the oven at 400 degrees, since they take the longest to cook. Then I sliced Japanese eggplant and added that to another big sheet pan. By the time I had sliced all the peppers and red onions, the turnips and eggplant were basically done, so I combined those and added the peppers and onions to the emptied pan.

I tossed all the finished veggies together with Ponzu sauce. I also made a kimchi mayo with diced homemade kimchi, mayo, garlic powder and a little jalapeño fermented honey.

We ate it all with Jasmine rice, some fresh baby Tat soi, topped with the kimchi mayo and chili crisp. It was very good and is a very nice leftover/meal prep situation to reheat.

Peak BLTs & Caprese Sandwiches

It’s so great to be deep into tomato season and still have lettuce for BLTs!

I used an heirloom Purple Cherokee type and a yellow beefsteak tomato and sliced and salted them (along with Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning) right after starting to cook the bacon. I think that step is key to maximizing the tomato flavor.

And I love lightly toasted Bellegarde Honey Oat bread for a BLT. For these, I did truffle mayo, tomato, bacon, lettuce and basil vinaigrette. Sometimes I toast the bread more and the tomato next to it helps soften it. This time it got a little too soft by the end, so it should have been bacon touching one side, lettuce touching the other and tomato in the middle! Learn from my mistakes!

I also roasted some zephyr squash with Credo Farm’s Mineral Seasoning and those came out really lovely as a perfect side to the BLTs.

Then the next day, with just two pieces of bacon leftover, I did a caprese sandwich with more tomatoes, tons of basil and fresh mozzarella, which was as incredible as the BLT! Highly recommend.

Pasta with Salmon, Basil Vinaigrette, Olives & Sun Dried Tomatoes + Chicken Sausage Samples

After getting back from our Tennessee trip with the ducklings, this was what I through together for that evening’s dinner and meal prep for lunches for the next few days.

My basil is absolutely going off in my garden right now, but rather than pesto, I thought that another batch of the basil vinaigrette I’ve been making would be really nice with pasta and it was! For the vinaigrette, it’s just the basil, vinegar and or citrus juice, garlic and red onions and salt. Simple, bright green and so delicious.

For the pasta, I used a can of salmon, bones and skin and all, which used to freak me out, but they’re great sources of nutrients like calcium and Vitamin D and others, so I go with it now.

I also added an olive bruschetta blend and sun dried tomatoes.

I made breakfast potatoes for my breakfast burritos that night and the A&A Acres Gouda & Apple and Chorizo Chicken Sausages, so for dinner we had a whole spread with potatoes, sausage, pasta, fresh picnic peppers and kraut and then I had leftovers for both breakfast and lunch for the rest of the week.

Nectarine Fig Galette

Fourth of July dessert, celebrating some of the fruits of the season!

I made another batch of rye pie crust dough to start and then roasted some underripe but spotty nectarine slices to make them sweeter and jammier before assembling the galette. I added a little butter and brown sugar while they roasted.

Then I combined the roasted nectarines with some overripe figs, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, lemon juice and cornstarch, rolled out the dough and folded it up around it, then pressed halved figs on the top, brushed the top with cream and dusted with coarse sugar and some flakey sea salt.

It was really lovely — the combination of the peachy/nectarine flavor, the sweetness of the figs and the cinnamon, vanilla and lemon coming through.