Faux Pasta: A Sister Cooking Blog

Here is the promised recipe for pork tenderloin with cranberry balsamic sauce, and butternut squash risotto with turmeric and toasted pistachios. We grilled the pork this time, it got a little dry but it was still good! If you grill it, you won’t have leftover pan juice so just use more stock.

And - yes, canned cranberry sauce. I know. You think poorly of me now. Wait until you try it.

Pork Tenderloin with Cranberry Balsamic Sauce
From Bon Appetit

Ingredients

1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 8- to 10-ounce pork tenderloin
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
1/2 cup low-salt chicken broth
1/3 cup canned whole berry cranberry sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Preparation

Preheat oven to 450°F. Melt 1/2 tablespoon butter in heavy large ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat. Sprinkle pork with salt and pepper. Sear pork on all sides, about 2 minutes. Place skillet with pork in oven. Roast pork until thermometer inserted into center registers 155°F, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt remaining 1 tablespoon butter in heavy medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and rosemary; sauté until onion softens, about 3 minutes. Add broth, cranberry sauce and vinegar and whisk until cranberry sauce melts, about 2 minutes.

Transfer pork to work surface. Scrape any juices from large skillet into cranberry mixture. Boil until sauce has reduced enough to coat spoon thickly, about 6 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Slice pork and serve with sauce.

Butternut Squash Risotto with Turmeric, Goat Cheese, Tomatoes and Pistachios Because Why the Heck Not

I normally don’t mess with risotto, but I totally did this time and it was super good, in kind of a weird way.

Recipe adapted from American Brasserie by Gale Gand and Rick Tramonto

Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 medium butternut squash, peeled, halved, seeded, and cut into 1/2 cubes
2 plum tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup white wine
4 cups chicken stock (or vegetable stock or water)
1 onion, chopped
Kosher salt and black pepper
3/4 cup arborio rice
2 Tbsp. butter
1-2oz soft goat cheese
Pinch tumeric
Toasted chopped pistachios (about 1/4 cup)

Directions
In a large pot of salted water, cook the squash until fork tender (12-15 minutes). Drain and set aside. Purée in blender or using immersion blender.
Bring stock to simmer and keep until needed.
Heat the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat.
Add the onion and garlic and cook until the onion is translucent (about 8 minutes).
Add the rice and stir until coated with oil.
Add in the wine, stir until mostly cooked off.
Add the stock one ladlefull at a time, stir and wait until it is mostly absorbed before adding more. Repeat for ~25-30 minutes until there is no more stock.
Stir in the tumeric, cinnamon.
Stir in the squash and tomatoes.
Gently stir in the cheese.
Add salt and pepper to taste. Top with pistachios.
- Nellie

Blueberry Muffins with Streusel Topping

Hey, I got a pound of blueberries with this recipe’s name on it. These muffins taste like my childhood, so this means when you eat them, you’ll be transported to the children’s department of the Wheaton Public Library asking if there are “any more books besides the ones on the shelves” because you are “all out of books to read.” Wow, finish this sentence with, “But I’m such a nerd!” and you can put me out to pasture forever (one step away from complaining how hard it was to get whisked away to the Talented and Gifted Program in elementary school while everyone sat in regular class -  I did not have this experience and only marveled in the joy of being whisked away to speech therapy and remedial math class).

Hey, at least there were these muffins, the unconditional love of my family, and I finally figured out the math thing when I was 17.

Note: if you use frozen blueberries, make sure that they are still frozen or only partially thawed.

Makes 12 muffins.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
7 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
2 cups blueberries, fresh or frozen 

1. Preheat the oven to 400. Put paper cups in the muffin tins because you ain’t cleaning this stuff up.
2. In a small bowl, combine a quarter cup of the sugar and 1 teaspoon of the lemon zest; crush them together until the sugar absorbs some of the lemon flavor, about 1 minute. Add 1/4 cup of the flour and 2 tablespoons of the butter. Cut into mixture until it forms coarse crumbs. Set this streusel topping aside.
3. In a large bowl, place the remaining 1/2 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon lemon zest, crush until sugar absorbs, about 1 minute. Add the remaining 2 cups flour and the baking powder and toss to blend well.
4. Nuke the remaining butter and let cool slightly. In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, and melted butter. Pour the liquid over the flour mixture and fold lightly, 3 or 4 times with a rubber spatula to partially combine. Sprinkle the blueberries over the batter and distribute evenly, using as few strokes as possible (the mixture should not be perfectly smooth and will be quite dry). 
5. Quickly divide the batter among the prepared muffin cups and sprinkle about 1 tablespoon of the streusel topping per muffin. Bake in the middle of the oven until just golden, about 15-18 minutes depending on your oven.

A last cigarette is permitted in some prisons. Alcohol is prohibited in all. Most states limit final meal allowances to twenty dollars. Maryland and Texas do not allow a meal selection. There is a great deal of red meat, a few lobsters, no sushi, and no Godiva chocolate. Some requests provide clues about personality, race, and region. An Oregon inmate’s request closed with “I would appreciate the eggs hot.” And who wouldn’t.

“Final meal request of four pieces or fried chicken breast, two chicken fried steaks, 20 fried shrimps, four fried eggs with no yoke, two golden brown biscuits with butter and honey, two gallons of black coffee with cream and sugar and two hand size pieces of peanut brittle candy.”

From Dark Rye

Potato Salad with Roasted Garlic and Cilantro Aioli

Try as I might, I can’t get this potato salad to look like something better than potato salad. Guess what, potato salad is delicious, and we have featured a recipe or two here once before. What better to honor our one year anniversary than to make a potato salad and batten down the Berkeley winter hatches. After all, don’t we need to store fat for hibernating through this winter? Nooooo? You say we’re not cave people anymore?

Making your own mayonnaise obviously elevates this to a new level of doing dishes and doing DELICIOUS. It’s not hard, it mainly just takes up nearly all of your olive oil. Omega-3s forever. Let’s move to Santorini.

MAYO:

1 egg

2 tablespoons lemon juice (I like this pretty lemony)

salt and pepper

2 tablespoons horseradish mustard

1/4 cup Roasted Garlic Oil (err, you can buy some from the company that I work for or you can just sautee whole cloves in olive oil until they turn roasty then store that in a jar somewhere dark for a week or your fridge for practically forever)

3/4 cup olive oil

1 small, sweet onion, cut up

1/4 cup cilantro

1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

You’re going to need to make the mayo first, so here goes: blend egg with lemon juice or pulse in a food processor for about 10 seconds. Then, with the blender or food processor running, drizzle in the oils (I had the garlic oil and olive oil in a 1-cup measuring cup together) very sloooowlly so as not to break the emulsion, and go 4-5 seconds longer after you’ve drizzled if you are using a food processor. Then add in salt, pepper, cayenne pepper. Pulse or blend for a few seconds more. Add the onion in, pulse or blend. Add the cilantro in. Pulse or blend for a few seconds until incorporated. I used a food processor, and my final mixture was pretty runny but tasty. I ended up adding a bit more salt to it at the end, so taste it and see if you like it. Scoop into a container and refrigerate for 30 minutes to let everything mold together.

If you break the emulsion, I’m pretty sure you can add a few drops of water to the mixture in the blender or food processor then pulse and it’ll whip right back together again, or so my dim recollection of Harold McGee tips tells me.

THE POTATO PART OF THIS SALAD:

You will need—

2 lbs + of new potatoes

1 celery stalk, peeled and diced

3 hard boiled eggs, chopped

4 small sweet pickles or 1/2 dill pickle chopped into mini cubes

Quick pour of sweet pickle juice (so bad on its own but so good here)

Quick pour of dill pickle juice

1 green onion, white parts only, finely chopped

Steam the potatoes whole in a large pot for about 20-24 minutes. I know when they’re done when I stick a fork in them (really) and they easily, but not too easily, go through to the end of the fork tine. Take them out, put on a cutting board, let cool for a few minutes, then cut them into quarters. Add to bowl, mix in celery, hard boiled eggs, pickles, pickle juice, green onion. Once nearly completely cool, stir in the mayo that you made, tablespoon by tablespoon. You may have some left over. It’s good to taste it as you make it so you can see if you like the consistency, but the flavor really will come later. Add more salt if you need it and more pepper. You may need to add a dash of white sugar to counterbalance the acid. Let cool a bit more, then cover and let marinate in the fridge for 30-60 minutes.

- Nellie

When you make an asparagus quiche in the spring again, lie your spears in a cozy egg bed. Don’t chop them up and make them wrangle with ham cubes. It’s cruel and also kind of jumbly in your mouth.

I’m going through photos from earlier this year and thought you might like to see them.

I don’t remember what quiche recipe I used. Lots of eggs. Always cream or whole milk, never skim milk - it makes for a watery quiche. Any kind of cheese you want - you really don’t have to use gruyere. I think I used sharp cheddar and laid it at the bottom, then added the egg-cream mixture, then the asparagus. Whatever kind of pie crust recipe you like to use!

- Nellie