On a whim, we bought a 15-lb ham Tuesday night. (This is all that’s left of it.)

For the past 3 days we have been facing the consequences.

Last time this happened to us (because yes, ham is not just a food, it’s an event), we ended up freezing a great deal of it and promptly forgetting about it until months later when it was unearthed as mysterious pinks slabs encrusted in quite the lovely assortment of ice crystals.

This time, I’m determined not to let that happen. So after our first night of just eating the ham straight-up (with a side of REALLY AWESOME spring pea soup), I’m looking for ways to incorporate it into various things so that it will disappear slowly, but surely, into our tummies rather than the back of the fridge.

So far, I’ve come up with 2 ways of doing this, which means we’ve been successfully eating ham for three days straight. If you know me, you know this NEVER happens. I seem to have an allergy to lack of variety in my diet.

Anyway, I figured these recipes for leftover ham are shareworthy, because if they’re good enough to make me eat ham for 5 consecutive meals, I think they’re pretty darn good. Both are rather easy, and perfectly suitable for a weekday dinner too. And the leftovers are awesome, which is a plus if you have to hurriedly cram something into a Tupperware the next morning to avoid spending $10 at Boloco or someplace.

Onwards to the recipes:

Ham, Cauliflower & Leek Frittata

(I apologize for the iffy photo taken on my phone…)

Ingredients:
2 leeks, thinly sliced
1 cup ham, cubed
2 cup cauliflower, chopped
2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
12 large eggs
2 teaspoon dijon mustard
2 tablespoon unsalted butter
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Method:

1. Whisk eggs, mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, and the hot sauce in a large bowl; set aside.
2. Heat butter and olive oil in a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat until butter has melted. Add leeks and cauliflower; cook, stirring, until soft, about 5 minutes. Add ham; cook, stirring, until heated through, about 2 minutes.
3. Preheat broiler.
4. Add egg mixture and stir to combine. Cook, using spatula to pull eggs away from sides, allowing uncooked egg to run underneath, until almost set, about 8 minutes.
5. Broil until center of frittata has sent, about 1-2 minutes.

View recipe on Yumbox »

Swoon-Worthy Mac and Cheese

Ingredients:
1-2 cup ham, cubed
1 pound pasta, rotelle or elbow shaped
1 cup pepper jack cheese
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
1 cup parmesan cheese, shredded
1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded
3 cup broccoli florets
3 cup milk
2 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon chili powder
chives, chopped

Method:

1. Make sure everything is chopped beforehand. Preheat oven to 375˚ F.
2. Boil pasta until al dente. In last 5 minutes of pasta cooking, dump the broccoli florets into the same pot and let it steam/cook. When done cooking, drain and set aside.
3. While pasta is cooking, melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add olive oil. Stir in flour and cook for 1 minute until very lightly browned. Add milk, a tiny bit at a time, stirring in between to avoid lumps forming. Add butter, salt, pepper, and mustard and chili powders. Keep stirring until mixture is bubbly. Lower heat if necessary to keep it from exploding. Add cheese and stir until smooth. Turn off heat.
4. Put drained pasta, broccoli florets, and ham in a large 9″x13″ baking pan and distribute evenly. Pour sauce on top. Sprinkle mozzarella on top evenly.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until top of cheese is bubbly and golden. Yeah!

View recipe on Yumbox »

* Provided that at least one significant group of humanity can vouch for its deliciousness
** This statement does not apply to foods/eating practices that repel me on a fundamental or moral level, such as live larvae and ortolans. Yeah.

Today I would like to talk about guava. The fresh variety, not the kind that comes in a can or carton, appended with words such as “nectar,” “juice,” “soda,” or “-like artificially flavored substance.” I happened upon a shipment of them at the local H-Mart in Baltimore while home visiting my mother this weekend. At $3.49/lb., they were not cheap, but the aroma didn’t really give me much of a choice.

Background Info
Guava grows on a small tree native to Central America, Mexico, and northern South America. The kind we eat is technically called the “apple guava,” but more commonly just called “guava.” The fruits are 2-3″ in diameter and round or egg-shaped with a somewhat lumpy exterior. The out skins can be red, green, maroon, yellow, or anything in between, and the interiors can be pale green, yellow, or pinkish red. The kind I bought was pale yellow on the outside and inside. Guavas are purportedly marketed as “superfruits” rich in catchphrases, I mean antioxidants, omega-3 and -6 fatties, fiber, and vitamins A and C. The red kinds, though, are higher in these goodies than the yellow. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Eating It
That’s the first thing you’ll notice about guava: its smell. The interwebs say, in order to pick the best ones, look for fruits that are firm but slightly squishy, and that smell really, really good. Guava has a floral, sweet, slightly musky fragrance with bright citrus-y overtones. It smells like a spa and makes me want to pass out in a large basket full of them.

To find out how to eat a guava, once again I asked the interwebs. It dutifully replied that I should simply wash it off and chomp into it as if it were an apple. A soft squishy apple made out of fruity perfume. And that’s what I did.

Now let’s take a step back here. I have built up this wonderful anticipation of the guava experience, and I have to say,  after eating it, I was actually a tad let down. Maybe it was because my guava was not the freshest (I don’t think there are any guava growers in Maryland). Though it smelled fantastic, on two other counts it fell short:

• Texture – the texture of guava is creamy-going-on-mealy. I expected a burst of juice inside the skin; there wasn’t. It was slightly juicer than a banana, but a whole lot less than an apple. Also, the seeds. The inside is full of semi-hard and semi-crunchy little seeds surrounded by a  slippery fruit flesh. They are not worth the bother of removing. However they are kind of disruptive when you are trying to focus on enjoying the creaminess of the fruit flesh.
• Flavor – it actually tasted quite mild, and was not as sweet as I had expected. It’s also very lightly tangy, less so than a citrus fruit. The first one I ate was also a little bit bitter (I think this was the skin).

So for tastiness, I would put it somewhere right around y=0 of the XKCD fruit chart.

But how easy to eat is it? Very. You can’t get any easier than biting into a soft fruit that doesn’t need to be peeled or cut, and hardly requires you to chew. You also don’t have to eat around a pit; I even devoured the stem (I was, uh, too lazy to get up and walk to the trash. Captive under a purring laptop… you know how it is.) So you really don’t have to put in much effort in getting your vitamins and antioxidants, if you choose guava as their method of delivery.

Thoughts
I think overall, it was not worth the price. But I’m willing to bet these weren’t guava at its best… who knew how long they had to sit in storage before making it out to H-Mart and then being put in a shopping cart? if I could give it another shot, maybe one day if I’m traveling in Mexico, I definitely would. And I really would like to try the red kind, since that seems to be the more common kind depicted on Goya soda cans and such.

Next time, rather than just eating it directly, I could also put it to other uses that would showcase its intoxicating smell. Now I know why it is often used as a fragrance in bath and body products, etc. For instance, maybe I could blend it into a smoothie with a bit of agave nectar, apple juice, and ice. That would be pretty darn fantastic methinks (now I really regret eating all the ones I bought straight up.)

And this concludes our guava adventure! =)

I’ve made pork tenderloin before many times, but it was always hard to tell when it got done, and whether it would be juicy or a log of shoe leather by the end. I also could never seem to get a nice crust on the outside. So finally I decided to get down to learning how to do it right. The recipe I used tonight came from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which is a sizable compendium of classic French recipes generously annotated by both Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The recipe is simply called Sautéed Pork Filet or Tenderloin. It was pretty standard, following your classic “sear, bake, and make sauce” procedure. However this time around I made sure to follow the recipe to the letter. And when I deviated, I noted what went differently, why, and how I fixed it. As a result I think tonight’s pork tenderloin was the best I’ve ever made.

I learned a bunch of things in the process, so I shall write them down here in case you too might find them useful. What follows is my version of the recipe, adopted from and even more thoroughly annotated than J&J’s version (if such a thing were possible).

Tina’s Julia & Jacques’ Pork Tenderloin

Ingredients
1 small pork tenderloin (about 1 lb.)
10 apricots
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tbsp minced shallots
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/3 cup beef broth
1/2 tbsp jam (such as black currant, plum, or, in my case, lingonberry)
1/2 tbsp ketchup
fresh parsley or basil for garnish

Method

1. Cut the pork tenderloin into 4 equal-sized chunks and salt/pepper it.
   Jacques says to angle the knife differently each time so you end up more with a series of tetrahedral hunks about 2″ thick at the center, than with round discs. At first I did not know what difference this made, but I realized that this helps you actually brown the entire exterior of the meat, instead of ending up with just the top and bottom browned (as would be the case for a disc-shaped piece).
2. Preheat oven to 350˚ F. Heat vegetable oil in pan on high heat.
   Here is where I began to deviate from the original recipe. First, J&J say to set the oven to 200˚. The oven is for gently roasting the pork after you sear it quickly in the pan, so the inside cooks up all juicy and tender. I found that 200˚ was too low, but this may also be my oven being an old batty apartment oven. Let’s just say you, too, have an old batty apartment oven. Go with 350, otherwise your pork will never be cooked to an edible state in time and you will end up with cold sauce in the pan waiting for it. Secondly, I accidentally used olive oil (reflex…), which was dumb. Olive oil has a low smoke point and it isn’t suitable for high-heat activities like searing… let’s just say our kitchen had an interesting haze for much of the evening. You should definitely use a vegetable oil such as canola. Thirdly, medium-high heat to me is a 7 out of 10 on my electric coil-style stove on the largest burner (8″ diameter). The different burner sizes vary significantly in heat output, so I would say, be sure to save the big burner for this step. Finally, use a non-nonstick pan because I find that nonstick pans just don’t heat up well enough. Also, you’ll never be able to deglaze it without also ripping off all the nonstick coating. I used my 9″ Cuisinart stainless steel frying pan for this.
3. Sear the meat for 5 minutes total, turning throughout.
   First step to happy searing is to really heat the oil up real hot. Heat it until it gets that ripply look on the surface. This is where I often trip up because I’m impatient and the electric coils heat up super slow (I’m a gas stove kind of Tina, alas.) Then when the oil is hot, put the meat in the pan. It should hiss mightily at you. If not take the meat out and keep heating the oil, then try again. When searing, make sure your pan is big enough for at least 1″ of clearance around each chunk or else you will get steaming action and not frying. If there isn’t enough clearance, do 2 batches. One area which I personally have a lot of trouble with is knowing when to flip. I discovered that 2 minutes on aforementioned 7/10 heat is enough to get a perfect golden brown crust on the first side, but the first side only. And no peeking. Afterwards, I begin to turn the chunks every 1 minute or it starts to burn. After 5 minutes and 3 or 4 turns you should have all sides cooked to a crusty, even, golden hue. If not, you will know next time whether you should adjust the heat on your stove up or down.
4. Lower heat to medium. Put the meat in an oven-proof dish and pop it in the hot oven.
   This is to finish cooking the insides, which right now is straight-up raw. At this point, set the mental timer for 10 minutes exactly. At 10 minutes, open the oven and poke the meat. If it feels completely squishy still, give it another 5. Meat should still yield a bit to the poke when you take it out. This will result in medium to medium-rare meat. (I did extensive research, a.k.a. reading the first 10 links in Google, on whether rare pork is OK. The consensus is that nowadays, it is just as OK as rare beef, as food safety standards have improved drastically since the 60s when everyone was scared of trichanosis poisoning.) In any case, 10-15 minutes will result in meat that is still a little pink in the center, but really juicy and nothing like the awful leathery stuff you get when cooked to FDA specs of 155˚ internal temperature. Totally worth the sliver of a risk of dying, if you ask me.
5. Make the sauce: in the pan where you cooked the meat, add shallots and sauté for 30 sec. Add red-wine vinegar, stock, and port. Deglaze pan. Add apricots and reduce for 5 minutes on a gentle boil. Stir in jam and ketchup.
   This step is pretty self-explanatory. The jam essentially thickens the sauce into a beautiful glossy sheen, as Jacques explains in the sidebar. It’s a great trick. Look ma, no flour. Anyway, if you have everything already measured out, making the sauce will beat the roasting meat to the finish line. In which case you can turn off the heat, cover the sauce to keep it warm, and wait for the meat to finish. Use your newly emancipated attention to check up on the meat assiduously so it doesn’t get over-cooked.
6. Take meat out of the oven, arrange on plates, and pour the yummy leftover pork juices into the sauce. Stir, pour sauce over meat, and serve!
   

That’s it. It’s really quite easy once you figure out what your own oven/stove’s equivilant of high and medium heat are. So I guess it really comes down to practice. I’m happy to say next time I make this I’ll have this extremely verbose guide to refer to, and it just might come out as awesome as this time.

***

PS: Yang and I have decided I should publish a book called “Difficult, Unhealthy Dinners,” along the lines of this one. Because I champion fat-and-black-bits-laden foods the world over (hey, Julia says it’s totally OK in moderation) and I seem to have a knack for making easy recipes sound hard. But I think maybe we’ve got it backwards. Many recipes that claim to be easy are actually pretty hard to master. They only seem easy because they are written with an economy of words. You can only learn by doing, for instance, that your oven temperature will be way off and the supposedly “quick” recipe will take twice as long and can no longer be relied upon to produce what it claims to be perfect done-ness. So the purpose of this book would be to make easy recipes seem hard by making them super-long, but of course in doing so they will be easy again because you will be totally prepared when your oven is way off from what it’s “supposed’ to be. And of course all of the recipes will feature ample amounts of fats, sugars, and crunchy blackened crusts. Oh yes.

I love French onion soup in restaurants, the way they come in a little clay bowl all bubbling over with melty cheesy goodness. They can do that because they can stick the whole bowl in a hot oven and let it broil the bejesus out of the cheese. But we can’t, mostly because my mom and Yang teamed up against me to prevent me from purchasing 4 ramekins for $3 at TJ Maxx.

But it’s okay, I’m not bitter. Because I figured out another way to get practically the same delicious result.

Basically first you make French onion soup in a pot on the stove. I prefer Elise’s version over at Simply Recipes, even though she, too, says to do the oven bit at the end. Simply ignore step 3, and do like follows instead:

First you get some bread. Hamburger buns split in half will also do. This is what we had.

Then you get some garlic and put it through the garlic press (Anthony Bourdain be darned). Then you smear this lovely garlic mush over the top of each bread piece. Then you brush the top with olive oil…

…And stick it in the toaster oven on “bake” for however long it takes for the top to get golden brown.

Then you put cheese on top of the bread. We had slices of Swiss, which, if you fold the corners in, kinda fits perfectly on a Trader Joe’s hamburger bun. Now you know…

…And switch the toaster oven to broil, whereupon it doth broil until the cheese bubbleth.

And then, when the bread is yummy, and the soup is done, you do this:

+

=

In the end, equally delicious as the restaurant version, AND we managed to use up 4 more onions out of our Costco onion bag. Hooray!

ADDENDUM: The only downside is that hours later, I still can’t sit in the kitchen without eyes stinging and nose running. I need to work on this.