Meredith's Meatball Phở

Once upon a time in 1984, when my family moved to the United States, I was a little girl, and our neighbors became good friends with my parents. They had a daughter that was the same age as me, and we became fast friends. We roller skated in her garage, to the Pointer Sisters, Wham! and Prince, and swam in the lake, and caught sunfish and left them to "dry" on the pontoon, where we forgot them for several days, and then decided to toss them back in the lake. Who knew that sun-dried sunfish were buoyant? They floated to shore and bobbed in the waves.

As a child of the 80s, it's also worth noting, that my dear friend got me my very own  Cabbage Patch doll for my birthday. And for one glorious week in the summer, our two families rented a full sized motor home and vacationed together all over Minnesota and Wisconsin, hitting up all the mini golf courses, RV parks, water theme parks, and camp sites. These are those lingering sweet memories of my youth.  Anyway, we moved many times, time passed, and we did -- as kids did in those days -- stay in touch via regular letter writing. Thanks to modern times, internet, and social media, we are now still able to exchange photos and updates with far more frequency than we did the last few years.  And since I'm a newbie mom with little to no time to blog about recipes, I asked her to share a guest post with me that she had written about on Facebook.

She had me at "Phở" ... This Vietnamese savory soup is easily one of my favorites! (Note: I may add more photos when I get a chance to make this myself. )

So here it is:

Meredith's Meatball Phở

1 lb. Ground pork

1 cup water chestnuts, small dice; divided.

1/2 cup soy sauce; divided

1/4 cup fish sauce

1 tsp. Fresh ginger puree; divided

1 tsp. Fresh garlic puree; divided

1Tbsp. Dark sesame oil

2 quarts chicken stock

1 package rice noodles (fresh preferred)

1 cup asparagus chopped into 1" pieces

1 cup oyster mushrooms, cleaned and chopped into bite-size pieces

1 head bok choy, sliced

1 cup snow peas, halved

Garnish:

1 bunch green onions, chopped; divided

1 bunch pea shoots (or bean sprouts)

Fresh cilantro, chopped

Sriracha

Fresh lime (optional)

For meatballs:

Place ground pork, half of the pureed ginger, garlic, water chestnuts and soy sauce in a bowl. Mix well with your hands, and roll into approximately one and a half inch meatballs. (Should make about 24). Place on baking sheet and bake in 350° oven for 20-25 minutes.

For soup:

In a large pot on medium low heat,  combine stock, remaining ginger, garlic and soy sauce. Add fish sauce and bring to a simmer. Add in snow peas and asparagus and simmer for 5 minutes. Add mushrooms, bok choy, some green onions and noodles. Cook until noodles are soft.

When ready to serve, add meatballs and garnish as you like.

This is ALWAYS a hit in our house no matter what fresh ingredients I use!

 

 

      

Pork & Bok Choy Gyozas

Hi all ten of you loyal readers.  It’s been a while.  Did you miss me? I’m sure you’ve been staying up at night wondering when I’d have a new recipe to share.  Oh, don’t you worry.  This one is SURE to disappoint, as I didn’t even take photos… I was up to my wrists in raw meat, and my husband was exercising and couldn’t help hold the camera.  And it was late, dangit.  We were hungry, so I just cooked, and did not pause to consider the repercussions of a photo-free blog.  But take heart – there are OTHER blogs that show you how to assemble gyozas, and they have expertly taken photos, so if you like my recipe, you can just imagine what the photos would have looked like.  And the best part is that this recipe is approximately $5 worth of ingredients and you’ll have about 40 gyozas when you’re done, and you can freeze uncooked ones for later use.

Are ya ready? Okay!

Pork Schnitzel with sauteed mushrooms and egg noodles

My husband and I recently celebrated our anniversary by going up to the quaint Bavarian-themed tourist town of Leavenworth, located in the Cascade mountains in Washington State.  Clearly, with the Alpine menu options that are prevalent, we had to do at least one “authentic German” meal.  So we had schnitzel, with red cabbage sauerkraut, and egg noodles with mushrooms. Now back in the day-to-day of normal life, I thought we would try to recreate that meal (all but the red cabbage sauerkraut which I didn't have...) to take a bit of Bavaria back home to us. 

Mole Pulled Pork Tacos & Spanish rice

Happy New Year, readers.  Did you miss me? All four of you?

I haven’t blogged for a while, because as much baking & cooking as I did during Christmas it was all Christmas food, with Swedish recipes, and I don’t know how many of you really want a recipe for pickled-herring and beet salad?

Plus I just didn’t cook a lot of new stuff in the busyness of the Christmas season.  Most of the food I made had already been entered on the blog.  But it’s a new year, and I’m hoping to have a few more recipes up my cuffs.

I made this meal yesterday, and mostly made it to deliver to a family from our church that was recovering from a rather major car accident, and in my haste to make the food, I didn’t even think of blogging it, let alone photographing my progress.  So this will be mostly from memory, and you’ll just have to use your imagination.  And you know what pulled pork looks like.

[PS. This was edited a year later after the original posting to adjust the ingredients, because I made it again today and it was even better than the first version.  So here it is -- updated.  Please note that this is still by no means a fully authentic recipe.  At least it's a good pseudo recipe for the harried (or hairy) housewife.]

Pork Stir Fry

I just threw this together last night.  I can’t say anything for its authenticity (as you have discovered to be the theme of my blog, being Off The Cuff) but it was pretty tasty, so I thought I’d share the gist of it.

Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Kale Sauté

So tonight’s dinner is so absurdly simple that I hesitate to even blog about it. I mean, there was very little prep of any kind. Just some chopping, some seasoning and that’s it. But it was delicious. So for those of you who think putting a few raw ingredients together constitutes “cooking” I share with you my excessive wisdom. Ha ha ha.

INGREDIENTS:

1 pork tenderloin (I happened to have bought an organic, farm fresh pork tenderloin from a co-op-type place.)

5-6 stems of kale, de-stemmed, and roughly chopped

1 bell pepper, preferably red or yellow (and you will find that bell peppers are in most of my foods), julienned

2 Roma tomatoes, cut into small wedges

Olive oil, fennel seed, salt & pepper

DIRECTIONS:

Sprinkle liberal amounts of fennel seed, salt & fresh ground pepper all over the pork. Grill it on high the first 3 or 4 minutes, turning it once to the other side.

Turn down heat to medium, and keep grilling until internal temp is about 155-160 F. Slice into medallions.

A few minutes before the pork is done, sauté the veggies in a skillet with olive oil, and some salt & pepper sprinkled on. Serve like a “hot salad.”