Teeny Tiny Tuna Patties

This was another attempt to feed LongJohn as well at home as he eats at daycare. He ended up not being a huge fan of these (despite, of course, him loving them at daycare), but I enjoyed them so much I’ve made them for myself and others since. It’s a great easy lunch when the thought of another boring sandwich just does not appeal. Not to mention that it’s one of those great flexible recipes that requires no measuring. The only ratio that is really important is one egg to every can of tuna you use. Other than that, play around!

When I’m doing stuff like this, I always start with my seasonings: what do I want the flavour to be? In this case I have some chives, garlic chives, tarragon, and sage growing out in my garden so that was an easy choice.

Other good options would be diced caramelized onions or green onions, shallots, fresh rosemary, basil … you get the picture. Chop those babies up.

Tip your handful of fresh herbs into a bowl with about half a cup panko bread crumbs (you can use regular bread crumbs but I like the crunch of panko). Season with salt and pepper, maybe a little bit of onion and garlic powder if you’ve got ’em.

Tip in as well some grated parmesan cheese, to your preference.

And an egg! One egg for every can of tuna ensures maximum patty cohesion.

Mix it into a gross paste.

Now, your can of tuna: this is a chunk white albacore.

Break that up and chuck it in the mix as well.

Now melt a gob of butter and a dash of vegetable oil (to keep the butter from burning) in a large frying pan and let that heat up.

Form the tuna paste into patties any size you like. These ones are about 2″ in diameter and I ended up with 8 in total.

Slide those patties carefully into the hot butter and let them fry!

Flip them after a few minutes, or when the bottoms are a nice golden brown.

When they are brown on both sides, slide them onto a piece of paper towel to drain and cool slightly before taking a HUGE BITE.

I served these with some plain yogurt mixed with Dijon mustard and those avocado fries I made in the last post.

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Fun Food Friday: Baked Avocado Fries

Did you know that these are a THING?

I was looking for a way to make it easier for LongJohn to grasp slippery avocado without totally. smushing. it. EVERYWHERE. and I found out that people BAKE the suckers after BREADING them. I got very excited about that. Then I looked at the price of avocados in this country and felt less excited. But LongJohn needs his superfoods …

The trick here is to use underripe avocados, because otherwise they go a little too squishy after baking. These were perhaps a little past their prime but they did a decent job.

Preheat your oven to 350°F, set the rack in the centre of the oven, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Pit and peel your avocados and slice them lengthwise into nice long “fries.”

Grab a bowl with some flour, another with some panko (seasoned with salt and pepper and whatever else you crazy kids can come up with), and a third bowl with a beaten egg (go with the ratio of one egg for every avocado you use).

Dip an avocado fry into the egg, then the flour, then the panko, and lay them out on the baking sheet.

Spray the fries with some cooking spray (sounds weird, I know, but trust me – it’ll make the panko go all nice and golden).

Bake for 20-25 minutes, flipping the fries halfway through, until the panko is gloriously gold and they’re nice and crispy. You can see that my fries were a little softer than they should be in that my spatula took chunks out of them in the flipping process.

I served these up to LongJohn with some tasty tuna patties, a dijon-yogurt dipping sauce, and a small mountain of fresh fruit … but you can do them however you do.

Mmmore Meatloaf!

Happy Birthday to Papa John!

One of the weirder, yet endearing things about my husband is the fact that if he goes to a fancy restaurant and they have meatloaf on the menu, he will order it. Every. Single. Time. Like a total weirdo. I’m carving my way through a juicy perfectly cooked steak. And he’s eating meatloaf. So we make quite a bit of meatloaf at home, too. Here’s another version of my classic: feel free to double it as I did and freeze one (or both) for later!

First ye grab yer meat. A lot of it. Enough for two loaves. I prefer the lean stuff – the extra lean is wayyyy more expensive and is harder to stick together.

Then ye take yer onions.

And yer mushrooms.

And ye put them in a bowl.

With a lot of other stuff: panko bread crumbs, Newfoundland savoury, oregano, salt, pepper. The works, really.

Then you chuck the meat in a bowl and add some eggs. Like, four or five.

Dump in the rest of the stuff too and give it a good stirring. Feel free to use your hands. Tip in some Worcestershire sauce as well for flavour.

When you’re ready, whisk up a concoction that’s a mix of barbecue sauce, Dijon mustard, and honey.

Spread that in the bottom of your two loaf pans.

Cram the meat on top and smooth it down. See how that sauce comes up the sides? That’ll keep it from drying out.

When you’re done, you can either cover it up and shove it in the freezer …

Or you can bake it at 350°F until it reaches an internal temperature of 160°F.

Then you eat it. Unfortunately cooked meatloaf does not photograph well. But you get the picture.

Sausage Rolls

I made these for our end-of-the-year softball team potluck, and despite me making four dozen of them, they were gone within five minutes of opening up the container. I’ve never made sausage rolls before, but I do love them, so it was easy to figure out what should go in them. I will definitely make them again, and probably tweak what I throw in, just for variety’s sake – you should, too!

I started by chopping up a bunch of end-of-season herbs from my garden: a bit of sage, parsley, and chives. There is probably about 1/2 cup chopped fresh herbs here.

Then I chopped up 1 package white mushrooms, about 3 cups minced. Ordinarily I’d probably mince up 1 large onion and do half onion, half mushroom, but one of the potluck attendees is allergic to onions so I left it out.

Then grab some (500g) uncooked sausages. These are a little on the spicy side, but nothing too crazy.

Slice through the casing and remove the meat.

Chuck the sausage meat in a bowl together with your herbs, the mushrooms and onions (if you used onions and/or mushrooms), 2 large eggs, 2 tablespoons minced garlic, and about 1/2 cup panko bread crumbs. Feel free to season with salt and pepper as well. It turned out that I had bought pre-seasoned panko so I didn’t bother.

Mix the sausage up thoroughly with the other ingredients. I found it was easier (if more disgusting) to use my hands, but you could probably get away with doing this in the bowl of a stand mixer as well.

Now, remove from the fridge that package of puff pastry sheets that has been defrosting in there overnight.  Slice each sheet into three equal strips.

Grab some mustard. I bought this fancy Tarragon Dijon stuff and I don’t regret it.

Brush a line of mustard down the length of each strip of puff pastry.

Evenly distribute all your sausage meat on top of your mustard line on each strip.

Bring the edges of each strip of pastry together to seal the meat into a long tube. You may have to stretch the pastry a bit to do this, depending on how full it is.

Shove your sausage tubes into the freezer for 15-20 minutes to firm up the dough and the meat and make it easier for you to slice them. You can preheat your oven now, to about 425°F. My oven cooks a little hotter (you’ll notice the finished ones are slightly charred on the bottom) so feel free to reduce the heat to whatever you need to if you have the same problem.

Slice the now-firm tubes into 8 equal pieces – this will give you 48 sausage rolls.

Bake the rolls for 20 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown and puffy and the sausage is cooked through.

Allow them to cool slightly before you stuff them all in your face. I don’t know how long they will last after baking them, in terms of storage, because I never got the chance to find out.

… Squasage?

I did not name this, for the record.  When I was looking up basic cooking times on the internet, I found one for sausage-stuffed squash that was entitled “Squasage” and now I can’t get it out of my head.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, I had this squash (I think it’s a kabocha?) that needed eating and this is what I decided to do with it — it makes a nice winter meal for two.

Preheat your oven to 400°F and cut your squash in half.  I use a grapefruit spoon to remove the seeds — it’s easier that way.

Place the squash cut-side-up on a baking dish or in a roasting pan and brush with olive oil.  Dust with salt and pepper and roast for about an hour, until you can poke it all over with a fork with little resistance.

In the meantime, rinse and drain 1/2 cup quinoa.  This is red quinoa.

Dump the quinoa in a small pot with 1 cup broth (your choice) and bring to a boil.

Lower the heat, cover it, and let it simmer until the broth is all absorbed.  It’ll look all fluffy with little white tails like this when it’s done, after about 15 minutes.

You’ll also want to chop up some veg, about half an onion and half a red pepper.  Or a whole pepper.  Up to you.

I had three Italian sausages here, but you can use two as well.

Slice open the casing and dump the contents into a bowl.

Heat up some olive oil in a pan and start sautéing your onions.

When they’re soft and translucent, add your sausage and break it up with a spoon while it cooks.

When it’s cooked completely, add in your red pepper and some herbs.  I used fines herbes, a combination of things like parsley, chervil, marjoram, and chives.

Stir that around for a bit until the red pepper is softer.

Then you can dump in the quinoa and lower the heat just to keep the whole thing warm until the squash is ready.

In a small bowl, dump in a few teaspoons panko bread crumbs and a little bit of grated cheese (your choice).  Mix that together.

When the squash is ready, lower the oven heat to 350°F and start spooning the sausage mixture into your squash halves.  You may end up with leftover mix, but it makes a great lunch the next day.

When the squash halves are holding as much as they can, sprinkle the cheese/panko mix over the top and chuck it back in the oven for about 15 minutes, until everything is thoroughly warm, the cheese is melted, and the bread crumbs are starting to brown.

The result is an all-in-one, piping hot meal.

We did find it easier to tip out the contents and scrape out the softened squash before mixing it all together and eating it.  It was less molten that way.

Petite Piglet Patties

I was going to call these things “savoury sausage sliders,” or even “summer savoury sausage sliders,” but then the Pie suggested the above title and for some reason I started to laugh so hard I needed a tissue and had to sit down.  And then he suggested that, since we used hot italian sausage meat, we call them “picante petite piglet patties” and I may have told him to shut up at that point.

Anyway.  These are sliders, if you hadn’t gathered that by now.  I picked up a package of ground sausage meat the other day and this is what we did with it.  Basic ingredients are about 1lb ground pork, 1 egg, half a white onion, and some fresh summer savoury.

Mince up the savoury and the onion and chuck them in a bowl with the sausage meat and the egg.  Season with salt and pepper.

Give that a good stir with a spoon and then mix in about 1/2 cup panko bread crumbs (or whatever kind of bread crumbs you have on hand).

Form the goo into balls slightly larger than a golf ball but smaller than a cricket ball and flatten them into patties (I ended up with eleven patties).

Fry those suckers up.  For some reason the light was such in my kitchen on this particular afternoon that it took us twelve tries (the Pie tried to help) of blurry patty photos before I gave up and used flash.

While that’s on the go, why don’t you have yourself a salad, too?  Here we have a mixture of baby spinach, a small hunk of plain goat’s cheese (chevre), a handful of sliced almonds, another handful of dried cranberries, and a diced ripe pear.

Then the dressing is 3 equal parts vegetable oil (I used almond, because we’re trying to use it up), rice vinegar, and orange juice).

Toss it up!

Top your sliders with whatever floats your boat.  I used mayo, tomatoes, avocado, and spinach.  The Pie voted for barbecue sauce and cheese.  We had them on some picnic buns I grabbed in the bakery section.

All in all, a good summer meal. Don’t forget to eat your veggies! You see them peeking at you in the background? Don’t forget them!

Turkey Meatball Rigatoni with Pesto

Happy Canada Day!  Today is a holiday here in the Great White North.  Last Monday was also a holiday for those of us in Newfoundland, and I cooked this recipe up on that particular day.  We are trying to consume the contents of our pantry and freezer before we move (and we’re doing a pretty good job) so this gets rid of a chunk of the stuff in there.

Anyway, my landlord is doing some renovations to her house, which is directly behind ours, and she needs our yard for access.  The first thing I said to the Pie when he got up and joined me in the kitchen last Monday morning was, “Oh good, you’re clothed — there’s a man in our tree.”  And there was.  And there were several in the backyard.

And in the front yard.

And in the side yard.

And everywhere.  All.  Day.  Which made Gren very grumpy.

And all the shops were closed so we had to make do with what was around for our dinner.  So start making up some meatballs, okay?  Preheat your oven to 375°F and grab a baking sheet. Ignore the small highway being created in your backyard.

Finely grate up a medium-sized carrot.  Chuck that in a bowl.

Slice up some green onions.

Then dice ’em.  Chuck those in the bowl with the carrots.

Then add a few spoonfuls minced garlic.

Plop in 2 eggs.

And about 1/2 cup panko bread crumbs.

Give that a thorough stirring.

Add in some ground turkey, seasoned with salt and pepper.

Stir that all together, then use your hands to squish it into golf-ball-sized meatballs.

Plop those onto your baking sheet and let those cook in the oven for 20 minutes.

To test for doneness, cut one open and see that there’s no pink inside.

Grab yourself some pesto, too.  However much you want.  I like lots.  You can buy it or make it yourself, it’s up to you.

And slice up some tomatoes.  I used grape tomatoes here.

Boil up a pot of water and cook up some pasta.  We used rigatoni, because it was something we needed to get rid of.

Drain the pasta.  Dump the tomatoes and the meatballs into the pot with the pasta.

Add the pesto.  Stir like there’s no tomorrow.

Serve it up hot!

Panko Chicken with Savoury

This is quick and crunchy and very handy if you’ve got a harried husband on his way out the door.

About an hour and a half before you want to eat, submerge 2 chicken breasts in about 1 1/2 cups buttermilk.  Add in some hot sauce (and/or tabasco) as well and leave that to marinate for an hour.  The acid in the buttermilk makes for a tender, juicy chicken that is hard to beat.

When the chicken is marinated, preheat your oven to 400°F and generously spray a baking sheet.

Pour about 1 cup panko crumbs (or other bread crumbs, brown rice ones if you are going for the gluten-free version) into a bowl with a pinch of sea salt and a tablespoon of dried savoury (or other dried herb of your choosing).

Mix that all together.  Lift one of the chicken breasts out of the buttermilk and let it drain before dredging it in the panko crumbs until completely coated.

Place the chicken on the baking sheet and repeat with the other breast.

Bake for about 25 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the crumbs are starting to turn golden.  We served ours with some corn and carrots.  Mmm, tasty!