Lobster tails and sweet corn

Summer isn't over quite yet!

Lobster tails for $5.99 each, fresh sweet corn, a perfectly ripe heirloom tomato and a baked potato. Almost doesn't need a recipe, more like a timetable! The only other ingredients are:

Butter, 1 stick, melted (and you wouldn't need that much, but leftovers are good)
3 cloves of garlic, peeled, smashed and minced
a few leaves of fresh basil, chiffonnade (roll'em up and chop them into ribbons)
salt
fresh ground pepper

Fill your big soup pot with water and add some salt. Put it on to boil.
Scrub the potatoes, pierce them with a knife or cooking fork, and lightly rub with butter or cooking oil. Put them in the oven. Turn the oven to 400 degrees and bake for about half an hour.

Husk the corn and get all the stringies out. (Or get your nephew to do it. Thanks, Mike!)
Split the lobster tails to expose the meat. Turns out a good kitchen scissors is a good tool. Put the tails meat side up on the broiler pan. Spoon a little of the melted butter over each one.

Put the garlic and some of the basil in the butter.

When the potatoes are done, take them out and put in a pan, covered, on top of the stove to keep warm. No heat need be applied because the oven is still warm and should keep them hot for the next 10 minutes. Or you could leave them in the oven, won't hurt anything.

Put the corn in the boiling water. Plan on cooking for 8 to 10 minutes, tops.

Put the broiler pan with the lobster into the oven. Cook for 3 minutes, then turn them over and cook for about 8 minutes more. Don't overcook. When the meat is opaque white instead of shiny gray, they're done.

Slice the tomato and put some of the basil on it.

Plate it all up, and bring the garlic butter, salt and pepper to the table.

Have lots of napkins and a chilled rosé wine.

This takes less time to make than to eat, I think! The corn on the cob and the lobster definitely require slow eating, just because of the mechanics of eating them, which is also conducive to savoring. The hardest part is getting the lobster out of the shells, but since it's still summer, we went with the "hands-on" approach. And this will be one of the few times I'll ever say this: The baked potato was my least favorite thing on the plate! Only because everything else was so spectacular. Although a dollop of Greek yogurt along with the garlic butter is definitely a good substitute for sour cream.

We each actually only ate one lobster tail, which means I have two left over. Gee, I wonder what I will do tomorrow with leftover lobster?!

Pork tenderloin stir-fry

This time, with cabbage, onion, carrot, mushrooms and black sesame seeds (optional, but I happened to have them!)

Pork tenderloin is really great to stir fry. It comes out tasty and moist and, well, tender. Stir-fry can use just about any vegetables you have. I happened to have these. I posted a pork tenderloin stir fry with bok choy a while back, so check that out, too.

Ingredients -- approximate amounts, don't be too fussy -- to serve two really hungry people or even four people if you make rice, noodles or couscous. I skipped the extra carbs. What's on the plate is about one-third of the batch:

• 1/2 pound pork tenderloin, cut into large bite size pieces (1-inch to 1-1/2 inch)

1/2 cup or so each:

• shredded cabbage (I just took narrow slices with my chef's knife)
• onion, cut in half, peeled and sliced
• sliced mushrooms (I used creminis, aka baby portobellos)
• carrot, "shaved" into ribbons using vegetable peeler
• fresh ginger, peeled and chopped very fine, about 2 teaspoons. More if you really like the zing. (You might be able to use candied ginger, although that would add a sweetness that you might need to counter with something sour, like vinegar, but do not try to use the ground ginger in your spice cupboard. Different taste.) Be sure to mince this very fine, because fresh ginger is very potent, and you probably don't want to get a bite of food that has a whole slab of the stuff.
  
• canola or other high-temp oil (peanut would work)
• soy sauce
• a couple of dashes of hot chili oil, if you have it. If you don't, pepper or cayenne pepper or pepper flakes. Of course, if you happen to have fresh hot peppers around and like them, sure
• garlic, two cloves or as much or as little as you want, peeled and minced
• sesame seeds, optional
• any other Asian type seasonings you might like, from five-spice to curry. Probably not both!
  

Heat about 2T oil in your wok or large skillet, on high heat. Carefully add the pork and allow to brown a couple of minutes, stir/turn, let brown, repeat, until all sides are nice and brown and the pork has cooked for about 6-8 minutes. Remove from pan. The pork will keep cooking itself as you cook the veggies, never fear.

If needed, add a little more oil to the pan and put in the onions and mushrooms. Stir occasionally. In a few minutes, when they've softened a little bit and gotten some "golden" brown spots, either remove from the pan or scoot them to the side to make room for the cabbage, garlic, ginger and carrots. Let those soften/fry a couple of minute, stirring frequently. Add the sesame seeds, soy sauce and other flavorings. Stir the pork back in.

Dish it up. Grab a fork or a pair of sticks.

If I had been making rice, at this point I also would have added a little chicken or vegetable stock and some cornstarch to make a little sauce, so there would be something to give the rice some flavor and a reason to exist. But in this case, I didn't want extra sauce, just the little bit of naturally occurring sauce from the ingredients themselves.

You know, if I chopped up a bunch of different veggies on the weekend and had them ready to go in bags or bowls in the fridge, I could do a different stir-fry for dinner every night with no prep and little cleanup. Hmmm.

Sweet Italian sausage skillet supper

This is sweet Italian sausage with mushrooms, shallots, baby spinach, baby arugula, grape tomatoes and clementine, with cous-cous. It takes half an hour or less. I do wish the photo were better, and I will work on that.

You could use any pasta, or you could use rice. I used cous-cous because I like it, I always have it on hand, and it is practically an instant food. And whole-grain cous-cous tastes better, in my opinion, than most of the whole-grain pastas I have tried.

And if that weren't enough, I made this with cous-cous that was left over from the day before! Because, trust me, one cup of cous-cous goes a long way. That's fine, because it is so versatile.
If you haven't tried cous-cous, give yourself a treat. It has a mild, kind of nutty flavor, and you can add ANYTHING you like to it.

Here's how to make it:

Cous-cous
One cup of liquid: I generally use either water or chicken stock, but you could use vegetable stock or even fruit juice if you wanted. Hmm, I think I will try making it with orange juice some time!

--2 tablespoons of butter or olive oil or any oil or you can skip this

--1/2 teaspoon of salt (omit if you are cutting back on salt or if you are using a salted broth)

Bring this to a good, rolling boil in a medium size saucepan. Don't use too small a pan; you will regret it. Measure out a cup of cous-cous. Turn heat off once the liquid boils, then pour in the cous-cous and give it a good stir and smack a lid on it. (If you don't have a lid for your pan, aluminum foil or even a plate will do.) Wait 5 minutes, open it up and fluff the cous-cous with a fork.

That's the basic recipe. You can add all kinds of things, including dried fruits or an array of seasonings, but since this is going to be served as part of the sausage supper, I won't go into that here.

Obviously, since I did it, you can refrigerate any leftovers, and reheat either in the microwave (add a little liquid) or by tossing right into the pan with your other ingredients. Speaking of which:

Quick and easy Sweet Italian Sausage skillet supper:
This is for 1-2 servings

Get out your large skillet (I use my cast-iron chicken fryer, because it is nice and deep, so I don't spill things when I am stirring later on; any large skillet will do, I guess). Over medium heat:

Put in about

--2 tablespoons of olive oil, butter or whatever, enough to generously coat the botoom, and add

--2 shallots, diced -- or you could use about half of a small onion. I like shallots when cooking a small quantity of food, because I like the flavor and they're the right size for one or two portions. If I chopped an onion, I'd go ahead and dice it all and put it in the fridge (well-sealed in plastic and/or glass) for another meal.

--3 Cremini mushrooms, sliced -- well, of course, whatever mushrooms you have or like. Creminis are the small version of Portobellos, by the way; or, rather, Portobellos are the giant version of creminis. Whatever.

Season those with a little salt and pepper, but keep in mind that the next thing going in is the sausage, which has lots of flavor, so don't over-season at this point.


--2-3 links of sweet Italian sausage. I used 3 because I wasn't having a "starter" course or dessert. I like mild, but if you like hot, go for it. I also like to squeeze the sausage out of the "links" into little meatballs about the size of radishes, partly because I don't like the casings and partly because the more surface area, the more yummy brown carmelized crust. Drop those into the pan. Saute over medium high heat, stirring only occasionally, until they are yummy and brown on all sides. I use a sturdy metal "turner" to scrape the bottom of the pan to make sure the shallots and mushrooms aren't burning and to make sure the sausage is getting evenly browned.

While that's going on, wash and pat dry

--a handful of baby spinach leaves. 12-20 leaves is my guess, but if I catch you standing there counting, I will suggest you get help.

--a handful of baby arugula, which is optional but nice, and it's my nephew Mike's favorite thing. Put this decoratively on a plate. You can sprinkle with a little olive oil, if you'd like. I did.

Wash and slice in half
-- a handful of grape tomatoes. What did I tell you about counting? OK, six or so.
-- zest (grate the colorful part of the peel), peel and dismember one clementine. You could use about half an orange. I would cut the sections in half and make sure there aren't any annoying pits.

--Get ready with about 1/2 cup of liquid: Open a bottle of white wine if you haven't already. If you don't have or don't use wine, get out some chicken broth. If you have homemade, good for you. The rest of us use the kind that comes in a box. I like low or no-salt varieties made from free-range chickens. I would NOT use chicken bouillion for this, as it is very salty. It would be better to use water.

--Grate a couple of teaspoons or tablespoons of Parmesan. Your call.

Is the sausage brown yet? Then

add the spinach, clementine sections, zest, tomatoes and about 1/2 cup of wine or other liquid. Hear the sizzle. Use that turner again to scrape up all the yummy bits from the bottom of the pan. Cook for about two more minutes until the tomatoes pucker a little, the spinach wilts just a tad, and everything is hot. This is a good time to taste and decide if it needs more seasoning; be sure you get a bit of the sausage in your tasting sample before you make that decision. I added

-- a dash of an Italian spice blend that is mostly oregano.

If you are using leftover (cold) cous-cous, fluff it again with a fork to make sure it isn't lumpy, then just stir it right into the pan. It may absorb even more liquid than it already has, so stand ready to add a little more liquid, but you don't want it soupy. Give it a minute or two to heat up.

If you are using freshly made cous-cous, put it on the plate on top of the arugula and pour the sausage mixture over.

Add the Parmesan on top.

Pour a glass of wine if you haven't already.

Enjoy.

This turns out to be more than one portion; might feed two, especially with a "starter" course. Definitely enough left over for tomorrow's lunch or a freezer meal.