What's Cooking: Goat Tacos, Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Shrimp & Bacon & Sheet Pan Beef & Peppers with Lime Basil Mayo
This list is a little shorter this week as I made a bunch of recipes last weekend before I got sick on Monday night.
They came in very handy to have good nourishing food while I was down and out!
Smoked Goat Tacos with Okra, Squash & Potatoes
This week Grant’s weekly grilling project was goat leg roasts.
I did a rub with ancho peppers (dried and then reconstituted in water), dried chipotle powder, garlic and onion powders, paprika, allspice, coriander, ginger and cumin. We smoked the two legs on the PK grill for about two hours, then finished them in the Instant pot for another 45 minutes on high pressure.
Then the final step is to shred the meat and crisp in the oven. Sometimes that texture of goat and lamb isn’t may favorite, so getting the shredded meat really crispy is key for me, highly recommend.
These were sort of inspired by birria tacos, but I didn’t end up crisping the tortillas in a pan and piling as much cheese in them to make a true queso birria taco. I did serve it with broth to dunk in though and that was not a bad choice!
To go with them I did some roasted potatoes, okra and strips of small summer squash.
Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Shrimp, Bacon, Corn & Mushrooms
Well this was a fun project! I don’t love sweet potatoes the way I love Irish potatoes, so I am constantly looking for creative ways to use up all the culled sweet potatoes I take home.
This time, I decided to try my hand at gnocchi.
First I baked some sweet potatoes in the oven, let cool and scooped out the flesh to puree in the food processor. The gnocchi recipe was pretty straight forward — two egg yolks, two cups of sweet potato puree, a half cup of parmesan cheese and about 1 and 1/3 cup of flour, plus salt. The dough is a little tricky to work with since it’s sticky and a bench scraper helped a lot.
Once I was able to roll it out (using a lot of extra flour to keep from sticking), you cut and roll into gnocchi shaped pieces and then boil for a few minutes, until they float. I did this in batches.
To go with it, I had cut up a pack of bacon ends into smaller pieces and cooked those in the oven (at the same time as the sweet potatoes and beef and peppers were cooking, best to use the oven all at once in the summer!).
Then I sautéed shiitake mushrooms in a little of the bacon fat, then added shrimp and minced garlic, then frozen sweet corn (from our homegrown crop this spring!). To finish, I added back the bacon pieces and some chèvre and milk to form a simple sauce. We ate it with a Roma tomatoes drizzled with pecan oil and white balsamic vinegar. Very good!
Sheet Pan Beef & Sweet Peppers with Scarlett Rice, Lime Basil Mayo and Kimchi
As good as those other two dishes were, this was the star of the week. I do some variation on a sheet pan “stir fry” with tenderized round steak and seasonal vegetables every few months. It’s easy and great for meal prep.
For the beef, I sliced up a bunch of round steaks while still partially frozen — it’s nice to get them a little thinner that way. Then I tossed the beef with Smokey Shiitake and Black Garlic seasoning, cornstarch and black pepper and drizzled with a little avocado oil, as the beef itself it pretty lean.
I roasted in the oven at 400 degrees for 15 minutes or so, then added a bunch of sliced sweet peppers (banana, lunch box and yellow bell), along with red onions. I also drizzled with soy sauce, coconut aminos and rice vinegar at the end of cooking.
Meanwhile, I also made some Scarlett Rice and a lime basil mayo with garlic, the lime basil, fish sauce and a little honey for balance. I made it mostly for meal prep to eat for lunch, but the first day, we also topped with fried eggs and kimchi, alternating between my purple Napa, carrot and radish version and my cucumber, bell pepper and onion version. (And then I never packed a single container of it to take for lunch since I ended up staying home sick all week!). But I still appreciated having it in the fridge ready to go!