What's Cooking: Roast Beef with Horseradish, Tempeh Sushi Bowls, Tamarind Goat Ribs & More!
Welcome back to our weekly round up of cooking ideas!
Here’s what fueled us this week, featuring almost everything you can get our our shop from our fellow farmers and producers in our regional foodshed:
Eye of Round Roast with Horseradish Cream Sauce and Mashed Potatoes
Eye of round roasts are one of my favorite cuts! There are three parts to the round primal: the top, the eye and the bottom. We mostly cut stew beef or grind the top and bottom, sometimes doing tenderized round steaks from them. But I almost always have the butcher pull out the eye of round and save them as roasts.
Eye of round roasts are lean and much tougher than filet or ribeye or even teres major, but with the right treatment, they make for a great cut for medium-rare roast beef.
I have marinated them before, but in this case I just blitzed some garlic and rosemary in the food processor with olive oil, then added in a bunch of black pepper, Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic seasoning, another mushroom seasoning, garlic and onion powder, thyme and red pepper flakes.
Grant browned them on the grill on high heat, then transferred to a cooler part of the grill to smoke for about 40 minutes. Since they were small, it didn’t take all that long to reach the desired internal temperature for medium-rare beef.
To go with it, I made a horseradish cream sauce with sour cream, garlic aioli, prepared horseradish, Meyer lemon vinegar and green goddess seasoning. I could have used goat yogurt and creole cream cheese, but we sold out last week! I also made some mashed potatoes and a beet salad and had some broccoli pickles with it, too. It all was so delicious and every time I made roasts like this, I ask myself why I don’t do it more often.
Marinated Beet Salad with Pistachios & Fresh Mozzarella
The Well Cafe at the Spyre Center has a lovely marinated beet dish and I have made this salad about six times in the last year, inspired by theirs.
I start by cooking the beets in the Instant Pot. For medium size beets (in this case mixed with some large ones I cut in half), I cook them for 20 minutes on high pressure. I let them cool in ice water and then peel and slice.
The dressing is pecan oil, balsamic vinegar, coconut aminos, a little maple syrup, lemon zest and juice, fresh grated garlic and sea salt. Often I include cucumbers, sometimes it’s just beets. In the fall and winter when there’s local citrus, I’ll often include orange or satsuma juice and zest, too. This time I had some fresh mozzarella, so added that and plenty of pistachios, too. It was so delicious with the beef, but the best part is that it just gets better the longer it marinates in the fridge!
Tempeh & Spicy Salmon Sushi Bowls
Love a sushi bowl to scratch the sushi itch since we don’t eat at restaurants much these days! It doesn’t come close to fresh raw fish, but the sushi rice, the spicy mayo, the avocado and crunchy tempura pieces at least come close enough!
It’s fun that we now have actual sushi rice, but before I open one of those bags, I finished off a bag of Marsh Hen Mill’s gold rice, another short rice variety that worked great here. The key to sushi rice is cooking it with rice vinegar, a little sugar and a piece of kombu, a type of seaweed.
For the tempeh, I defrosted and cubed two blocks (I used the green pea and red lentil variety), tossing it in a mixture of cornstarch, garlic and onion powders, nutritional yeast, avocado oil and soy sauce and baking at 400 degrees until crispy. Then I added some Japanese BBQ sauce and baked for a few more minutes.
For the fish, I did a combination of canned salmon and sardines, sesame oil, sriracha and tons of lime juice. I also made a spicy mayo with garlic aioli, sriracha, sesame oil and lime juice. The bowls came together with the sushi rice, tempeh, fish salad, avocado, carrot ribbons and cucumbers drizzled with more Japanese BBQ sauce, spicy mayo and sriracha.
Maple Tamarind Goat Ribs with Coconut Tomato Farro & Squash
Using up those sale cuts at our house!
Goat ribs can be a little intimidating for some reason and over the years, I’ve decided that the sourness of tamarind is one of the best complements to goat ribs. So I broiled these in the oven first to get a little browning effect, then drizzled with tamarind pulp and maple syrup and cooked in the Instant Pot for 40 minutes on high pressure. They came out perfect — totally tender meat but not completely falling apart so you can still eat them off of the bone.
To go with it, I wanted to make a coconut tomato rice dish, but since I already did sushi rice for the week, I decided to do it with farro instead. I soaked the farro for about 24 hours before and then sautéed a bunch of onions, then added garlic and ginger. I also had roasted a few Japanese and fairy tale eggplant, so added those in along with the farro, two cans of coconut milk and some whey. Towards the end, I added some beefsteak tomatoes.
I cooked it down quite a bit so the coconut milk reduced to be super creamy and decadent. We also had some simple roasted summer squash on the side and topped everything with green onions.
Banana-Zucchini Bread with Pistachios & Coconut
These week’s baking project also featured coconut! We only harvest bananas from our trees in the yard of the shop every two years at most (depending on when we get a freeze that kill them back!). So I was set to make banana bread when I realized the bag in my freezer was the last of them for now!
Luckily I had a bunch of summer squash, so I went for a banana-zucchini bread hybrid. I used a recipe for coconut banana bread, but subbed some of the bananas for the shredded squash. I also had some coconut flour to use up, so subbed that in, knowing that I could adjust the liquid down a little because of it. It also included almond extract, shredded coconut and pistachios and that combination made for a really delicious quick bread, eaten as a dessert or for breakfast.
Steak & Egg Breakfast Tacos
On Friday I needed some extra protein for lunch, so I defrosted two of the tiniest packs of teres major steaks lingering in my freezer, only to discover that Grant had consolidated containers and there was some eye of round roast left after all! So I had that for lunch and the steaks got punted to the next morning for some delicious breakfast tacos!
I just salted and seared the steaks and let them rest while I scrambled some eggs with salsa and heated flour tortillas. Then I layered in sharp cheddar cheese, the eggs, steak, avocado, fermented radish salsa and chipotle almond sauce. Pretty good way to start a Saturday!