What's Cooking: Goat Kebabs, Shrimp Fried Rice, Blackened Snapper & More!

Welcome to our weekly round up of what we’ve been cooking lately. This used to exist only in our email newsletter, but is now moving to the website.

While we don’t have the bandwidth to develop, test and write full recipes at this time, these photos and descriptions are meant to inspire you to cook with what is local and in season now, along with what you have on hand!

Grilled Goat & Eggplant Kebabs with Homemade Naan

Grant has been loving our PK Grill lately, so this was our weekly grill project. We get a lot of our Local Cooling Farms goat legs, shoulders and neck cut into boneless stew meat, but I wanted to see if it was tender enough to be marinated and grilled versus just slow cooked. It totally was! At least for my liking, I can say.

The marinade was yogurt, lemon juice and zest, fresh rosemary, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, paprika, sumac, turmeric and sea salt. I mixed it up with the defrosted meat and let it marinate in the fridge for about six hours.

We also oiled and salted some fairy tale eggplant and threaded those onto soaked wooden skewers and grilled them after the goat kebabs.

With it, I made some homemade naan (there’s a bunch of recipes out there, I like one with yogurt and milk and no eggs, with a mix of whole wheat and all purpose flour).

We layered the fresh naan with Nur’s Kitchen hummus and goat meat, drizzled with some yogurt and sprinkled with more sumac, served with the eggplant on the side and a simple salad with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and Southern Maids marinated feta.

Rainbow Veggie Shrimp Fried Rice

The more colorful, the better, right? I truly think this is true, it terms of visual appeal (you eat with your eyes first) and phytonutrient diversity!

I had leftover basmati rice to use up, so I brought home a pack of Anna Marie Seafood gumbo size shrimp and a slew of veggies to make this fried rice.

I started with green onion bottoms, garlic, ginger (saving the green parts for garnish at the end), then pink oyster and shimofuri mushrooms, carrots, sweet peppers and purple and yellow snap beans. I cooked the shrimp separately with butter and garlic and added just after I added the cooked rice to the veggies with coconut aminos, soy sauce, black garlic sambal and rice vinegar. Once I added the shrimp to the rice and veggie mixture, I used that pan to scrambled some eggs as the final addition.

Topped with green onions and homemade hot sauce!

Blackened Red Snapper Brioche Sandwiches with Remoulade Slaw

This one of the few times I pulled red snapper taco strips and made something other than tacos! But I made a slaw and used avocado, so not all that different than I normally prepare snapper after all!

For the fish, I just seasoned with a blackening type blend including garlic and onion powder, paprika, coriander, thyme and oregano. I get a cast iron skillet really hot, add some oil and sear. I did this in two batches and I actually had a pack of red grouper taco strips as well and we wanted to compare the difference in flavor, which honestly wasn’t very significant!

The slaw was fun and a little different, using a mayo and yogurt base with capers, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, celery seeds, paprika, a little honey, lemon juice and hot sauce. I used purple and green cabbage, carrots and purple daikon radishes for the veggies.

We smashed some avocado with lemon juice and flakey salt on a Bellegarde slider size bun, added the fish and slaw and thick slices of yellow heirloom tomatoes. The sandwiches were so good!

I also roasted the last of a bag of okra I had brought home and blistered some Padron peppers to go along with the sandwiches, but the peppers were way spicier than shishitos and way spicier than we were expecting, so I ate a few and saved the rest for popper dip (below).

Roasted Padron Pepper Dip with Bacon & Cheddar

Since these peppers were too spicy to eat alone, I saved them for Fourth of July and made a delicious dip with them!

I cut out the stem and seeds to decrease the heat level and sliced a pack of bacon ends into smaller pieces and cooked in the oven.

When ready to assemble the dip, I used a container of creole cream cheese, a little mayo, the peppers and bacon, garlic powder and nutritional yeast, plus shredded sharp cheddar and pepper jack cheeses, topped with a mix of homemade and panko bread crumbs. We ate it with thin slices of Bellegarde ciabatta and it was so decadent and such a treat.

Fermented Bread & Butter Pickle Relish

I have never been super into bread and butter pickles, I’m more of a dill pickle person. But that changed when I tried Josey’s Goods bread and butter pickles. They use a little cinnamon, turmeric and celery and mustard seeds and plenty of onions with the cucumbers and there’s something about them that just really hit the spot sometimes, even thought I still love dill pickles.

A few summers ago when I was getting into fermenting, I realized that relish is a lot easier to pull off than fermented pickle spears or even chips. You don’t need perfect cucumbers (meaning I could use culled cukes where I cut a mushy spot or two off) and you don’t really have to worry about various additions that can help keep the pickles firm. Plus, one of my favorite ways to eat pickles is on burgers and with sausages, so the size/texture of relish works great.

So hence, my fermented bread and butter relish was born. I always use what I have on hand that needs to be used up, so each batch comes out a little differently. Last summer I made a batch with a lot more sweet peppers because I had a bunch of sweet cherry and lunch box peppers that needed to be used.

This time I had more pickling cucumbers to use up and I also used white onions from River Queen Greens. The spice mix was just like the Josey’s with cinnamon, celery and mustard seeds and turmeric. Usually for a half gallon ferment, I use about three tablespoons of salt. With cucumbers I also add sugar to get it going faster because they are more likely to mold than brassicas like cabbage.

For some reason, it was maybe a bit too much salt, because even when it was finished and bubbly and sour, it still tasted a bit too salty. I also added a bit more sugar at the end since the microbes ate up all the sugar I put in at the beginning. It still tastes great overall! And I let it ferment for nearly six days. Usually cucumbers I only do for four or so.

Farro with Tomatoes, Beans, Mushrooms, Tuna & Pesto

I’ve been wanting to try Marsh Hen Mill’s farro, so I made a big batch of farro with pesto, tuna, heirloom tomatoes and snap beans on Thursday to have for lunch on Friday and Saturday.

I try to always soak whole grains and beans to make them more digestible. I also cook them with kombu, a type of seaweed, that can help with digestibility, too!

The farro package doesn’t actually have a cook time on it and with the overnight soak, I’d say I cooked it for about 30 minutes, maybe longer, tasting along the way until it was al dente, but cooked to my liking.

I made a batch of pesto with fresh basil, pistachios, garlic, parmesan, nutritional yeast, olive oil and lemon juice, steamed some purple and yellow snap beans, cooked some more pink oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms, diced up some yellow beefsteak tomatoes and canned tuna. Then I topped with with crumbles of Southern Maids chevre. It all came together into a creamy, flavorful dish that was perfect for meal prep.

Peanut Butter & Berry Crisp

Even though I’ve been making fruit desserts almost every week lately, I decided late in the day on Fourth of July, that the holiday couldn’t pass without another one.

And I had also been having a craving for these peanut butter and chocolate rice crispy treats (or Scotcheroos), but we didn’t have enough rice puff cereal left to make those.

So, I thought, maybe a peanut crisp topping, like a PB&J?

It was a great idea. I used blueberries and blackberries for the fruit filling and made the crisp how I normally do with oats, flour, brown sugar, vanilla and cinnamon and replaced some of the butter and coconut oil with crunchy natural peanut butter. Grant especially could not get enough, it was really good.