What's Cooking: In My BLT Era, Plus Kabocha & Sun Dried Tomato Pasta, Pork & Veggie Stir Fry, Black & Blue Corn Muffins & More!

As usual, we were eating good every day last week!

The Best BLTs

Who would have thought we’d be enjoying BLTs in mid November?!?

While they have been some other years where tomatoes have lasted this far into fall, the last couple have had early (October) cold snaps, so all the summer produce was done by then. And usually cherry tomatoes keep going longer than heirloom slicing tomatoes.

I usually don’t take perfectly good sliced bacon home for us, only allowing us to eat vacuum seal fails and other butcher mistakes or less popular items. But we have a lot of bacon in stock and darnit, sometimes we deserve it, especially to pair with these beautiful tomatoes.

So between the perfect bacon and tomatoes from Two Dog Farms, plus beautiful head lettuce from Cicada Calling Farms and River Queen Greens, sliced Honey Oat Loaves I always keep in my freezer from Bellegarde Bakery and Smokey Shiitake & Black Garlic Seasoning for the tomatoes, we have almost everything at the shop to make some really excellent BLTs.

You also need mayo, of course. And you could make your own with our eggs if you wanted to be extra fancy. In my case, there’s a brand of truffle mayo that is incredible that I always use.

My other keys are of course to salt the tomatoes while the bacon is cooking and get the proper layering — mayo on both pieces of bread, tomatoes next to the bread on one side, bacon in the middle and lettuce on the other side.

We had BLTs multiple nights last week and ate it with oven fries, salad and roasted and glazed kabocha squash. It was a dream. And with cold weather coming, I can’t say there won’t be at least one more round of BLTs before tomato season finally does come to a close.

Rosemary Chicken Legs with Kabocha Squash, Sun-dried Tomato & Eggplant Pasta

This was a full-on use up what you have on hand dish and it came out so delicious!

I still had the last of the big batch of pureed kabocha squash that I used last week for cookies and pancakes.

And I also had one medium size Italian eggplant with a spot on the bottom, but not enough do a whole meal with. So I roasted the eggplant in the toaster oven and combined with rosemary, sautéed onions and garlic and sun dried tomatoes, I blitzed it in the food processor and added that to the squash.

I have done all kinds of pumpkin and squash pasta sauces and this was a take that ended up tasting a little more like a creamy tomato sauce thanks to the sun dried tomatoes, but it was really good and kind of different. Rich flavors for sure.

To go with it, I roasted some Pearl River Pastures chicken leg quarters on a sheet pan with some oil from the sun dried tomatoes, coriander, mustard seed, black pepper and rosemary. We had it with a big baby kale salad.

Pork Loin Stir Fry with Broccolini, Peppers & Kohlrabi

I had some chops from a breeder boar we had custom processed years ago to use up, so I cut it off the bone and cut the loin into cubes for stir fry.

I also had smallish quantities of broccolini, bullhorn and cubanelle peppers and a kohlrabi to use up, so those became the veggies in the dish.

I started by browning the pork loin in my beloved cast iron skillet with a little sesame oil, then removed it on a plate, leaving the rendered fat. I then sautéed the kohlrabi and peppers and added the sauce: minced garlic and ginger, pork bone broth I had left from when I made soup last week, some Trader Joe’s teriyaki sauce along with a little extra soy sauce, coconut aminos, rice vinegar and gochujang.

After the peppers and kohlrabi were cooked, I added in the broccolini and added back the pork. We ate it with basmati rice, cilantro, chili crisp and homemade kimchi.

Blue Corn & Blackberry Muffins

Well, these were fun! I somehow have so much corn meal in my pantry and freezer — some grown and ground by neighbors, some bags from Delta Grind and Marsh Hen Mill and then I discovered this bag of Hopi Blue Cornmeal from Barton Springs Mill in the back of a cabinet when we moved!

So time to start using it up!

I just followed a simple cornbread muffin recipe with the addition of frozen blackberries from my parents’ garden. They were super sweet so they were nice as breakfast or a snack versus full on dessert. And really good with some pecan butter or creamed honey!

They would be just as delicious with yellow or white corn meal, but the blue made them beautiful and a little extra special.