What's Cooking: Flanken Short Ribs & Eggplant Fries, Lamb Meatballs, Zucchini Carbonara, Steak & Egg Tacos & More!
Flanken Short Ribs, Eggplant Fries, Sesame Cucumbers & Yum Yum Sauce
My dad’s love language is basically short ribs. He also loves Japanese BBQ sauce, so for all his work on our house during their visit, one small way I could thank him was cooking his favorite foods!
For these I used what our butcher calls riblets, but what we refer to as Flanken or Korean style short ribs, cut across the bone.
Because they are cut across the bone, you technically can grill or broil them without any slow cooking component. They can be a little chewy that way and while I don’t mind it, but my mom isn’t as big of a fan!
So for these, I browned them in a cart iron pan, seasoned with salt and pepper, drizzled with Japanese BBQ sauce and pressure cooked in the Instant Pot for 40 minutes. It was about 6-7 lbs of them, so the time could definitely be less if you weren’t cooking as many.
Then I pulled them out on a pan, poured the sauce and broth into a pan to reduce and basically made meat caramel, simmering off much of the liquid into a thick, tangy, sweet sauce. I poured that back over the ribs and broiled to finish and they were sticky, falling apart and incredibly delicious.
To go with them, one of my absolute favorite ways to eat eggplant is as breaded, oven-baked fries. But it’s a lot of work, so I don’t do it very often. I didn’t have quite enough bread crumbs, so I added some pulsed some crisped rice cereal in the mix, along with panko and homemade breadcrumbs, garlic powder, sesame seeds and a little parmesan cheese.
I had egg whites from using the yolks for carbonara, so I just used those versus whole eggs, tossing them in the egg whites, then the bread crumb mixture. Then I baked on parchment paper drizzled with avocado oil for 20 minutes or so, flipping halfway to get browning and crispiness on both sides. It’s important to space them out so they don’t get soggy — the picture was taken after I combined the two pans I baked them on!
With it, we also had Jasmine rice, a sesame cucumber salad and yum yum sauce for dipping made with mayo, ketchup, Japanese BBQ sauce and rice vinegar.
Mom’s Lamb Meatballs & Garden Veggies
My parents often make some meals and freeze them before they come and years ago a tradition was started with lamb meatballs. Now they bring them almost every single trip. The usually get a whole lamb per year from a farmer in Wisconsin, hence a good supply of lamb in their freezer.
These were made with breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese and Italian seasonings and then she made a marinara sauce with garden tomatoes, onions and shiitake mushrooms.
They also brought green beans, beefsteak and cherry tomatoes and cucumbers from their garden, so we steamed the beans with butter and the Smokey Shiitake and Black Garlic Seasoning and made a salad with the cucumbers and tomatoes with pecan oil, white balsamic vinegar more of the ALL CAPS seasoning and goat feta cheese. Lovely and easy thanks to my mom’s work in advance!
Sausage, Zucchini & Leek Carbonara
I did make the entire pound of spaghetti for the meatballs even though Grant doesn’t regularly eat pasta and it wasn't a huge batch of meatballs. So since I was left with about half of the spaghetti, later in the week I made a carbonara to finish it off.
Carbonara is my personal comfort food and my dad raved about it, too.
I used some of our pork sausage, as well as leeks and a big zucchini from my parents’ garden.
Since you usually add hot pasta and pasta water to the egg and cheese mixture to get the luscious sauce, I had to improvise since the pasta was already cooked. I ended up adding some water and microwaving it in short increments to heat it up evenly and then added to the egg yolk Pecorino Romano cheese mixture as usual. It worked out great. After the yolks were cooked and incorporated into the pasta, I added the sausage and the veggies. It was a really good Saturday lunch!
The Ultimate Steak & Egg Breakfast Tacos
Since we’ve been on a fajita kick, we also had those one night, but I didn’t take any pictures since I have shared them multiple times recently.
One thing I did do differently was marinate the Bavette steaks first since I wanted to grill them this time. Since we were doing a larger quantity, it just seemed more efficient and less smoke and heat in the tiny house!
So the marinade was avocado oil, sea salt, smoked paprika, cumin, coriander, garlic and onion powders, plus lime juice.
The next day, we made a bunch of roasted potatoes and scrambled some eggs with leftover pico di gallo for the ultimate steak and egg breakfast tacos.