Weekend Wrap-Up (June 5-6)

Bacon, Anyone?

Sorry this is up so late this week.

Here's what Tom made this past weekend:

- Oatmeal Ice Cream (my idea!)

- Pickled Asparagus 

- Smoked Bacon

- Smoked Blackstrap Molasses Ham

- Molasses Glazed Ham Steaks w/Mushroom Cognac Sauce; Sauteed Chard with Roman Beans and Smoked Bread Crumbs

- Fava Beans, Sauteed Garlic Scapes

- Whole Wheat Flat Bread

- Whole Wheat Sourdough Sandwich Bread

- Merguez Sausage with Grilled Spring Onion, Zucchini, Garlic Scape, Spinach, Olives, Feta with Flatbread and Potato Salad

I'll start with the ice cream. It's really rare that Tom takes one of my suggestions for cooking. Although in all fairness, my suggestions are usually one of three things: pizza ('what do you want for dinner?'), chocolate/vanilla ('what flavor ice cream should I make?') or eggs ('what do you want for breakfast/lunch/dinner?'). Those are three things I pretty much always want to eat. Plus, I don't read food blogs or watch food shows as obsessively as Tom, so I don't usually have any creative ideas. Imagine my surprise when I came up with oatmeal as an ice cream flavor and Tom actually approved of it.

Originally he suggested rum raisin, with actual raisins in the ice cream. I quickly said no to that idea, I can deal with raisins in bread or cereal, but ice cream? Sounds gross to me. The ice cream would already be melted in your mouth while you're still chewing on raisins! Since Tom said raisins, my brain said 'oatmeal cookies' and that became oatmeal. The oatmeal ice cream was good. He put actual oatmeal into the ice cream, so it had a texture that reminded me of tapioca. I liked it, but Tom wasn't so sure about the texture.

More Bacon....

Saturday Tom smoked bacon, ham and breadcrumbs in his homemade smoker. I'm not really involved in the process, other than to clean up woodchips from the kitchen table and floor, but I know the meats got done a lot quicker than Tom had anticipated, so they didn't get as smoke flavored as Tom had hoped. The breadcrumbs did get pretty smokey though, and we had them that night for dinner in the bean/chard dish, along with the ham.

Smoked Ham

The ham was good. It was a little salty, but that's how ham is, right? Tom cured it before smoking it, and he was worried about the cure recipe he used. After he put the cure on, he read something about the recipe having too much pink salt, which is salt mixed with sodium nitrate. Nitrates are bad for you in high doses, I think if you eat them too much, eventually you'll get cancer. So Tom was freaking out about it and started feeling sick (I think it was psychosomatic). I looked it up online (which is how I know about the cancer thing) and it said your body will get rid of excess nitrates, so we both just drank a lot of water to flush our systems out, just to be on the safe side. I'm sure we were fine, but we both tend to get paranoid about weird stuff.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

I don't have too much to say about the bread, other than it turned out! Tom's been having issues with bread recently, so he was very happy to get such a fine looking loaf of bread!

Greek-inspired dinner

I used to really not like dill, but recently I've discovered I don't mind it, in fact, I kind of like it. (I still won't eat pickles though, I don't like cucumbers) With this new freedom to use dill, Tom made us a Greek inspired dinner. He made his own flat bread, which we used to hold the sausage, spinach, onions, olives and feta into one really yummy wrap! He also made a dill potato salad to go with it. Instead of cucumbers in the tzatkiki, Tom used raw zucchini, so I would eat it. (I really really don't like cucumbers!)

So there you have it. Tom's already put up his Weekend Evaluation on these meals, so check out his post too, if you haven't already!