Seared tuna and an apple and avacado salad.

Let's be honest here, the tuna out of a can just doesn't do the tuna species justice. I was out in Astoria Oregon with my dad a few years ago and we had fresh grilled tuna sandwiches and grilled oysters, I thought I was in heaven, it was so goood. My favorite little restaurant in Port Aransas, Tx serves a nice little seared tuna so I decided to give it a shot.


The secret is to start with good tuna. I'm in Kansas now so it's hard to find fresh tuna so I used vacuum packaged and frozen tuna, but if you are on a coast use the freshest you can get.

I coated the tuna with a simple rub of kosher salt, black pepper and parsley.
Then I seared it on high for about 1 1/2 mins on each side in a pan with EVOO, rice vinegar and a drop or two of soy sauce. Then thin sliced it to serve it with the meal. I personally add a drop of wasabi behind each slice but I love wasabi so don't put it if you can't handle it.

The apple and avacado salad was a lot better then I expected. It is one gala apple and one avacado sliced and stacked and topped with some blueberries and a homemade blueberry-pomegranate vinaigrette, that I adapted from my dad's recipe.

Blueberry pomegranate vinaigrette

1. 1/2 cup blueberries
2. 1/2 cup pomegranate juice (POM the real stuff works best)
3. 1/4 cup EVOO
4. 1/8 cup Red Wine Vinegar
5. Basil
   
6. Salt
   
7. Pepper
8. Garlic

Blend the blueberries and pomegranate juice together to make a mixture. Then reduce it to a thick sauce on the stove (in a pot of course). Then add the other ingredients and blend it together. I store mine in a tuberware in my fridge and use it on a lot of salads.

Tomatoes gone Wild

Soooo I got the crazy idea to try and cook whole meals using one key ingredient, darn you Iron Chef America and Alton Brown. The first one I decided to try was tomatoes. So here are a few tomato recipes. Hope ya'll like them as much as I did. I used a pile of different tomatoes as you can tell. The big red ones are Beefsteak, the greens are Greens, the yellows and purples are heirloom varieties, and the others are Romas, grape, and cherubs.

This is a chilled tomato soup. Honestly there are no good pictures before this because I basically used every tomato scrap from preparing the other dishes. But here is the recipe. Hope you like it.

1. 2-3 cups diced tomatoes, like I said it was a Motley Crue (minus Tommy Lee haha)
2. 2 tablespoons basil
3. 1 tablespoon thyme
4. 2 tablespoons sugar
5. EVOO
6. Salt
7. Pepper

Put a little EVOO in the bottom of the sauce pan. Add all the tomato pieces and cook them until they have become soft. Add the sugar, basil and thyme then puree the mixture. Salt and pepper to taste, then chill in an ice water bath.

This is a pseudo-bruschetta, the base is a ciabatta bread that I had made the day before, no pictures and it wasn't my recipe so I won't but on here. The topping is made with juliened romas and sun-dried tomatoes. Then I covered it all with 1% mozzarella a baked it until the cheese melted, goes really well with the soup.

These tomatoes all ended up being a stacked tomato salad. These were all marinated with a little olive oil and my three favorite herbs; rosemary, thyme,basil, and salt, pepper, and sugar. Then I stacked them up from largest to smallest topped them with a little mozzarella.


The final part to this meal is a tomato covered steak. The fifth taste is umami (Japanese for savory) things that have umami flavors are beef, pork, tomatoes, mushrooms, and cheeses (there are more this is just a short list). As it turns out when you combine two ingredients that have taste umami taste the umami is augmented exponentially, 1+1=3 in this case (if you'd like to know more about umami go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn5Iy7bfdbQ). So this portion of the meal was designed with this in mind.

1. Three 6-8 oz steaks of your choice (sirloin, flat iron, or chuck steak will work, chuck steaks will require the most cooking.)
2. 2 cups sliced tomatoes
3. Kosher salt
4. Pepper
5. Garlic
6. Feta Cheese
7. Basil
8. EVOO

Place some (1-2 tablespoons) EVOO in the bottom of a large frying pan. Then coat the steaks in pepper, kosher salt, garlic, and basil be generous unless you have an aversion to flavor. Sear the steak on medium-high to high in the frying pan. Then cover with the sliced tomatoes and cover the pan. Cook for about 5 min on medium-low until the tomatoes soften then add the feta and recover and cook another 5 min on medium-low until the feta melts.

Well I hope ya'll enjoy this meal I sure did.

BBQ Competition

Here are some pics from my last BBQ competition. These are pictures of pulled pork, and ribs. No recipes, just because it's our competition stuff. My brother and I have the team, our name is the WHR Meatmasters.

Pork Butts in the Smoker, about 30 at a time.
A table full of ribs resting after being cooked.

Smoked Salmon Appetizers

This is one of my favorite party treats. It's quick and easy, but everyone thinks it fabulous.

2 blocks of cream cheese

1 small package of good smoked salmon (about 4-6 oz)

Water crakers

Caviar

Mix the cream cheese and smoked salmon, scope them on to a water cracker. Then make a small indention with your wet thumb, and add about a 1/4 teaspoon of caviar. That is it. I usually use a little rosemary for a decoration.

This is a cedar table I built, with the help of my sister Beth (my photographer except in these, I finally got a camera, welcome to the 21st century Dan). In the knots I inlayed turquoise (I just figured out how to do it well so I've been doing it a lot). The table is 3ft wide, by 6ft long by 30 inches high. There are matching benches that are to come shortly.

Her Necklace

So I made the dark beads on this necklace on my lathe, they are a wood called Texas Ebony, I inlayed one with turquoise. My sisters helped me bead this up, it was all for a girl that I've been dating, I won't put her name so she's not embarrassed.

Pesto Pita Pizza

Alliteration aside this is a fantastic and pretty healthy meal that can be whipped up in minutes and devoured even quicker. I start with a pita dough from one of my earlier posts then cover it with a fresh pesto that is made as follows:

2 cups fresh basil
2 tablespoons or so roasted almonds (pine nuts work)
A few parsley sprigs
2 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
1 1/2 cups of Parmesan Cheese
Kosher Salt
Black Pepper

Using a food processor mince the almonds and the garlic. Add the basil and parsley and chop to a fine texture. Slowly add olive oil until a good consistency is reached. Add the Parmesan and chop, season to taste with salt and pepper.

Once the pesto was done I spread it on uncooked pita and covered it with Feta crumbles, followed by baby bella mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, grilled eggplant (my sister said I had to use eggplant somehow, she's kinda like the chairman on Iron Chef, my favorite show) and grilled chicken. The grilled chicken and eggplant were seasoned with Greek Seasoning and a little olive oil before grilling.

This was all baked at 425 for about 20 minutes, or until the dough is cooked, it really is quite delicious.