Cuban pork 'sandwich'

My husband is a pig lover.  I hope that is not a reflection on me, but the boy loves all things pig.  Sometimes we would think back on the last 7-10 days and realize he hadn't gone a single day without some pork product.  Those vacations in islamic Turkey were the only times I can recall him going without the other white meat.  I myself love a good pork chop and was trolling the internet for a new way of doing pork when I came across a Bobby Flay recipe for cuban pork.  I adapted the recipe, taking out all the oil (totally unnecessary) and substituting a single pepper jack cheese slice where it calls for 2 pieces of swiss.  The result was fantastic.

You start by juicing an orange and a lime with a bit of fresh oregano, dried cumin, and salt & pepper.  Butterfly your boneless pork chop so that it is thin, but still has a long hinge.  Put it in the marinade for a couple of hours.  When you're ready to make dinner, pat the pork dry with a paper towel, but leave some of the marinade on (e.g. the pulpy bits of orange and lime).  Put a single thin slice of ham, a layer of sliced cornichons or deli pickles, and a single layer of pepper jack in the inside of the pork chop and then close the chop so it looks like a sandwich.  Season the chop with some more salt and pepper and then grill it on your grill pan or outdoor bbq.  Tip - use medium heat or you'll end up burning the outside without cooking your pork through in the middle.  Resist the temptation to flip it too many times or you could lose your stuffing.  While it is grilling, juice another orange and lime and add some chopped fresh cilantro.  When the pork comes off the grill and you're ready to serve, pour on the orange-lime-cilantro mixture.

I served it with a side of mashed potatoes that I substituted lime juice and garlic for the usual milk & butter when I whipped them.  Not as tasty as milk & butter but easier on the calories.  And I made a salad dressing with some of the orange-lime-cilantro juice to match up on the side.

To continue the orange-lime theme, I took a bit more of the orange-lime juice mixture and added some seltzer and sprite zero muddled with mint and a tablespoon of rum for a mojito of sorts.  It may not have packed much alcoholic punch, but it gave the right flavors to make us feel like we were doing it right.

My little piggy husband says we'll be making this again for sure.

16 Weight watchers points -  9 for the big pork chop, 2 cheese, 1 ham, 3 potatoes, and 1 for a dash of rum.

Snapdragon General Tsao

A few weeks ago I tried one of these Snapdragon thai mixes.  I was surprised about the low number of points associated with them, and Andy really liked the giant bowl of food that a stir fry gave him.  I've said it before and I will say it again - he's a terrible diet partner.  He's constantly moaning about being hungry and I find him in the kitchen staring at the bread and having impure thoughts.  Since he firmly believes that more is better, I've come to shrink our serving bowls and other manipulations to make him feel like he is getting more.  The snapdragon mixes really help.  So I went back to the store and bought the whole range.

This one was not good.

It started off well enough - the part that we control - the chicken and veg looked and tasted stunning.  The rice noodles never really got soft even after leaving them in the water twice as long as it said on the pack.  The horrid part though was the sauce.  It tasted more like fish sauce meets catsup than General Tsao's.  We tried to add salt and hot sauce with very little improvement.  I ended up eating about a quarter of the pack and giving up.

Thrifty 'more-ish' Andy managed to finish it, but did not advocate we buy another pack of this one.

For any of you wondering if we ever have a bad meal at our house - yes, sadly we do.  Here's the proof.

10 weight watchers points - 3 for chicken, 6 for half a box of the mix, 1 for canola oil

Simple steak salad

 One of my favorite dinners (or lunch) is a steak salad.  I love steak, but i think I only love a little bit of steak.  When you go to a steak restaurant and order a steak, it is meat overload.  When you have just a few yummy strips it is perfection.  You may disagree and I'm cool with that.  The corollary to the rule is when a good bernaise sauce is present, then you could eat all the steak in the world.  But this is supposed to be a weight watchers type blog, and dreaming of steak and bernaise in ungodly portions is probably not a wise way to spend one's day. 

My go-to salad green is Maiche, also called lamb's lettuce depending on what part of the world you're in.  My mother used to grow it in the garden I think.  I didn't see it for decades and then was served it a bunch in the UK maybe 8 years ago.  It tastes a lot like baby spinach - a sweet delicate green - and comes in these little rosette clumps.  I think chefs likes the look of it.  What i liked was how long it lasted in my fridge.  I could buy a head of romaine and a bag of maiche and the maiche would still be good a week later.  I think because it has that little root still on the rosette maybe it doesn't die so quickly in the shipping.  I also like that they grow it in greenhouses so you can get it year round.  That is, until you move back to america, where people are saying 'paper mache what?'  when you ask about it.

So happy was I to find it in a Basha's in Tucson.  And then a whole foods somewhere and then .... almost completely reliably in Trader Joes.  Go buy some, you'll love it.  Everyone I serve it to is a convert.  Pictured is the TJ bag, while the Whole Foods maiche comes in a plastic bin and says Maiche Rosettes on it.  Hit or miss depending on your whole foods (did you know each store manager is control of their stocking strategy?)

I use a bag of maiche per every 2 people.  The Trader Joes bag is bag, so as a side salad for dinner parties it's a bag per 4 people.

In my small circle of friends I have a reputation for my salad dressing.  I think they think there is only one version because I don't offer my recipe up.  But in actuality there are many, all depending on what's at hand.  The all follow the oil & acid & sweet plan though.  I also like to add a dash of cream as it coats the leaves better.  Tonight I went for what I think is a pretty classic french vinaigrette:  for the oil I used almond oil (I prefer walnut oil, but it seems out of fashion at the moment and I haven't been able to find a bottle - I wish I could pick up more from the Santa Monica farmers market guy - that stuff was amazing) but olive oil works just as well.  The oil is costly on weight watchers - 4 points a tablespoon.  I added 1 T white wine vinegar, 1/2 T dijon mustard, 1/2 T agave (1 point), and a small clove of garlic.  I emulsified that with a  fork in a glass measuring jug.

I toss the salad leaves in the dressing before topping.  I think this serves two purposes.  First, it stretches a small amount of dressing further and applies it uniformly.  Second, I like to top the salad on the plates so that the toppings are distributed well.  When you toss everything in the bowl the good stuff always falls to the bottom.  Even if I am serving family style, I toss just the leaves with the dressing and then load the toppings over the top.  This means, if you come to my dinner party, you want the salad first before some greedy duckling has taken all those toppings.

We had a lot of extra points today since we accidentally skipped our afternoon snack, so I loaded on the walnuts and goat cheese.  I bought these red walnuts at the La Jolla farmers market and they are amazing.  Pricey at $8 a half pound, but they explode with flavor in your mouth.  10 walnut halves are a very costly 4 weight watchers points.  So you better count.  Each salad got a full ounce of goat cheese which is also about twice what you need.  I buy the honey chèvre from Trader Joes and love it.  The expiration on that is always a couple months out, so even if you can't get to TJ's often, you can stock up on this.  I made this salad for my step-father over christmas and he raved about the cheese for days.

I marinated the steak in adobo, salt and lemon juice.  Andy grilled it for a few minutes each side and then we sliced and added it to the salad.

If I stopped right there it would be a filling and nutritious dinner with about 15 weight watchers points.

But we still had 12 points left for the day, so I reached into my bag of tricks and found some cheese and leek pies I bought at the IKEA food shop a month ago.  Decadent 3.5 points each these were yummy cheesy soufflé wonderfulness.  You could always eat less than the allocated number of points on any day, but you risk your body feeling starved and turning off the magic metabolism machine.  I don't know if this is really true or how the science works, but it sounds like a lovely excuse to eat cheese and leek pies.

I often measure my success in how long it takes Andy to eat his meal.  Under ten minutes is a failure but if I can get him to still be chewing for at least ten minutes it is a success.  With a plate full of salad like this, it was a good 25 minutes til he put his fork down.  sweet success.

22 points total - 7 for the ikea pies, 6 for the steak (3.5 oz), 2 almond oil, 1 agave, 4 walnuts, 2 goat cheese

Chicken soft tacos

One of my favorite lunch dishes, this is extremely filling and not so horrible on the points.  If you are on restricted points you could have only 1 of the 2 tortillas that we eat, but otherwise this is a filling plate of food with tons of energy-goodness ingredients.

For the chicken:  i take a single organic-if-you-can-afford it chicken breast and with a very sharp knife cut it in two width wise so you have 2 large but thin pieces of chicken.  I squeeze a lime on them and then sprinkle dried chipotle and salt over them.  I quickly grill them on a hot grill pan.  No oil needed.  You'll get gorgeous caramelized lines on the chicken just from the scant natural sugar in the lime.  Note, i take them off the grill pan when they are still a bit pink inside because I finish this dish off in the oven and want the chicken to still be juicy.

I cut the chicken in strips and place on the tortillas.  This week I am using Fresh & Easy's cilantro jalapeño flour tortillas.  Fresh & Easy is the US execution from Tesco.  I love love love it.  Which is odd because I never shopped at Tesco in the UK.  But they have great meat and produce and packaging that reminds me of how they do it in the UK - and that is one thing the UK has over the US.  In the UK you can buy sensible sizes of things and not be wed to 5 pound bags of green beans.  If you have a store near you, check it out.  I hear they are still losing money and I really wish them well.  Note these tortillas are 40gram and 100 calories each - so you have to account for that versus the 30 gram in weight watchers.  I count them as 1 and a 1/3 each for simplifying the math - which works out to 3 points each.

I then mix up a fresh salsa salad-y thing for inside.  Today I used 1/2 cup of frozen white corn, about a cup of cherry tomatoes halved, a finely chopped fresh apple, a whole lime, half a fresh jalapeño and maybe 1/4 cup of that serrano salsa fresa from trader joes.  The corn has points associated with it (2 points for the 1/2 C).  I put a couple big spoons of this on the chicken on the tortilla.  Then I top this off with just a pinch of reduced fat shredded cheese - in this case a mix of colby and cheddar.

I roll the tortillas up and place them in a glass baking dish and slide them into a hot oven.  One of the things I think is really important on a diet, and especially at lunch, is to try to eat hot food.  I know most people work out of the home and can't, but I feel like emotionally a hot meal seems more comforting and homey.  When the tortillas are crispy, or when Andy starts pacing in the kitchen, and I take them out and serve them with any of the remaining salsa-salad mixture.

11 Points total - 6 for two tortillas, 3 for the chicken, 1 each for the corn and the cheese.

Facebook inspiration night

It's been two years since I put anything back out here on the dinner buzz blog. I've just started on weight watchers again, and we have been eating some mighty fine food, so I thought maybe I should get them down 'on paper' so to speak before I lose these ideas. Then, if I get really busy or lame I could just go through these in rotation.

 For the last few months I have used my friends as inspiration on Sunday afternoons. I ask in Facebook for three* random ingredients and then try to make a meal out of it. This week I got cucumber, tamarind, coconut milk, pineapple and basmati rice. (*My friends are not so good at math, but I love them anyways.)


It sounded very thai, very bright, so immediately I thought about how I could combine them into a chilled gazpacho style soup. I simply took the cucumber and peeled it and chopped it up rough. To that I added a third of a giant sweet onion, and about 2 cups of fresh pineapple. I chopped up a single jalapeño for a little kick. I put it all in a blender with the juice of a single, and quite pathetic lime. Then I added 1/3 C lite coconut milk (1 WW point). I blended that and opened the top for a taste. It was brilliant and a lovely pale yellow color. Since I had to use the tamarind for the Facebook challenge, I added 2 tablespoons (2 WW points). Maybe the tamarind adds something to it, but mostly it just turns it from a nice pale yellow to a hideous vomit brown color. If you are watching your points, definitely leave it out. This made enough for 4 servings, so you still divide those 3 points by 4. Crazy low for something so tasty. Essentially 'free' if you leave out the tamarind. Or maybe just swirl it in at serving so it doesn't blend and turn the color sickly. If you aren't watching points some chopped macadamias would be brilliant to add a little texture on top.

 To accompany this bright soup, I had bought some frozen albacore tuna at Trader Joes. I had done a big shop and decided to buy one of each of their frozen fish collection to see which ones are ok from frozen. I am very skeptical about frozen fish but at $5 for 2 fillets of tuna I decided it was worth at least a test. I'll work my way through mahimahi and tilapia and salmon and cod. I will say this though - never ever buy the albacore! It was horrible. There was a pound of fish when I started but it was so mealy when it thawed that I had to fillet at least half of it off. Thank goodness Andy bought me that fish skills course back in london so I know what is, and what is not, good fish for eating. I soaked it in another pathetic lime (pathetic because it was a new bag of limes, got home and they were all dried up already - argh). Then i coated the fish in black and white pepper and grilled it on my new caphalon grill pan.

 Let me digress a moment and tell you how wonderful this grill pan is. I always owned a cast iron grill pan which i thought was the best for these sorts of things. I hardly used it because it is real cast iron and the clean up is a bitch. You have to wash it and dry it and then oil it so it doesn't rust. You then leave an oiled paper towel on it in the cupboard which never struck me as all that sanitary. So when we needed a new frying pan (sorry mom, but your engagement present to us died from overuse) I headed to Bed Bath and Beyond. Do you know decent frying pans cost about $200 each? I was shocked. I need a frying pan that I can use on the stove and then shove in the oven - that's generally how i cook the white fishes that have to actually be cooked through. Anyhow, I was walking the aisles not wanting to spend $200 and not wanting to buy a cheapie that wouldn't work for me when I spotted the very reasonably priced $35 caphalon teflon-coated square shaped grill pan. I thought - why not, it might me healthier than a frying pan in any case as the fat drips down into the ridges. It has been used almost every day. So easy to clean. So easy to get lovely grill marks.

 On the fish I placed a dollop of store-bought serrano salsa fresco from trader joes to further mask any fishiness.

 And to fill our carb-loving stomachs I made some sticky cal rose rice with another 1/3 of a cup of the lite coconut milk since the can was open and all. I added a generous teaspoon of ginger powder too since we love ginger.

  In total - 9 points - 4 for the rice, 1 for the coconut milk, 3 for the tuna, 1 for a single serving of the gazpacho.