Summer Daze, bentos to the rescue!
Ok we had a 2 week intermission, not my fault mind you :). With all of my wife's work craziness and the travel we decided to put off last week's bento to this week. (Course I had already made half of it.) I continue this week on the fruit theme, the heat here is abysmal and I can't fathom eating anything on the heavy side.
Easy peasy, we start with a basic salad and a pear balsamic vinaigrette. Nothing fancy here, I needed to fill the space, and I had bagged salad from last week's bento to use up.
We head to our soup course: we have a chilled Melon Ginger Soup. The recipe is courtesy of a local restaurant, "The East side Cafe", they pride themselves on an organic menu from a local farm they own and run themselves. I didn't get to taste the soup after the ginger got a chance to really sink in, but from the hint I got I'm sure the soup will be very good in the morning. Chopped cantelope, watermelon, and honeydew to give it texture and a bit of ginger to give it a zip.
This side is from watching foodtv: Onion and Goat cheese tartlet. My wife swooned as she saw this so I really had no choice but to make it. It's a very simple recipe, you basically use a puff pastry shell and fill it with a custard, top it all off with a cube of goat cheese, voila you have a nice appetizer. This was actually an easy side to churn out, I'll be using it as a party appetizer in the future.Finally we come to the entree: Basic pork tenderloin here, topped
it off with a blueberry sauce. I decided a nice drizzel of the red wine I had on-hand to deglaze the pan would give the sauce a nice umph that it would not have otherwise had. I think it was a good choice, it added a bit of flavor complexity that spikes up the pork (I had only used salt and pepper when I cooked the tenderloin)It does feel really good to get a chance to cook again. I hope to continue regularly so please stay tuned. Thank you to the loyal readers that come to peruse the blog. I still welcome suggestions, please send them over.
Box Contents
- Salad with pear balsamic vinaigrette dressing
- Ginger melon Soup
- Onion and Goat Cheese Tartlets
- Pork Tenderloin and Red Wine blueberry reduction
Comments
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Ginger Melon Soup
3 cu cantaloupe cubed
3 cu watermelon cubed and seeded
3 cu honeydew cubed
2 cu fresh orange juice
1 tbsp fresh ginger peeled and minced
Place 1 cu of each melon in a large bowl. Puree reamining melion and orange juice in small batches in a blender or food processor until smooth. Add puree to cubed melon and stir in ginger. Chill for 1 hr.
So my modification on the whole thing: 1/2 a honeydew, 1/2 a cantelope, 1/2 a "personal sized" watermellon (about 8 inch diameter) ended up yielding something on par 14-16 cups of liquid (or mostly filling my largest disposable glad ware) Sorry I can't be more precise. I believe the original recipe says it served 6. I think standardize on weight would have been more useful for a consistent result on servings.
Hope that helps lemme know if you need anything else and thanks for dropping by!