On Martha’s Vineyard this week, with Liz and her boys, Josh, and Debbie.  Last night everyone had finally arrived.

Pre CrummyCook we went out a lot when we went to the Vineyard.  The kitchen environment in a by-the-week rental is often not what you would want, and things don’t work well.  Plus the whole island is really moist (what you’d expect from some land in the middle of the ocean, I guess), and things (like crackers, cereal, pasteboard boxes, etc) get so moist they’re downright flexible.

But all that has changed with the Cook’s Point of View, and so we’re making more food.

We did swordfish on the charcoal grill last night.  My Universal Grilling Method (heat to iron-melting temperature and cook really fast) works extremely well with this use case.  The fish was actually pretty good.  I thought it was a little too dry in the middle, but Liz said her piece had a part that was perfect.

That and chard and salad and corn on the cob (not Island corn, but picked the same day on the mainland) seemed to please everyone.

This started out because I wanted to grill something, and I knew we had a pork tenderloin in the freezer.  But this recipe for pan-seared and then oven-roasted tenderloin spoke to me, mainly because the rub sounded exotic (and the basic theory of rubbing, as opposed to marinating, was unfamiliar to me).

It’s another Self magazine recipe, which means less tasty but more healthy than, say, Gourmet or other Conde-Nast properties.  But it was good.  There’s a pico de gallo topping built around black beans which had a pretty simlar taste to the rub.  I was worried it was going to be monotonous, and perhaps it was a bit.  But Debbie was happy, and so was I.

We had a salad on the side.

Squash blossoms was the stretch vegetable this week.  They had them at the farmers’ market.  I’ve always wanted to think of myself as someone who knew how to prepare them.  And, with the help of Epicurious, I am.  Sort of.

Here they are.  It’s a delicious recipe, and not too hard (by Epicurious standards).  It took me about the 40 min they mention in the recipe.

The hard thing is actually getting the stuffing into the darn squash blossoms.  They’re fragile.  They’re floppy.  They lack structural integrity.  I would get one open and the leaves would flop back into place while I was pushing the stuffing in.  Or I would push too vigorously the leaves would tear.  And nothing I could do seemed to be able to get the stuffing into the very bottom of the flower.

In any case, Debbie thought they tasted great.  I could have used more stuffing.  Next time I’ll get a pastry bag or a big plastic syringe and do it right.

Mara taxes me regularly with being too hung-up on following recipes.  She would have been proud of me tonight!

I had a yen for meatballs, and we had a bag of frozen turkey meatballs from Whole Foods sitting around, calling to me.  I looked up “turkey meatballs” in Epicurious, and the few recipes that came back were tough and demanding.  The last thing you want on Sunday night.

Well, I saw a number of recipes pairing meatballs with tomato sauce, and I looked in the fridge and saw leftover Harissa dressing from a previous Crummy-Cook exploit.  I thought, “let’s put the Harissa dressing on the meatballs”.  Then I thought, “that’s a bit intense, let’s cut them with something.”  Inside the fridge, the Greek yogurt spoke to me.  I mixed the yogurt with the Harissa and cooked it with the meatballs: a star is born!

Not sure of the conventions here, but I’ll err on the side of punctilio until I figure out the lay of the land.

Last night (still alone :-() I got hung up on tofu, but also sick of the usual stuff.  One of the few areas of cooking I knew something about pre-Crummy-Cook-vow was Chinese stir-fry cooking, and I just wasn’t in the mood last night.

A recipe for Spinach and Tofu from Deborah Madison (famous, in our household at least, for the her connection with Moosewood Cookbook and its progeny) caught my fancy.

I’m one of the few people in my zip code who has actually made paneer from scratch, so Saag Paneer, the ur-dish on which this is based, is a household favorite.

I cheated.  I made it with frozen chopped spinach.  It still tasted great.

From Epicurious.  Pretty darn simple, really tasty.

The problem of making perfect grilled eggplant remains, but I got a little better at it this time.

Josh (my non-crummy cook friend, not my son) says you should salt the eggplant first (removing the salt before action, of course).  Salted eggplant is to oil as toast is to butter.  It absorbs the oil but doesn’t get all soggy.

Garlic problem solved.  This garlic peeler, from Sur La Table, eliminates the garlic-peeling problem  You put a clove inside, roll the tube around until the garlic clove crackles, and, voila, the peel comes off.

Mara, Debbie, and I ate at home on Friday, with Ellie as a guest.  Two dishes – both from Epicurious, need I say?

The Grilled Summer Vegetables with Harissa Dressing could be made in advance, so I grilled them in the midst of a Djibouti-like Washington DC summer day.  One goofup, which worked out okay: the “Harissa Dressing” is harissa powder whisked into oil and lemon juice basically.  I thought that some stuff called “Harissa” at Whole Foods was just the powder in oil.  Turns out – and, dummy me, I didn’t see it until after I had mixed it with lemon juice – that the major ingredient in the Whole Foods stuff is tomato.  Mara tasted it, however, and said it tasted like sun-ripened tomato and would be OK as a dressing.  So it was.

So I really only had to assemble the grilled veggies at meal time.  I guess this is my first experience plating.

The other dish, Shrimp and Pancetta on Polenta, was pretty tasty for how easy it was.  Just make some quick polenta (we do it in the microwave, per Debbie, with one part polenta to 4 parts water) and cook the other stuff in a pan.

Here’s what Ellie wrote the next day:

Thanks for the dinner.  I loved the shrimp, polenta dish.  I came home and read the crummy blog.  I gather that pancetta can be tricky.  Nice to visit . ellie

I guess that’ll do in lieu of criticism/self-criticism.