As you know, last week we came to you, the readers, to help us pick items for our cooking challenge that would help reduce our freezer and pantry contents. Phil and I each put 10 “slow moving” items on a list and you voted for the ones you wanted us to use. I carefully tallied the votes as they rolled in, and expected to cook with shrimp, pork tenderloin, assorted chocolate candy, and stir fry veggies. As the polls closed, I went to the freezer to extract the pork and shrimp for thawing. The pork tenderloins bravely stepped forward to be placed in the fridge, but the shrimp was nowhere to be found. I searched high and low for the alleged shrimp, but to no avail. Finally, I asked Phil, who had put shrimp on the list, to locate it for thawing. He smugly pulled out a gallon ziploc bag and handed it to me. It was filled with… frozen bananas!!! Was this an honest mistake or are darker forces at work here? Are we now just calling bananas shrimp, and cooking them like shrimp and pretending they are shrimp?
Plot twist: As you can see from the video above, Phil was not the only male in the house to misidentify the contents of that bag. Pretzels?!?! (See new challenge below!)
Despite the bizarre news from Australia this week about a woman convicted of using poisonous mushrooms in a Beef Wellington, we decided to make Pork Wellington. We removed and thawed mushrooms from the veggie mix to grind into a paste, along with some ham cubes to stand in for prosciutto. Here’s what we did:
Pork Wellington
Vegetable oil
2 small pork tenderloins
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup mushrooms
1/2 cup onion, chopped
3/4 cup ham, chopped
1/4 teaspoon sage
1/4 teaspoon thyme
1/4 cup white wine
2 tablespoons mustard
2 puff pastry sheets (thawed according to package directions and rolled slightly)
1 beaten egg
Sauce
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup finely minced onion
2 tablespoons mustard
1/2 cup beef stock
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup cream
Salt and pepper
- Set oven to 425º and heat oil in large pan. Sear tenderloins on all sides and remove to plate, reserving pan. Season meat with salt and pepper.
- In food processor, pulse mushrooms, onion, ham, sage and thyme to make paste. Melt butter in reserved pan and cook mushroom mixture.
- On slightly rolled out puff pastry sheets, brush mustard. Distribute mushroom mixture evenly over mustard. Place one tenderloin on each sheet and roll up, encasing meat entirely within pastry sheet. Brush with beaten egg.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a thermometer reads 140º.
- While it is baking, make the sauce. Melt butter, add onion and cook a few minutes. Add mustard, stock, and wine, cooking until well blended and slightly thickened. Remove from heat and stir in cream. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- When tenderloin is done and has rested a few minutes, slice and serve with stir fried veggies (optional) and sauce.
When I thought we were cooking with shrimp, I was thinking of some kind of appetizer, maybe pulling mangoes into the mix, or using the stir fry veggies with them to make one big beautiful bowl. But bananas? It’s not like they were even great looking bananas. Nobody freezes bananas in their peak. The freezer is banana purgatory. This bag had probably been waiting in there for years to get used. I mean, it got mistaken for shrimp and for pretzels, for heaven’s sake. We decided to pair bananas with chocolate to make a dessert.
When the kids were little, we often made what we called fruit ice cream, and topped “special breakfast” pancakes with it Saturday mornings. It always begins with frozen bananas in the food processor, then you throw in the frozen fruit of your choice. Depending on the fruit, you may add a little sugar, but the real magic happens when you drizzle in a little milk (even skim will do) while the processor is running. It turns into a creamy treat that resembles soft serve ice cream.
We elevated our game today by making both “pink-berry ice cream” (I had forgotten Ben’s long ago name for strawberry ice cream) and mango ice cream, which we topped with what we are calling chocolate ganache.
Despite the shrimp scandal and the chocolate’s refusal to comply, we believe our cooking challenge was ultimately a success. We used seven items from the list along with those bananas, and everything tasted great! While we hesitate to involve you in another one of our challenges with our top man’s fraudulent ingredient behavior so fresh in your mind, we love your input and need a new challenge. What will it be? Pick a meal challenge below by Thursday, and we’ll do our best to meet it!
- One Big Beautiful Bowl – (a whole meal in a bowl)
- Rainbow – (a meal including at least one ingredient from each color of the rainbow)
- Grab Bag – (a meal using pretzels, shrimp, bananas*, and one other item pulled from the freezer by Ben while blindfolded)
*Worried we’ll run out of frozen bananas? Not a chance. The shrimp investigation revealed a disturbing number of banana bags. None of them are labeled because at the time of freezing we held those truths to be self-evident. Big mistake. Still, I beg you not to pick challenge number 3!
As always, thanks for reading, and for doing your civic duty by voting in this matter of utmost importance!
