Pork Watermelon Tacos

Mexican inspired food is a personal favorite for both of us, and we love sprinkling tacos, fajitas, or enchiladas into our weekly meals on a regular basis.  For some of our more interesting takes on that style of cooking, check out our southwest pork taco salad or Mexican posole soup.

We've been working a good deal more fruit and veggies into our food lately, as well as trying new recipes far outside our normal mode of meal making. One recent dinner combined both of these aspects by making tacos using a very surprising ingredient.

To start off, we chopped up jalapenos for some heat, green onions, tomatoes, and the meal's unexpected base: watermelon.

To have the best of both worlds and add in a meat element, we seasoned and pan cooked a large, thin pork chop. After cooking through, the pork was sliced and cut into small pieces.

Instead of just adding in watermelon to a pork taco, we wanted to change the entire focus of the meal away from the standard taco texture. Instead of being based around the meat, the tacos are based around rice cooked with chicken bouillon and the chopped veggies. The rice was first cooked in a large pan with the bouillon, and then poured into a skillet with the pork and vegetables (don't cook the watermelon - leave those juicy and cold!)

To put together our tacos, we start with watermelon, the pork/veggie and rice mixture, and some verde salsa.

On top of that goes the standard shredded cheddar, along with a few drops of hot sauce if you want more heat.

We finished off the tacos with some diced avocado and then folded up the flour tortillas. Sour cream and guacamole can go well here, but they aren't strictly necessary because of how many flavors and textures are already present.  Some friends and family were over when we tried this recipe, and the taco filling was completely gone almost immediately.  The pork and watermelon go hand in hand, the jalapeno gives it the necessary spiciness, and the rice and salsa are a pleasantly unexpected combination for a taco.

Stay tuned for a new blog coming soon showing what might have been our best barbecued ribs yet - made with our own custom cherry rub and cherry cola BBQ sauce.

Mozzarella Stuffed Pork Meatballs

As the fall and winter months approach, we'll be shifting out of a focus on grilling and back onto hearty indoor meals. One of our favorites is pasta, in just about every variety and configuration imaginable.  When summer finally dies down we'll be devoting a series of blogs just to different ways of making unique pasta sauces beyond the standard tomato or alfredo. As a little primer to that, and to have a break from all the non-stop grilling, today we'd like to share with you an interesting way to use cheap ground pork: cheese stuffed meatballs over linguine.

One of the grocery stores we shop at frequently has ground pork on sale for around $1.80, and there's just enough in the package either for a few burgers, or in this case, a bunch of delicious meatballs.

The meat alone simply won't do of course, so there's got to be a perfect blend of seasonings added in to get just the right taste. Recommended spices include garlic salt, garlic powder, onion powder, pepper and any combination of Italian spices (oregano, basil, parsley, etc.) you'd like.

Adding in oats not only makes the meatballs better for you, but it also adds stability so they stay together. As long as you don't load in too much, you'll never even see them in the end product and they don't add an oatmeal taste at all.

A few eggs gives the meat the consistency needed so it can be mashed together and then formed into the proper shape.

While standard meatballs make a great addition to any pasta meal, we wanted to make things more interesting by stuffing them with mozzarella. Here we're using our go-to option of mozzarella balls marinated in olive oil and seasonings. These are typically available at the olive bar near the deli section down at your local super market. Because of the size of the balls, Megan pounded flat two small pieces of the ground pork, and then formed them around the mozzarella and rolled them until they get into the desired shape.

While the pasta and sauce is cooking, the meatballs are heated up on the stovetop until they are brown on all sides.

To make the meatballs really pop and to create a strong contrast, we ended up cooking them in a tomato based sauce, but then spooning a cream based sauce onto the actual pasta. The combination was simply amazing!  Although there are plenty of flavorful canned sauces, we prefer to whip up our own, and homemade sauces can actually end up saving you money - even over the cheapest brands. We'll be explaining how we make our sauces in future pasta themed blogs, so check back in the coming weeks and months as we continue to wind down grilling season and switch gears.

Cutting into the meatballs with a fork creates an explosion of gooey cheese that's immensely satisfying, and just as good as anything you'll get while ordering pasta at a restaurant. We had enough that there were leftovers the next day - made into stellar sub sandwiches for lunch!

Grilling Pizza

Ribs, chicken, burgers, kebabs: we've made all these classic favorites on the grill, but barbecuing doesn't have to stick just to the basics. An outdoor charcoal grill can cook just about anything if you're willing to re-think how you cook certain items.  To try out something new with our grill, we decided to cook pizzas outside, since it's been far too hot for using the oven lately.

Cooking a pizza on the grill completely changes the flavor and texture, since you're getting that fantastic smoky edge, and the bottom crust is likely going to end up with a little bit of char. For our first attempt we decided to forgo our usual process of making the dough, and instead got a pre-made cheese pizza on clearance at Smiths for $3.49, along with a bag of pre-shredded cheese for $1.49.

Of course just the standard cheese topping won't do, so here Megan is sprinkling on the Mexican shredded cheese.

Cheese alone makes for a pretty boring pizza, and we wanted to see how the charcoal heat would affect different toppings, so we also put on sliced tomato, mushroom, green onion, and pancetta (a thinly sliced pork product similar to bacon that's usually available in the specialty cheese section of the grocery store).

As usual, we're going with indirect heat for our pizza. Unlike with a lot of other meats, it's pretty much mandatory here if you want to avoid burning the crust. Below you can see me pouring the burning coals out of our charcoal starter. The easiest way to do indirect heat with a pizza is to push all the coals onto one side, and have one half of the pizza over the coals, then turn the pizza a quarter turn every five or so minutes. As the cooking progresses and the crust browns, pull the pizza completely away from the coals to the other side of the grill so it doesn't burn.

You will definitely want to lay down a layer of tin foil before setting down the pizza. Putting tin foil underneath the pizza serves three main purposes. First, it makes it much simpler to rotate the pizza, since you only have to grab a corner of the foil and just turn the whole thing. Second, it provides structural support and prevents the dough from sagging into the coals, which can be a problem if you are making your own dough. Finally, and most importantly, it helps to prevent the crust from burning since, unlike with ribs or burgers, you aren't able to flip the pizza over part way through the cooking process.

The bottom layer of crust will cook through much more quickly than thick cut veggies, and it will take awhile for the cheese to bubble and turn the right color, so make sure to watch it carefully and turn as necessary.

The finished pizza looks fantastic, smells heavenly, and has a flavor you simply can't get by cooking with the oven.

After our first experiment, we later had a pizza grilling night with friends and family over where everyone made their own custom pizza. We made a huge ball of dough and cut up all the toppings, then set it all outside on a folding table next to the grill, along with a bowl of sauce and a plate of shredded cheese. Everyone put together a custom pie by rolling out their own dough and adding whatever toppings they wanted: onion, bell peppers, mushrooms, bacon, cheddar and mozzarella, jalapenos, green onions, tomatoes, and more.

Here are a few of the finished pizzas, with all their unique shapes and topping combinations. Using a slightly sweet homemade pizza sauce made with balsamic vinegar and a hint of sugar creates a great flavor combination with the smokiness added in from the charcoal cooking.

There will be even more outdoor barbecue adventures coming in these last few weeks left of the 2012 grilling season, so check back soon! Please be sure to let us know if you make anything interesting on the grill or try out any of our recipes.

From Grill To Crock Pot To Leftovers

As much as we love to experiment and try new things, we also love to spend as little as possible during weekly grocery shopping, which is why Megan and I plan ahead to interconnect our meals throughout the month. For today's entry in our cooking blog, we'll explain how we took one main item - homemade barbecue sauce - and took it from grill to crock pot to microwaved leftovers.

This particular sauce was actually the second barbecue sauce we ever made, which was taken in a much spicier direction than the first attempt with smoky raspberry BBQ sauce. While this was a successful creation, and I'd recommend anyone try if you want to start experimenting with your own sauces, we have since significantly changed up our recipe. We now use much fewer ingredients and generally don't use tomato paste, instead basing the sauce around soda. This lets us create interesting flavor bases, like root beer, cherry, or even apple, and using soda instead of water also eliminates the need for corn syrup, since the soda already has plenty of sugar.

Here's the main ingredients we used for this particular sauce experiment:

To make sure there aren't any clumps and the flavor remains consistent with each bite, we first grind up all the dry ingredients with a mortar and pestle.

While the dry ingredients are being ground up, Megan whisks together all the liquid ingredients in a large liquid measuring cup.

The two finally meet in a medium sauce pan on the stove over medium-high heat so that it can eventually reach a boil.

The dry and liquid ingredients are whisked together thoroughly until the mixture is uniform in texture and color.

After coming to a boil, the sauce is turned down to a low heat and simmered for as long as necessary for it to reduce down and become thick enough to use. This can take anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours, depending on which ingredients you are using and how much of any given ingredient you've thrown in.

The end result is a thick and delicious sauce that easily rivals anything you'll find in a bottle on the grocery store shelf.  Speaking of, we have now started reusing plastic bottles from the store, putting our homemade sauces into BBQ or ketchup squirt bottles so we don't have to throw them away every time.

The sauce was of course used for outdoor grilling (and you can see how we use BBQ sauce with ribs in our various pork rib blogs), but that wasn't its only application. To interconnect our meals and make use of this sauce for another tasty dinner, we put together another BBQ sauce centered meal using this beef chuck roast.  To get it ready, the roast is first seared over high heat on a metal skillet.

As the first side quickly browns, it's turned over so that each end gets cooked through and we get a uniform color.

The meat isn't completely cooked yet, but we're still going to pull it off the skillet and throw it in the crock pot for several hours. After being mostly heated through, the beef comes back out of the slow cooker out for slicing.

The whole roast is sliced into small pieces, so that each and every piece can be properly flavored by the BBQ sauce.

After the slicing is finished, the beef is returned to the crock pot for a final round of cooking.

The sauce goes in next, and everything is mixed together so all the beef is covered by delicious (and spicy!) sauce.

After the beef and sauce are cooked together we've got the beef equivalent of pulled pork ready to go on a sandwich!

As usual, we had a side salad to go with our meat-centered dinner. This time around we had a fruit-heavy salad, using strawberries and a fruit dressing.

The slow cooked beef is spooned onto a hamburger bun along with a few slices of cheddar. No extra condiments are required, but if you like it a little more moist, throw on some additional sauce.

This is Megan's finished plate, and she's gone with a poppyseed dressing instead and also sliced some cheese onto her salad.  These sandwiches are fairly quick to put together, since the crock pot does most of the work, and we've made a few variations on this basic meal. Coming up in another blog we'll cover a pork version using a five star apple BBQ sauce.

The slow cooker beef roast ended up making more meat than we could put away in one sitting, so the leftovers were re-purposed for a different meal the next day that provided more variety. Instead of having the same thing again, we reheated the leftover beef and spooned it over a bed of mashed potatoes, along with a side of veggies covered in seasonings.  By combining these different ingredients and basing our meals around one main item, we not only get a wide variety of delicious meals, but also save money at the grocery store.

Potato Salad: Spicy Southwest And Italian

Last month's experiments with putting new twists on old favorites included several different types of potato salad to go with all our mouth-watering barbecue fare.  We already went into detail on our standard vegetable potato salad as well as an out-of-this-world chicken bacon ranch variety, but the experimentation didn't stop there. Today we'll look at two more versions of this summer favorite: Italian and spicy southwest.


Megan and I keep a white board in our kitchen so we can write down ideas for interesting new meals whenever inspiration strikes, and while washing dishes one day after lunch we came up with a fantastic idea: what if we combined the best of both Italian pasta salad and potato salad into one delicious side?


Our Italian potato salad starts off with standard baking potatoes cut into wedges and boiled until tender. You could substitute any kind of potato you want here though, if another variety strikes your fancy.

When I think of pasta salad my mind usually brings up two ingredients first: Italian dressing and mozzarella. To make our combination of two different dishes really stand out, we went to the olive bar at our local grocery store and picked up fresh mozzarella balls marinated in seasoned olive oil.  "Buffalo" style mozzarella or any of the fresh varieties packed in small containers at the specialty cheese section of the grocery store are equally good options. Here I'm cutting them into halves to be tossed with the potatoes.

For color and to keep the Italian theme going, we also quartered grape tomatoes, which were the perfect size and texture for this collision of flavors.

Pasta salad frequently has a meat element, such as pepperoni. We found a bag of turkey pepperoni already in small coin shapes on clearance at Smith's to use, but any similar ingredient would work great.

Now we're mixing it all together, along with mayo and some Italian dressing to further combine the ideas of potato and pasta salad. Even with the tomato it all turned out a bland color though, which just wouldn't do...

So we upped the ante with diced orange bell peppers and plenty of green onion slices, adding both color and  more of a fun pasta theme.

This is our finished Italian potato salad, combining ideas from two different cultures into one perfect offering. The fresh mozza and grape tomatoes really make this dish an explosion of flavor, and the end result is good enough to dig into with a spoon instead of using as a side!

As our regular readers have probably figured out, we love using peppers (have you used our pepper comparison guide to try out your own pepper-based kitchen adventures yet?) and I like adding hot sauce to just about anything. Since our basic potato salad already features a load of veggies, why not tweak the recipe to go in a spicy Southwest direction? For our Southwest potato salad, we're starting with onion, red bell pepper, anaheim, and poblano. If you want it spicier, you could also add in serrano or jalapenos.

Each pepper or vegetable is diced up into small pieces, just large enough to provide a firm texture to every bite of soft boiled potato.

Everything gets tossed together as before in preparation for adding the final mayo concoction.

For this version of potato salad, we mixed together mayo with a white wine mustard and two types of hot sauce. The end result was the right balance of savory heat, but if you like it hot, hot, hot, ditch the Grey Poupon and go with spicy brown or a hot specialty mustard and put in as much sauce as you can handle.

After lightly beating it all together with a spoon a few times we had Southwest potato salad perfection to accompany delicious barbecued pork and chicken!

Thanks for checking in, and hope to see you again soon as we continue to try new things on our culinary travels. We'll be bringing you plenty of barbecued dinners, diner-style breakfasts, and much more throughout the rest of the summer.