The Pantry Reject challenge continues, and today I used the Mesquite Smoked Maine Sea Salt that started it all. After referring to the Maine Sea Salt Company’s website, I applied about a teaspoon of the salt to a pork tenderloin, and wrapped it tightly to “marinate” for the day.
Rob grilled the tenderloin with no further salting or spicing. It was quite tasty, although I tasted more salt than mesquite. Considering that I still have quite a lot left in the jar, I can try again with more. In all fairness, I never said I was going to use all of these things up this week, just that I would use them.
To accompany the grilled pork, I prepared Barbara Kafka’s Zucchini Custard, which is basically a crustless quiche. We also had a bowl of very fresh heirloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market, roughly chopped with a bit of kosher salt. They would not have won any beauty contests, those immense, misshapen tomatoes with the odd wormhole and black line, but they are to ethylene-gassed grocery store tomatoes what 18 karat gold is to pyrite.
The Zucchini Custard was delicious, but I think I used too much zucchini – I tried to estimate 2 pounds, but it seemed to me that the finished dish had too much zucchini in relation to the cheese custard. My recommendations are that you try this, because its lovely, but that you try for the correct amount of zucchini and slice it all to the 1/4-inch thickness called for by the recipe.
I’m glad that you enjoy my recipes. Perhaps your problem with the zucchini custard was not to let the par boiled veg cook long anough. Check the recipe. I think that is the problem. Thanks for the attention. Barbara
[...] recap as briefly as possible: Friday night I was delighted to find a comment by famous food writer Barbara Kafka on one of my old posts in which I used one of her recipes. Verbatim (but attributed). I checked out her own site and blog, [...]