Foodie Calls: Classic Spaghetti; Pork and Eggplant Stir-Fry; Hot Chicken Pockets

After the great fun of hosting a large dinner party on Friday (Sept 26), we had a weekend of cleanup and recovery. Two broken wine glasses (one by me), a few Cabernet stains on the carpet (don't just clean it -- OXYCLEAN IT!), and one curtain rod torn from the wall kept me busy on Saturday. A couple of four-inch wood screws and a little drywall repair got the curtains back up well enough to last another year or two of rental, and the rest of the rainy weekend was spent resting up and doing a bit of routine cloning in the lab. Molecular biology can be surprisingly relaxing...

Monday night Melissa pulled out a classic spaghetti with tomato meat sauce. We had about four boxes of angel hair pasta left over from the dinner party (better too much than not enough), and it will all be put to good use eventually. In this dish Melissa used a base of canned diced tomatoes with garlic, onions and a whole lot of fresh basil from the garden. Chuck steak minced in the food processor added a fine meat base that melded into the sauce without being too omnipresent. A 2005 Villa Cerrina Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (Abruzzi, Italy) was really nice with this pasta dish. This wine is one of Trader Joe's best sellers when it's available -- a great budget Italian red at $5 for the bottle.

Tuesday we supped on Beth's famous buffalo chicken dip and warm chocolate chip cookies at our regular game night with some HMS graduate students. While Melissa and I kicked ass at Trivial Pursuit that night, I have to say it is generally surprising how bad a bunch of Harvard-trained scientists can be at this game.

Wednesday dinner was a great dish to use up the leftover eggplant from last Friday while also powering through the arugula and grape tomatoes that will otherwise soon rot in the garden as colder weather sets in. On a thick bed of said arugula, Melissa served up a pork loin stir fry seasoned with sea salt and liquid smoke and accompanied by a roasted garlic, eggplant and grape tomato puree. The smoky pork, sweet caramelized garlic and tart tomato flavors filled out the eggplant base and complemented the spicy arugula just perfectly. Melissa will attempt to reproduce this recipe upon request, but she says it's been too long since she made it to remember exactly what was done. Clearly a not-so-subtle suggestion that I get the blog posts up in a more timely fashion...

By far the most tastebud-jolting dish to come out of the kitchen last week was Melissa's spicy chicken pita pockets. Chicken thigh meat was marinated for a couple of hours with a Mexican chili powder mix, dried chili flakes, crushed garlic cloves and lemon juice, then pan fried and stuffed into halved pita bread with a fresh salsa made of tomatoes, basil and jalapeno peppers (all from our garden) with a bit of lemon juice and some tasty Australian olive oil. The jalapeno peppers we grew were hotter than we expected, and the whole thing snuck up on us like a mouthful of blowtorch. When the 2007 Villa Maria Riesling (Marlborough, NZ) we had with dinner failed to cool us down, we resorted to a glass of whole milk. The flavor was Texalicious and the pepper-storm was, well, cathartic.