Breakfast, Cooking In, Lunch, Quick PostKerry Alaric Cheeseboroapple, bacon, basil, bread, Breakfast, broth, butter, cheese, couscous, egg, eggs, fish, fresh, garlic, guanciale, ham, herbs, honey, juice, lemon, Lunch, mint, nuts, oil, olive, pesto, pine, pita, red, roll, rosemary, scallion, scallions, scrambled, skins, snapper, truffle, vegetableComment

Quick Post | Pesto Change-o

Breakfast, Cooking In, Lunch, Quick PostKerry Alaric Cheeseboroapple, bacon, basil, bread, Breakfast, broth, butter, cheese, couscous, egg, eggs, fish, fresh, garlic, guanciale, ham, herbs, honey, juice, lemon, Lunch, mint, nuts, oil, olive, pesto, pine, pita, red, roll, rosemary, scallion, scallions, scrambled, skins, snapper, truffle, vegetableComment
Open-Face Scrambled Egg on Pesto Sandwich with Guanciale and Scallions
Roasted Red Snapper with Pesto over Couscous with Pine Nuts, Garlic and Mint

AS I AM OFTEN EITHER dining out or cooking in, I have to make a concentrated effort to get use of the foods and ingredients in my cupboards and refrigerator to get the most mileage out of them before they start to go bad. I find, as often, that it helps "jumpstart" any culinary creativity I may pretend to possess.

I decided that today was the day that I would finish of the pesto sauce I used for a recent breakfast. It would take me two separate meals, however, to do so.

So, for this morning's breakfast, I used the very last of the guanciale (cured pork jowl bacon) and scallions from this recent pasta dish, and scrambled them in some eggs. I then spooned them onto two halves of a toasted roll smeared with a layer of pesto, topping them off with the same truffled cheese I had also used for the aformentioned pasta dish.

A few hours later, I seasoned some red snapper fillets with salt, pepper and paprika, and placed then skin-side down in a hot skillet with oil to crisp up the fish fillet skins. I then turned them over and lightly coated the last of the pesto and some fresh lemon juice on the now top-side skin and placed the whole skillet—with fish—in the oven, set on broil.

I prepared a box of couscous, first sautéing sliced garlic and pine nuts in butter in the bottom of a medium-sized pot, then using vegetable broth and apple juice as my liquid, letting it boil, stirring in the dry couscous, taking it off the heat. Then, after letting it steam itself to doneness, fork fluffing it with a little extra butter and some diced mint leaves, spooning on a plate, topping it with the red snapper, and serving it with oven-toasted pita bread brushed with a rosemary-honey-olive oil mixture.

Both dishes were winners, and were palatably added to delightfully by the herbaceous, earthy and yet bright properties of the pesto, adding zing to the "comfort" of a morning sandwich, then grounding but not overwhelming the flavor of the fresh fish over the more exotic tastes of the couscous and brushed pita toasts.

But now, what to do with the remainder of the couscous I didn't use...?!

Bun Apple Tea!

.kac.

Open-Face Scrambled Egg on Pesto Sandwich with Guanciale and Scallions
Roasted Red Snapper with Pesto over Couscous with Pine Nuts, Garlic and Mint