The problem: hot turkey sausage (which Harry says shouldn’t even count as “sausage”), red peppers, and hulled corn (Debbie bought a pack of it at Whole Foods for reasons I couldn’t divine).

There were actually some interesting Epicurious recipes for sausage and corn (yes, Harry, even turkey “sausage” and corn), but for whatever reason sausage a polenta, a dish Debbie makes very well, spoke to me.

Don’t tell anyone, but we have used Barbara Kafka’s microwave recipe for polenta for some years.  Easy, tastes fine.  I’m sure my faithful readers, at least some of them, are calling foul.  But we do it anyhow because we love polenta and don’t love excess work.

So, polenta was spoken for.  The sauce was c-cook improvisation: I wilted down onions and peppers in olive oil, then added the sausage (which wasn’t going to contribute much to the fat department, else I would have had them first), then garlic for a brief fragrant moment, then deglaze with red wine, then add store-bought tomato sauce.

Not the most adventuresome recipe I’ve ever made (although I gave myself points for improvisation).  Unfortunately, it didn’t taste that great to me.  Probably cut too many corners.  The sauce wasn’t so hot.  Some gourmet stuff in a jar, but all the heartburn of tomatoes with none of the mouth feel and finish of a really great tomato sauce.  Would have been better to do my own.  I made a great Bolognese Sauce once or twice from Marcella Hazan.  These things are well within my powers.  Oh, well.

Debbie and I both thought what I made was pretty good.  But I’ll have to aim for a higher bar next week.

I made these last night, in a nod to the classic Friday pattern of crummy cooking (Debbie and I were out on actual Friday night).

Not bad, certainly tastier than they sounded.  Maybe the secret here was that Debbie told me we had ground turkey and we really had ground chicken thigh, which has a little “nature” to it that turkey never had and never will.

Ended up making the corn salsa from scratch – tomatoes, onions, fresh corn cut off the cob, cilantro, etc. – because we didn’t have any store-bought in the house.  Have to learn how to make different kinds of salsas.

On Martha’s Vineyard this week, with Liz and her boys, Josh, and Debbie.  Last night everyone had finally arrived.

Pre CrummyCook we went out a lot when we went to the Vineyard.  The kitchen environment in a by-the-week rental is often not what you would want, and things don’t work well.  Plus the whole island is really moist (what you’d expect from some land in the middle of the ocean, I guess), and things (like crackers, cereal, pasteboard boxes, etc) get so moist they’re downright flexible.

But all that has changed with the Cook’s Point of View, and so we’re making more food.

We did swordfish on the charcoal grill last night.  My Universal Grilling Method (heat to iron-melting temperature and cook really fast) works extremely well with this use case.  The fish was actually pretty good.  I thought it was a little too dry in the middle, but Liz said her piece had a part that was perfect.

That and chard and salad and corn on the cob (not Island corn, but picked the same day on the mainland) seemed to please everyone.

This started out because I wanted to grill something, and I knew we had a pork tenderloin in the freezer.  But this recipe for pan-seared and then oven-roasted tenderloin spoke to me, mainly because the rub sounded exotic (and the basic theory of rubbing, as opposed to marinating, was unfamiliar to me).

It’s another Self magazine recipe, which means less tasty but more healthy than, say, Gourmet or other Conde-Nast properties.  But it was good.  There’s a pico de gallo topping built around black beans which had a pretty simlar taste to the rub.  I was worried it was going to be monotonous, and perhaps it was a bit.  But Debbie was happy, and so was I.

We had a salad on the side.

Squash blossoms was the stretch vegetable this week.  They had them at the farmers’ market.  I’ve always wanted to think of myself as someone who knew how to prepare them.  And, with the help of Epicurious, I am.  Sort of.

Here they are.  It’s a delicious recipe, and not too hard (by Epicurious standards).  It took me about the 40 min they mention in the recipe.

The hard thing is actually getting the stuffing into the darn squash blossoms.  They’re fragile.  They’re floppy.  They lack structural integrity.  I would get one open and the leaves would flop back into place while I was pushing the stuffing in.  Or I would push too vigorously the leaves would tear.  And nothing I could do seemed to be able to get the stuffing into the very bottom of the flower.

In any case, Debbie thought they tasted great.  I could have used more stuffing.  Next time I’ll get a pastry bag or a big plastic syringe and do it right.