It's all about the sauce.

This sauce was born very quickly out of the desire to eat only what was on hand.


It turns out what was on hand was at least quality home grown ingredients. We had an abundance of tasty cherry tomatoes I used for this sauce in addition to field tomatoes and home grown oregano and basil.

Oven roasted pizzaiola sauce

2 large field tomatoes sliced
20 or more cherry tomatoes halved
half an onion sliced thin
3 garlic cloves crushed
1 small shallot diced
large handful of fresh oregano finely chopped
5 large basil leaves finely chopped
sea salt and black pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. While the oven is heating lay out all of your tomatoes, onions & garlic on to a large baking sheet. Sprinkle your diced shallots and herbs on top of the tomatoes. Aggressively brush everything with plenty of olive oil. Season with sea salt & black pepper. Place the tray in the preheated oven for 30 minutes or until everything is just starting to crisp up with a nice golden brown color. The kitchen should smell amazing at this point.


Transfer all of the roasted goodies into a food mill over a large bowl and grind away. Taste what you have, it's pretty good. Super fast sauce, tons of fresh flavor with oregano breaking through screaming at you for attention. This batch was just enough for 1 pound of pasta. We had a little oven roasted crispy kale as well with this.

So good.

Totally Tropical Pork Mojo

With summers heat and humidity creeping in the desire to eat or even cook inside seems to fade.

Start with a pork tenderloin, you may have to trim the excess fat and pull off the "silverskin" before this is ready to marinate in the MOJO baby.

The Mojo sauce or marinate is a very common in Cuban cuisine. It's simple as pie to make and is lip smacking good.

Tropical Mojo

• 1/2 cup olive oil

• 8 garlic cloves thinly sliced

• Juice of 2 limes & half an orange (traditionally a sour orange is used in place of the orange and lime)

• A bunch of fresh oregano & cilantro chopped

• Salt and pepper to taste

• Splash of vinegar
• 1/2 cup of water

Heat the oil over medium high heat; throw in the sliced cloves till lightly browned. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a quick boil.

After the Mojo has cooled allow tenderloin to marinate in this for at least 24 hours.

This totally tropical pork mojo was served with the following!

• Grilled onions
• Grilled asparagus
• Grilled plantains mmm
• Black beans with cilantro, cheese and grilled onion

Nicely washed down with a DOUBLE IPA homebrew from two good friends. Very malty, sweet and high in booze. Tasted like a cross between a Sam Adams and a Dogfish 90 min..

Damn fine.