For dinner last night Alli followed this wonderful recipe for farfalle with zucchini. You should really follow the link if you want to know how to do it and see lots of pictures that put ours to shame. The pioneer lady is also pretty funny-- Alli loves her. Here's the zucchini all cut up and browned. That would have been an awful good snack all by itself. Anyway, I'm sure this recipe is a keeper.
For my part I cooked us some tuna steaks. The same kind I've done before, but this time the driving rain outside made me opt for pan-searing rather than grilling. My mom recently told me about making some tuna steaks this way, and I did mine pretty much the way she did-- thawed them (because these are costco frozen variety, but sushi-grade), then drizzled with olive oil, sesame oil, a very little bit of soy sauce, and liberally added fresh ground sea salt and black pepper. I'd been surprised when my mom told me how much sesame oil she used, as in my experience that stuff goes a loooong way, but I actually didn't really even taste it in the product. The overwhelming flavor was from the salt and pepper, which is actually kind of how it should be, just letting the good tuna flavor come through. Once those were seasoned, I grabbed a non-stick saute pan and got it screeching hot, and tossed in the steaks. About 15 seconds later Alli was standing under the smoke detector fanning and praying this would not recruit fire trucks to the condo complex where we were staying. This screeching hot pan, add oiled meat cooking method is excellent for moist, flavorful product, but I have yet to understand how you do it without setting off smoke detectors. After the fact (and the time spent scrubbing the pan with steel wool to remove the burned on oil), I remembered that my mom used an iron skillet. Perhaps this reduces the smoking? It would certainly have eased the cleanup.
Anyway, we opened some windows, no fire trucks came, and the fish was excellent. I've taken a close up to show the rarer center. mmm.