"A Solid Double"

That's what my old boss used to say when we finally wrapped up a project where a number of issues still linger. The kind of thing where we got the sign offs we needed, but not without a major struggle and not without a huge list of remaining issues.

And that's what describes our latest new recipe. It's a fantastic new idea, and will likely form the basis of a lot of other ideas. One of my favorite foodie bloggers, Cookin' Kate recently raved about this fantastic Chipotle Orange Turkey Burger with Lime Cream.

The recipe looks pretty complicated, and there are 2 sauces, burgers, and bread to make, but it's not as hard as it looks. Everything Kate describes is spot on - the glaze is sweet, tangy, and spicy. I really need to use more chipotle peppers, they have incredible flavor. With a garden full hot peppers, I just might make my own. Adding milk and breadcrumbs presumably keep the burgers moist without falling apart - though we did have a little bit of trouble with some crumbling. Still, the glaze really helps the burgers get nice and caramelized.


Then there's the bread. Now, the Red-head makes some fine biscuits, yeast rolls, and some other baked goods. But neither of us have been into baking bread, let alone focaccia. I really don't know for sure what went wrong - it just didn't rise once we rolled it out. Here's what happened...

Now, I can never be accused of never showing a screw up. It smelled great - but came out pretty much like a thick cracker. Oh well, at least we had some buns in the freezer.

The kicker though was the lime sauce. Oh boy, is this stuff good. A nice citrus cool creamy touch that cuts nicely with the zingy burgers. We've got some leftover in the fridge, and I see it coming out as part of a grilled chicken salad, as a dip for veggies or pretzels, or maybe shrimp tacos. But it was darn near perfect with this turkey burger.


Quick note - we added a bit more sauce after snapping this picture, it was that good.

Sammiches!

Geez, I've been a bad food blogger. But believe me, we've been busy! I've been following along with most of my favorite foodies, but have not taken the time to comment or post much here. Hopefully, things will start to settle down back into wait mode on the adoption and I'll have time to do some fun blogging. I've got a couple of ideas for restaurant reviews, and some pics of less than perfect attempts at cooking something new.

Buy, for this post, I'm still keeping it simple. Last night I had an excellent reuben at the 5th Street Diner, while the wife had herself an awesome burger. Both of these are sandwiches that I just love. In fact, I really love sandwiches. There's nothing like taking 2 slices of bread and just filling it with whatever comes to mind. I mean, who first thought to combine corned beef, saurkraut, and thousand island dressing? Yah, I love burgers and really like ruebens.
Of course, it doesn't get any more simple than an all-American cheeseburger? Maybe with grilled onions and pickles? Heck, who says it has to be that basic all the time? How 'bout some flair like maybe with avecado, cajun spice, or even a Thai inspired turkey burger?

Here's something that took a few tries to get the hang of. Mini-burgers - a little bit of a fad right now in restaurants. They're fun to make, and tasty.
Behind them you'll see some jalapeno poppers. I didn't think they turned out so well, couldn't quite get the filling to not leak all into the oil.


Some sammiches I love...

Monte Cristo - of course, I love French Toast, so this makes sense.
Cheesesteaks - onions, no sauce please!
Sausage peppers and onions - a farmers market favorite.
BLTs - I like mine with honey mustard - try it some time.
Gyros - this a new favorite. The best I've had are from a stand at the Ephrata Fair.
Italian hoagies - something I used to make dozens of a day working in high school. Crusty roll, oil and vinager, provolone, ham, hard salami, capicola, shredded lettuce, tomato, onion.
Tuna melt - not too much mayo, best on an English muffin with a fresh slice of tomato.
Tomato sammiches - best sliced still sun-warm from the garden on plain white bread, mayo, salt and pepper.
Sloppy Joes - don't ever tell me you like Manwich - ick!

And last but not least - I love turkey sandwiches. Love them. I make them all kinds of ways - with stuffing on them, warm with gravy, turkey salad on a croissant, grilled with Swiss cheese,
and lately, just simple sliced turkey with the red-head's homemade cranberry sauce. I love Thanksgiving and the 5 days after!

Chili Freaks

And boy - do I mean freaks.
As you know, I love chili and I love to make chili. I've even included a few posts on here about the subject.

Well, about a year ago, my Nephew was planning to get married on St. Georges Island, Florida. Unfortunately, his lovely bride had an family emergency and all of those plans got re-arranged (don't worry, they're married, they just didn't have a ceremony on the beach).

My sister, the red-head, and I decided to keep our plane tickets and motel reservations and take the trip anyway. It's a beautiful area, with awesome beaches, wilderness swamps, and quaint small towns, such Apalachicola. Really quite worth a week's vacation on it's own. But, we only had a couple days, but one of them coincided with the annual Charity Chili Cook-off.


Not sure how many of you've ever been to anything like this, but it's a unique experience. There were parrot heads there, a radio station, food vendors, etc. We got to sample several chilis (for a buck each!!!), and got a little insight as to how some contestants assembled their concoctions. I saw a lot of canned chicken broth, a lot of red powder, quite a bit of beer and other booz, and a fair amount of hot sauce. The chicken broth is what surprised me most. I really don't use it that much because I think it makes chili taste like chili soup, which is very different than what I'm trying to achieve. I have experimented with beer and will continue to search for other forms of liquid in order to back off on the "tomato-i-ness" of my own recipe. Although some folks like it that way.

At any rate, the cookoff web site has a lot of pictures that give you a good feeling for what it was like there. We took a few of them ourselves. I cut off these chubby gentleman's heads because I don't know them, but they had OK chili (a little bland) and a cool name. Can you tell which dude is the team captain?


These guys easily won for most creative booth. I did not try their chili, but it looks like they've won a number of awards over the years. We're pretty sure this was a real coffin hollowed out with cooking equipment mounted inside. It certainly was an impressive setup.

Just a quick and tasty update to my post about Thai Chicken Coconut Milk Soup. I'm sure you recall how much I raved about it.

It was so good that we decided to make it again - this time we had the gumption to spruce it up even more. So the red-head dropped some dumplings into it at the end and it tasted even better.

She took your basic dumpling recipe (flour, baking powder, salt, milk), but used coconut milk instead of regular, then also added some diced jalapenos. Holy wow, those were quite simply the tastiest dumplings ever - and really complimented a light-ish soup, making it a moderately hearty meal. This got us to thinking, dumplings really could be modified to match any soup. Could Chili and dumplings be in our future?

Here are some pics of this updated yumminess...

Funny Stuff

Wow - it occurred to me that I have not posted here in a while - been pretty busy. I hope to throw up some more restaurant reviews soon, as well as some discussion about cooking equipment. But, here are some of my favorite food related funnies that I collected in recent years.

Easy as... soft pretzels?

Anyone out there ever made soft pretzels?
If you answered yes - then why didn't you tell me how easy it was? Furthermore, why didn't anyone tell me how cheaply they can be made in comparison those places in the mall?

Annie Anne's (which I used to love) charges something like 2 bucks for a dried out, flavorless greasy mess. There are 2 places in the Fairgrounds Farmer's Market in Reading where we go, and hopefully some fair or market near you that really know what their doing. But a pretzel still costs at least a buck. I'm pretty sure the red-head and I made the equivalent of 15-18 or so pretzels for less than a TOTAL of 2 dollars. We're talking flour, yeast, salt, water, brown sugar (just a touch), and baking soda. That's it.

But back to the food itself. They were quite good, crusty on the outside, fluffy and warm on the inside. There's no way the cook can take credit for this - as you can see, it took us a while to get the shape right - but it was tons of fun. This was probably our best batch of standard shape:

This would be a great baking project for kids to try. I can attest that every single shape cooked at the exact same rate. So little hands making fun pretzel shapes would not be a problem, in fact, it would be even more fun to experiment. Maybe have the little tykes spell their name? Give it a shot. Here are some shape experiments - sticks and nuggets:

Santa Nutter Butters

I'm not much for cutesy stuff, nor am I really into crafty ideas normally. But once in a while, you see something that's just so cool you have to take notice. One of the ladies at work made made these Santa Clause Nutter Butters. It's a very creative idea and tasted great as well. There were dozens of these little guys, I can't imagine how much time she spent on them. They all look exactly alike - which is also a little bit creepy - like maybe they're watching you.

Just getting started

Well, here's another blog. Not that I have as much time as I should for the adoption blog but this will be much much easier to post. I'm kindof using it as a journal for my food experiences as well - something I should have done many moons ago.

My wife and I absolutely love to cook, and absolutely love to eat out. Whenever we travel, we tend to avoid chain restaurants, which has led to some interesting experiences. Unfortunately, I've just recently gotten into the habbit of taking my camera with me in order to photo-document those experiences. As this new blog progresses, I will go back and re-count some more interesting food escapades, some with pics, some without. This is also my way of sharing more of myself because I'm incapable of creating a blog without a theme. Call it anal, but I just can't bring myself to do it!!! In actuality, this blog will be similar to the other in that much of what actually happens will be joint experiences, but will be reflected on by just me. On second thought, it's a good bet to think that I'll include her thoughts as well.

Also, you'll be more likely to see home-made experiences more often. We've fully shifted to our more streamlined budget (nice way of saying forced semi-poverty) in order to work on serving our church and adopting a child. Because we saw that coming, we have spent the last couple of years aquiring some mid to higher level cooking tools. For instance a new stove, a chest feezer, decent knives, and most importantly, a kick arse grill that can double as a smoker. Pictures of all forthcoming. In the long run, this will save a ton of cash, because being able to cook larger quantities of tasty chow (and freeze the leftovers) will be more cost-effective even before our family grows.

So, what can you expect? What kinds of food do I like? I like many of the same things most people do, such as pizza, burgers, ice cream, etc. But I've also really come to appreciate the difference between Frank's in Mt Penn and Domino's (ick), as well as the difference between Fudruckers and McDonald's. As far as cooking food myself, here's what I aspire to perfect...

* Pizza- I'm starting to figure this one out, but I can get better.

* Smoked Pulled Pork BBQ - first attempt at this on the new grill came out great, not sure if I can duplicate.

* French Toast - this has always been a specialty, and lately I'm experimenting with some slightly different techniques. For me French Toast is not a desert and should not be eaten with powdered sugar and whipped cream.

* Macaroni and Cheese - this is my wife's absolute favoritest food, so I want to learn how best to prepare it. I've still got a lot to learn about cheese and cream sauces though.

* Thanksgiving dinner - something I love to host. Melissa and I split the cooking duties down the middle, I make turkey, stuffing, and mashed taters. She makes cranberry sauce, gravy, yeast rolls, and apple pie.

* Chili - at this point, chili is the one food that I feel confident I can make better than any restaurant, so I'm always torn when I see "worlds best chili" on a menu. Should I order it and find out for sure? Or would that be a waste of $3.99?

* Hot Sauce - this is kindof a hobby and passion. I love spicy food, and have been growing peppers for a number of years now.