[frame align=”left”][/frame]Saturday was a glorious day.  We joined together in the holy name of burgers to celebrate the second Evernote cookalong.  And oh, what a cookalong it was.  Full of juicy, grilled deliciousness, smothered in cheese and various toppings, served on golden buns.

Let’s see…the burgers themselves were turkey-feta, and ground brisket and pork.  The toppings ranged from the classic cheese, tomato and lettuce to homemade double-dipped onion rings to…poutine.  Yes, poutine.  Our friends Jeff and Ruth are Canadian and well…they bought fresh cheese curds from Zingermans.  Which made Jeff think he could also get gravy and fries.  By that, I mean, he realized he could bring things to my house and I would make gravy and fries.  Because I would.  And I did.  And then he topped the fries with the gravy.  And topped the gravy with the cheese curds.  And topped his burger with the poutine.

He topped his burger with the poutine.  Well, I guess Sunday was Canada Day.  Continue reading →

 

If you peruse food sites as much as I do, you’ve probably already seen hundreds of Thanksgiving recipes already.  Turkeys, side-dishes, pie after pie after pie.  Well I’m going to jump ahead a bit with recipe for Thanksgiving leftovers.

Leftovers?!? you say.  How can you possibly think about leftovers when I’ve yet to even set my deck on fire while frying my first bird?  Well, I’ve already had one Thanksgiving so far—yesterday, in fact, at my inlaws.  It was delicious.  And it gave me plenty of leftover turkey to take home to experiment with.

Now, there’s one thing I tend to want the day after a good holiday meal: something light.  I love rich food but it only loves me for so long before it brings out the claws (rawr).  So tonight when looking for a good light meal and considering the bag of turkey goodness I had in the fridge, I thought….turkey cakes.

As is well known, I don’t eat seafood.  I don’t eat anything that swims at all.  In fact, if a cow has so much as wandered across a stream, I don’t want anything to do with it.  I don’t know why, it’s just a thing I have.  But I am entranced by crab cakes.  I partially blame one of my old roommates, Steph, who was from Maryland; I think she was a bad influence.  But mostly it’s because crab cakes just look so freaking good.  And I’ve thought, I could easily do these and just replace them with chicken.  But I never got around to it because hey, there’s so many dishes and so little time.  But now I’ve got all this turkey…turkey’s kind of like chicken.  It’s like a bigger chicken. Continue reading →

Happy Labor Day!

Well, there it goes.  The end of my summer.  Not with a bang.  Not really a whimper.  More of an “Ehhhhh I don’t wanna.”    Or a “Meh.”  A sullen “meh” though, not one of those nonchalant “I just don’t care” mehs.  Not here.

But instead of doing a giant barbecue (mmm barbecue) as a last hurrah to the last day of summer, I instead decided to put my best foot forward into fall with a dinner meal inspired by fall colors and fall comfort food: meatloaf.

All right, I’ll be honest.  I had my first slice of meatloaf about two years ago.  Seriously.  I’d never had it before that.  I always figured it was because my mom was a vegetarian, and while she made many meat dishes for the rest of us omnivores, why mold raw meat if you don’t have to?  Surprisingly, this was all apparently new to my mom, who is convinced that she made us meatloaf when we were kids.  In fact, when I told her she didn’t, she was absolutely taken aback and incensed and insisted on calling my sister to verify that she made meatloaf.  It went something like this:

Mom: What?  I made you guys meatloaf all the time.  Don’t you remember?  I used to put three strips of bacon across the top.
Me: Uh, no mom, I don’t know who you made that for, but it wasn’t us.
Josh: stifling a laugh
Mom: Well we’ll see what your sister says about this.  Picks up phone, dials.  Arica, didn’t I make you guys meatloaf when you were kids? Brief pause WHADDYA MEAN “NO?!” Continue reading →