Memorial Day Cookout

We had a few friends over for a Memorial Day cookout, and I decided that it might be fun to do hamburgers. Now, there are at least two reasons why I almost never cook hamburgers. First, I don't trust ground meat from the grocery store, even from Whole Foods. I have read that, in the typical package of supermarket hamburger, it is possible to detect the DNA of dozens of animals. Pretty scary. Second, I really dislike purchased hamburger buns. So I decided to address both issues in my hamburgers.

A friend gave me a copy of the cookbook from the Zuni Cafe in San Francisco several years ago, and one of the recipes that it includes is for the famous Zuni Cafe hamburger. It involves using whole chuck, which is cut into chunks and salted the day before, and then ground fresh on the day it is cooked. The method is pretty simple, even if it is a little time-consuming. My main concern was that the meat was a little too lean; I had bought grass-fed beef, so it was not very marbled. To raise the fat content a bit I ground some bacon in with the meat. It ended up being pretty juicy, and I did not detect any pronounced bacon flavor. I thought the meat might have been a little under seasoned, but otherwise it was tasty.

To go along with the burgers I made the hamburger buns from the Martha Stewart Living Cookbook. They were much better than the typical supermarket bun, and I was surprised at how quickly they went together. I was going to make her spicy ketchup, too, but I think that I will wait for tomato season. Instead, I made the gorgeous pink pickled onions in the photograph, which are also from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I honestly think that these onions were my favorite part of the meal, and I am glad that we only ate one of the two pints, so I'll have some to eat with sandwiches.

While I was finishing the prep we drank Leland Palmer cocktails, which are featured in the new issue of Bon Appetit (http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2010/06/the_leland_palmer). This is essentially a blend of iced tea and lemonade that is spiked with gin and limoncello. Very refreshing.

For dessert I made vanilla and strawberry ice creams, which we had with some very fudgy brownies. I was thinking of a Neapolitan-style sundae where the brownie stands in for the chocolate ice cream. When I was growing up we always had homemade ice cream for summer holidays. My family had one of the old-fashioned hand-crank White Mountain ice cream churns. It seemed like we had to turn that crank forever! It is a lot easier now just to pour the custard into the cylinder and flip the switch, but I sometimes miss the elbow grease method. The anticipation was almost as much fun as finally digging into a big bowl of pillowy frozen goodness.

Cold Suppers

In Washington, the approach of summer means that a heavy blanket of hot, humid air will soon be thrown over the city. Once that happens, eating hot food, much less preparing it, is not very appealing. And so the cold supper just makes sense.

That was the direction I went last night, even though it wasn't particularly hot. Instead, my motivation was a good combination of ingredients from the garden: A Tom Thumb mini-head lettuce, some sugar snap peas, sweet Walla Walla onions, and a couple of radishes. I added some chopped oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, and one yellow bell pepper that was left over from the marketing early this week. I poached some chicken breasts in broth, shredded them, made a lemon vinaigrette, and put the whole mess together. I should have walked out to the backyard to get a handful of herbs (some lemon thyme and parsley, maybe, or some marjoram), but I was too lazy. The salad was still pretty tasty.

To go along with the salad I made some buttermilk biscuits, which I think are one of the most perfect foods around. I use a recipe from a cookbook called Soul Food: Recipes and Reflections from African American Churches, by Joyce White. I am a little ashamed that the biscuit recipe is the only one in the book that I really use; I have just never gotten around to exploring the rest of the collection. But it is a really good biscuit recipe, so I probably should inaugurate a weekly soul food night for at least a couple of months.

Little Growing Things

I definitely have some little growing things in the garden. And yet I still am in that period when I have put a lot of time, energy, and sweat into the garden, and it is really just teasing me with the promise of a bountiful harvest. Yes, there have been some radishes, and arugula, and lettuce, and just in the past few days some sugar snap peas and spring onions. But I still need to buy a lot of vegetables at the store. That is really the test, for me. Being able to go and harvest something for dinner, planned menus be damned.

My garden is a little different this year than in the past. More eggplant and peppers, no rapini and not so many salad greens. And somehow I have ended up with nine tomato plants, which is an all time high. It would take really terrible luck (or some really pernicious pests) to strike out in the tomato department this year.

It is always interesting to see what comes up on its own. This year I have tons of fennel, a lone cucumber, and three sturdy potato plants (Yukon Gold, I think) that I reluctantly had to pull up, since they were just in the wrong place. My dad calls these plants "volunteers," which is a term that really appeals to me. I suppose that these plants are also little gifts from the previous year, and sometimes rather unexpected. I was frankly stunned to see the cucumber. My cucumbers were a disaster last year as usual, victims of my reluctance to use chemicals. I picked only a few before the vines succumbed to some sort of virus that always seems to claim them. I don't even recall discarding a fully ripe fruit that might have yielded a seed that came up this year. I suppose that I'll just have to wait a few weeks to find out if it is the same variety that I tried to grow last year.

Well, time to go check on dinner.