Sunday grilling (17/7): turkey burgers edition.

1. Southwestern Turkey Burgers

2. with Cajun Grilled Onions and Cilantro-Avocado Spread
I used Emeril’s Original Essence to coat the onions before grilling, except I put in half the salt the recipe called for, to avoid having them be inedible. The spread is just mashed avocado with minced cilantro and a bit of salt.

3. Plum Upside-Down Cake
My sister brought home plums from one of her friends’ trees, and they were in need of saving, so I used a Real Simple recipe I’ve had work for me before. This time around, however, I skipped cooking the plums. Last time, this step made the plums completely mushy, so I find it totally unnecessary. The cake turned out sweet in the batter and tart in the plums, just the way it should be!

4. Margaritas
Holy guacamole were these strong! I used the International Bartenders Association standard ratios, which tasted good, but definitely needed to be sipped slowly. Also, if you’re committed to using fresh lime juice, you will need a ton of limes. A ton of limes. You will also spend forever squeezing said limes and your arms will hate you. You’ve been warned.

Standard Margarita

2½ cups tequila
1½ cups triple sec
1 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (about 10-12 limes)
agave syrup to taste (my preference: ¼ cup) (optional)

Stir all ingredients in a pitcher and chill. Serve over ice.

Makes about 5¼ cups (pitcher).

Sunday dinner (10/7): homemade pizza edition.

Option #1: pesto, mozzarella, fennel, caramelized onion, bacon
The pesto was made from leaves I gathered in my backyard basil patch. I also snipped the fennel for these pizzas from the accidental fennel jungle that grew next to our tomatoes.

Option #2: ricotta, mozzarella, oregano, garlic, mushroom, bell pepper, tomato
Minced garlic and fresh oregano were mixed into the ricotta—along with some salt and pepper—before spreading it on the dough. The bell pepper and tomatoes were fresh from our garden.

Dessert: peach-custard pie (Martha Stewart Living, June 2011)
A great and fairly simple pie one could probably make with pears or apples. I wish the peaches I used were a bit more ripe; it would’ve made the pie easier to eat.

Sunday grilling: Fourth of July edition.

1. Greek feta Burgers
I remembered how good this recipe that I used last year was, so decided to go with it instead of overthinking what to make. As always, I replaced ground lamb with beef and blanched my own spinach instead of using frozen. The cucumbers and lettuce for the toppings came from our garden.

2. with Feta Salsa [Spread]
A friend of mine linked me to this recipe, which was quite à propos since I had Kalamata olives and sun dried tomatoes to use up. I eyeballed the quantities and processed it for longer to turn it into a spread for the burgers. It could’ve used less olives, as their taste was quite overpowering.

3. Grilled Tomatoes with Oregano and Lemon (Everyday Food, July/August 2011)
Super simple grilled veggie side! I made the oregano-garlic-lemon oil for the top a few hours ahead to allow it to infuse.

4. Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
Once again, continuing to slowly make my way through my stash of frozen cranberries.

5. Lemon-Mint Ice Tea
Brew the tea with a fistful of mint, and add half a cup of lemon juice. Easypeasy.

Sunday grilling (26/6): July 2011 issue of Bon Appétit edition. Best Sunday dinner eveeer.

1. Tri-tip with Chipotle Rub
I kind of fudged the rub as I didn’t know where to find dried chipotle chilies or pink peppercorns (err?), so I substituted chili powder and regular black pepper. Didn’t seem to hurt the taste any; the meat turned out soft, smoky, and sensational.

2. Little Gem, Feta, and Cumin Salad
Mmm fetaaaa. Instead of Little Gem lettuce, I used lettuce from our backyard, which at that point was starting to turn into a jungle. Since feta is already a salty cheese—and there’s a lot of it here—I wouldn’t include any more salt in this.

3. Cilantro-Scallion Bread
Great little nibbles! Could’ve probably used a little tighter rolling on my part, they don’t look anywhere as neat as the picture in the magazine. >_>

4. Grilled Vegetables
Sections of red bell pepper and cremini mushrooms, brushed with olive oil and slightly salted, then grilled until charred and crisp-tender. I put the mushrooms on some bamboo skewers to make them easier to grill.

5. Strawberry Daiquiri Italian Ices (Martha Stewart Living, June 2011)
These ended up a bit strange, mostly because at the last minute I realized that I didn’t have any lime and substituted lemon juice. They’re also misleading on the alcohol front; since you don’t really taste it much, it’s easy to overdo.

6. Peach-Strawberry Ice Tea
We had a box each of peaches and strawberries, and I was in an experimental mood, so once I made the tea, I decided to put one diced peach and about half a dozen sliced strawberries into it. I left it in the fridge overnight and most of the following day. It turned out absolutely amazing. Next time I decide to do this, I’m going to try first pouring the two cups of hot tea over the fruits and steeping them until cool, before watering it down. Should hopefully bring out the flavor even more!

Sunday grilling (19/6): kebabs two ways edition.

1. Flank Steak Kebabs with Peanut Sauce (Everyday Food, June 2011)
The peanut sauce on these wasn’t my favorite, since it was coconut milk based, and I don’t actually like the taste of coconut. >_> I figured that the peanut butter would take over, and I was mostly right, but there was just enough coconut taste to make the sauce kinda meh for me. The kebabs were pretty standard.

2. Mozzarella-Stuffed Turkey and Tomato Kebabs (Everyday Food, June 2011)
I made a fail substitution on these by using chicken breast instead of turkey. The chicken just wasn’t big enough to wrap the mozzarella completely, which resulted in it melting and leaking out on the grill. :( But it was heavenly in the few pieces it managed to hang onto.

3. Salad
Along with lettuce from our garden, this also included our first cucumbers!

4. Lemon Meringue Frankenpietart
I call this the Frankenpietart because I took three different Joy of Cooking recipes—one for the filling, one for the crust, and another for the topping—that weren’t meant to go together and used them anyway. The filling is for a lemon tart, but the crust is made of graham crackers, instead of the pâte brisée you would normally use in a tart. Basically, this is what happens when you have a giant bag of lemons and leftover boxes of graham crackers from Costco, as well as eggs that need to be used up ASAP. Overall it was fine, but I overbeat the meringue, so it didn’t brown as nicely as it could have.

5. Arnold Palmer
Self explanatory. Half homemade lemonade, half freshly brewed black tea!

Sunday grilling (12/6): Balinese chicken edition.

1. Balinese Grilled Chicken (Food & Wine, June 2011)
Although I didn’t include the fresh bay leaves—couldn’t find any at the store—and don’t know how that affected the dish, it still tasted great. The chicken was moist, smoky from the grill, and had an Asian flavor courtesy of the ginger and turmeric.

2. Potato Hobo Pack (Martha Stewart Living, June 2011)
This was a bit of a failure. I didn’t include the beer (too weird) and just put some oiled, salted, and peppered baby potatoes in some foil with a couple of garlic cloves. Sadly, we didn’t grill the pack long enough and the potatoes ended up a bit… crunchy.

3. Salad
A simple salad made with the first harvest of lettuce from our backyard!

4. Strawberry-Lemonade Icebox Pie
This was so gooooood. I love lemon and I love strawberry and I love graham cracker crusts—though not necessarily trying to cut them—and this pie had everything! It also had meringue, which meant I had the excuse to bust out my propane torch from Home Depot and go to town toasting it. :D

5. Iced Tea
Self explanatory.

Sunday grilling (29/5): “we will grill this weekend even if I have to stand in the pouring rain” edition.

By the end of May, I was exasperated with the uncharacteristic cold and rain we’d been having, and determined to grill for Memorial Day no matter what. Thankfully, the weather decided to cooperate and bring forth sun and warm temperatures, so I busted out my collection of grilling themed magazines and settled on the Club Med menu from the June 2011 issue of Bon Appétit. Since the original cake in the menu and its ingredients looked too complicated to be worth bothering with, I replaced the dessert with a cranberry cake.

1. Grilled Yogurt-Marinated Leg of Lamb
There are no words to describe how amazing this was, but I’ll try anyway. This had a smoky flavor from the grill and the tabil spice blend in the marinade, and it was so soft, it practically melted in my mouth. Makes me drool just thinking about it now. Bit pricy, but so worth it. Great for sandwiches the next day too!

2. Cucumber, Tomato, and Feta Salad
A fresh salad with that yummy feta cheese bite.

3. Tunisian Vegetable Salsa
The sweetness of the roasted peppers and onions really came through in this. If I could stand to eat spicy food, I would’ve kept the chile seeds, and it probably would’ve been a nice counterpoint to the sweet vegetable taste, but… I don’t like having my mouth feel like it’s on fire.

4. Grilled Flatbreads with Tabil Spice Blend
Mmmmmm breaaaad. I love bread as it is—which probably isn’t very healthy—but homemade bread is the best. It just took a while because the grill could only fit two flatbreads at a time.

5. Cranberry Upside-Down Cake
I didn’t have the patience to go search for the weird ingredients that the orange cake originally part of this menu needed, but I did have bags and bags of frozen cranberries. Since you can only find them around Thanksgiving, I went a bit overboard last year and stoked up. Majorly. To the tune of about a dozen bags. But this cake is quick to make and tastes great, so using up all that cranberry shouldn’t pose too big of a problem. I do double the ingredients for the batter, though it still doesn’t turn out as high as the recipe photo.

6. Mint Tea
Simple and refreshing. I dumped two tablespoons of loose-leaf tea, a handful of mint, and ¼ cup honey into two cups of boiling water and brewed until very dark, then diluted it with three more cups of water, and added about ⅓ cup of lemon juice.

Sunday lunch (15/5): “why the f is it so cold?!” edition.

I’m a couple or so months behind on updating Sunday lunch/dinner, so there will be a bit of a deluge of food pictures in the coming weeks.

We had an unseasonably cold spring this year, and after I officially declared grilling season open the first weekend of May, temperatures plummeted for the next three weeks, which meant all the magazine issues devoted to grilling in my mailbox would have to wait.

Bummed out and shivering, I decided to warm up by baking two kinds of pizza (one pizza isn’t pictured).

Option #1: tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, plum tomato slices, bacon, and arugula.

Option #2: ricotta, grated Fontina and Parmesan mix, caramelized onions, black olives, and salami.

Having not given up entirely on summer though, I made Frozen Lemon Soufflé and a pitcher of Cucumber Cooler from the June 2011 issue of Everyday Food Magazine. The soufflé turned out amazing—it was almost exactly like lemon ice cream—though I had issues making the extended mold border out of parchment paper. It turns out that tape doesn’t actually stick to baking parchment, so I had to get a bit creative and line the outside of it with foil.

The cucumber drink tasted… strange. Skipping the mint probably didn’t help either. I think I’d rather put my cucumbers in a salad, rather than using up so many of them and ending up with dubious results.

Sunday dinner: May Day edition, aka I declare grilling season officially open! Temperatures were in the 80s that weekend with not a cloud in the sky; perfect day to bust out the charcoal.

1. Turkey Burgers with Spiced Tomato Chutney and Cajun Grilled Onions (Real Simple, June 2009)
Homemade burgers are the best ever. I’ve also realized that mixing cheese into the patty, at least in this combination, is a lot more tasty than putting the cheese on top. The chili in the patty combined amazingly well with the spices on the onions and the cinnamon in the chutney to create a delicious, smoky-sweet flavor. Note to self: label random bags of leftover spices. At some point last year I was cooking a recipe that involved making my own spice mix, and I had a couple tablespoons left over, so I figured I would use it up on these onions. It turned out so damn good, but I have no idea what it was! Definitely some kind of mixture of chili powder, paprika, oregano, and salt. Maybe onion and garlic powder as well?…

2. Potato Salad with Bacon and Parsley (Real Simple, June 2009)
Fairly simple potato salad, though the Dijon and vinegar are a deviation from your standard creamy dressing. I think I still prefer creaminess and lots and lots of chives. The bacon for this recipe was cooked on the grill, since it was fired up anyway.

3. Strawberry Icebox Pie
The strawberry train continues! I ended up putting a whole stick of butter in the graham crust because it refused to stick together otherwise. I also replaced the cranberry juice with a handful of frozen cranberries from my Thanksgiving stash.

4. Raspberry Lemonade
My classic lemonade recipe with an added pint of mashed raspberries passed through a sieve. After the experience of a past lemonade batch ending up incredibly sour, I’ve learned to adjust the sugar by taste rather than rely on my previous ratios. I had wanted to try this with Meyer lemons, but as Murphy would have it, this was the week they were no longer in the store.

Sunday dinner: Easter edition! We don’t actually celebrate Easter, but I’d never baked a ham before, so I figured it was as good an excuse as any to try.

1. Marmalade Glazed Ham
The darn orange slices refused to stay on the hunk of ham, and the glaze seemed to mostly run off and burn onto the baking pan—thank goodness for aluminum foil. I also realized that I prefer ham better cold than straight out of the oven. We had a ton of it left over, despite trying to pick the smallest ham in the store. I ended up chopping a good portion of it—as well as the leftover potato and onion from the side dishes—into a salad Olivier for lunch the next day.

2. Tomato-Onion Casserole (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Tasty, roasted veggies that worked quite well. Next time, I would shove a bit more slices into the dish; I didn’t anticipate them shrinking quite as much as they did.

3. Scalloped Potatoes with Leeks
First, I halved the recipe to avoid massive leftovers taking over the fridge. Then, I nearly screwed it up because I thought it only needed to be baked for 30 minutes. I originally figured I’d just bake the potatoes while the ham is resting… and then I saw it needed to bake an additional 45 minutes. Whoops. Since the oven was otherwise occupied by the ham, I tried to cook the gratin in the broiler (ours is a compartment just under the oven that gets to about the same temperature) at the same time. It sort of worked, but the bottom layer of potatoes was slightly undercooked and the liquid didn’t absorb/thicken as much as it should have on account of the dish being heated mostly from the top. Note to self: read recipes more carefully next time.

4. Cranberry-Orange Sparkler (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Yummmmmmmm is all I have to say about this. You really can’t go wrong with cranberry juice, orange liqueur, sparkling wine, and ginger ale.

5. Raspberry Mousse Pie (Everyday Food, May 2011)
This quickly turned into a strawberry mousse pie when I saw that raspberries were something like $6 a pint, and I needed a pound and a half. o_O The strawberries, however, were 3 pounds for $5 and substituted beautifully. This mousse was soooo good, though slightly heavier than it should be, since I may have over-beaten the whipped cream a tad. Sadly, it uses gelatin, so it isn’t suitable for vegetarians. But if that’s not a consideration, this recipe would work super well as filling between layers of chiffon cake.