Summer – Page 3

Spicy Chorizo Burger

March 11, 2016

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I don’t know about you, but I watch a lot of Food Network. I know, you are shocked. For me, it’s just so easy to sit back, watch people make delicious food, and get inspired. Which is exactly how this chorizo burger came about.

This burger was 100% inspired by a Diner’s Drive-Ins and Dives episode my husband and I were watching last weekend. The episode featured a English-owned restaurant that made a delicious looking chorizo burger. How could an Englishman get a Chorizo burger wrong (sarcasm implied). But of course Guy made it sound like it was the best thing he ever ate. And it really did look good, so my husband and I set about making our own.

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My original intention was to buy pre-made chorizo and just mix that in with ground beef. Turns out, here in North Carolina, chorizo isn’t that easy to find. It also turns out that it’s not that hard to make assuming you have a well stocked spice rack. To make the chorizo, you just mix up ground pork with about a hundred different spices, sugar, and a bit of vinegar.

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Once the chorizo is made, the rest it pretty much like making a regular-ol hamburger. I just mixed the chorizo in with some ground beef and cilantro (just like the DDD recipe) and formed that mixture into patties. In the picture above, you can sort of see the marbling of the pink beef with the orange-tinted pork.

To cook the burgers, I seared them on both sides, then covered them and cooked on medium heat until they got to 160 degrees. Unfortunately, since they contain pork, you probably aren’t going to want anything less then well done.

But what’s is so great about this burger, besides that flavor, is that the pork really makes the burger extra moist and flavorful. The lady a Trader Joe’s told me that it was her husband’s secret to a juicy hamburger.

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I topped this spicy burger off with cheese (for my husband, at least) to help balance out all that heat from the chorizo, and I stacked the burger on a heaping portion of guacamole, doused the top with some salsa, and topped it off with lettuce and tomato.

If you are like me and are avoiding bread and cheese, I can tell you that it is just as good without the cheese and wrapped in lettuce, which is exactly how I ate mine.

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I hope you give this recipe a try, especially over the Summer when you start firing up that grill. It is a whole new spin on the classic burger that is super flavorful and definitely has a kick.

Enjoy!

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Little White Shirt Dress

July 3, 2015

This adorable white shirt dress has been one of my most complimented and versatile pieces of the recent additions to my wardrobe. It is ideal for summer due to the light weight cotton fabric and eyelet detail. From the office to the farmer’s market, it is, in my opinion, the perfect little white dress.

Here are a few ways I would love to style it:

Dress: Ann Taylor

Picnic: Espadrilles/ Hat/ Clutch

Work: Cardigan/ Necklace/ Belt

Farmer’s Market: Sandals/ Sunnies/ Tote

Some other great white shirt dresses

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Stars and Stripes Cookies

June 30, 2015

For those who know me personally or follow me on Instagram know that I have been really getting into cookie decorating lately. It’s taken a lot of practice, but I feel like I have finally got a hang of the art form.

With 4th of July coming up, I wanted to make some patriotic cookies for a bake sale we were having at work. I whipped up a batch of my go-to sugar cookies, cut them into 3 different sized stars, and flooded them with red, white, and blue flood consistency royal icing.

I started with the smallest stars and filled them with white icing. I outlined the edge first, filled in the center with icing, used a toothpick to spread the icing evenly over the surface, then tapped the cookie on the counter a couple times to shake out excess air bubbles.

: Outline the edge of the cookie.

: Fill the center with icing.

: Use a toothpick to cover the surface.

: Tap or shake a few times to get rid of bubbles.

Then I repeated the process with the medium-sized cookies and blue icing.

I made the largest cookies red and white striped. To create the stripes, I iced evenly spaced lines across the cookie. I then outlined every other section using the red icing, filling in the space, and spreading out the icing with the toothpick. For the sections in between, I outlined the edge in white, then created a white line right next to the edge of the red section. Then filled in the space with the white, repeating the same process with the red.

I packaged them with one of each cookie, stacked on top of each other. But they could also be arranged with the blue cookies in the top, left corner of a large platter, the red and white cookies filling the remaining surface area, and the little white cookies scattered over the blue ones to make a little flag.

For those of you who are more visual learners, here is a little video of the creation of these cookies.

Happy Independence Day!

Lemon Slice Cookies

August 18, 2014

Sometimes I get inspiration from the strangest places. The inspiration for this recipe was a random Instagram picture that someone took of those lemon slice candies. “Wouldn’t those make cute cookies”, I thought to myself. So I set out to spend my husband-free weekend baking and decorating these lemon slice cookies.

I started with a basic sugar cookie dough and added lots of lemon zest so that the cookies would be full of flavor. I rolled out the dough to about 1/4″ thickness and cut out circles with a biscuit cutter. Then cut those circles in half to get “slices”.

After baking, I let the cookies cool completely before icing so that the icing won’t totally melt off the cookie. That might seem totally obvious to you, but I have made that mistake before.

Now I am no icing expert. I am far from it. I have studied Glory’s blog, Glorious Treats, and her techniques to try to get a hand on how to effectively decorate cookies. Her cookies are just the cutest – you need to check her blog for even more cookie inspiration!

I started by outlining the “rind” in a dark yellow, then outlining the “pith” in white just inside the yellow. I also made the little lines for the sections of the lemon with the white icing (Glory has a different technique with the “pith” lines, which I think look better). Both the dark yellow and white are fairly thick so that they don’t run off the edge of the cookie. For the inner, lighter yellow, fill icing, I thinned it out with a bit more water so that it easily flooded the little sections I created with the white icing.

This kind of cookie decorating is very time consuming, which makes me even more impressed with people like Glory and Sweet Sugar Belle, who make it look so easy.

I made the dough and baked the cookies on Friday. Outlined in the yellow and white on Saturday to let that icing harden. Then iced the yellow sections the on Sunday. I just tell you this so that if you plan on making these, or any other iced cookie with multiple colors, you will need to carve out some time over a couple days.

All and all I am pretty pleased with how they turned out. They are not perfect, but they sure are cute! And tasty! But this does inspire me to work on my icing skills.

What do you think about these lemon slice cookies? What other candy would translate to a good cookie?

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Strawberry Caprese Salad

July 29, 2014

I love salads, but I am actually a little intimidated to make them at home. Restaurant salads include a variety of ingredients that 1) I normally wouldn’t pair together, or, 2) don’t keep on hand. If you told me to go make a salad right now all I could throw together is lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and baby carrots.

Which is why whenever I make a salad at home I default to a classic: the caprese. A traditional caprese salad is usually just fresh mozzarella, tomato slices, and basil. For a little jazzed up version I added fresh strawberries and crispy pancetta.

I started with a few strawberries I had left over from the farmers market, a plump tomato, and some freshly picked basil.

I also cubed up some left over bread, tossed them in a bit of olive oil and toasted them in the oven until they were crunchy and golden brown.

And I threw in the meat so that my husband would think of this as a meal and not just a side. I browned a small package of pancetta that I picked up in the deli section of my grocery store. If you want to make this recipe and can’t find pancetta, bacon would be the prefect substitute.

For the dressing I stuck with a simple homemade balsamic. There is so much flavor from the strawberries, tomatoes, and basil, you don’t really need anything too extravagant. To make the balsamic dressing I mixed 2 parts oil with 1 part balsamic, then added salt, pepper, and minced garlic to taste.

Then mix it all up and you got yourself a beautiful, and filling, salad!

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Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Pizza

July 23, 2014

There are a few things to me that are quintessential to summer. 2 of them are grilling out and peaches.

To kick off my “summer vacation” (the week off I had between jobs), my husband combined those two things with our favorite Friday meal, pizza, to create the grilled peach and prosciutto pizza.

I have to admit, we had never grilled pizza before. So what follows are some guidelines that we should have followed, not exactly what we did do.

We started with some gorgeous and juicy peaches from the previous weekends farmers market haul, prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and ricotta. I would also highly recommend mixing in some garlic into the ricotta and drizzling balsamic on top. While the pizza was delicious, those two things would have added some more depth of flavor.

The first thing we did was grilled off the pizza dough. We placed the dough right on the grill over in direct heat. What we should have done was heat up the grill with the cover down until the thermometer read 400 degrees. While the grill is heating up, you can prep the dough and all the other ingredients, then once its hot toss the dough on there and cook on each side for a few minutes.

Once the dough was a bit crispy and more crust like, I removed them from the grill and started layering on the ingredients, starting with the ricotta, the prosciutto, peaches, cheese, and then the basil.

We put the pizzas back on the grill over indirect heat and closed the top to let them cook for another couple minutes until the cheese got nice and bubbly.

Grilling pizza really isn’t all too different from cooking them in the oven. I really enjoyed the extra flavor that we got from the direct fire. There is something about that charred flavor from the grilling and the sweetness from the peaches that make this the perfect summer meal.

Do you grill pizzas? What are some of your favorite flavors?

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Cold Brewing Coffee

July 22, 2014

Now that it’s warm and muggy outside, a hot cup cup of coffee just doesn’t sound very refreshing. Unfortunately, I still require that nice jolt of caffeine in the morning to get me going. Last summer, I experimented with different methods of brewing coffee for iced coffee which ranged from throwing a bunch of ice cubes into a cup of hot coffee to cold brewing the coffee grounds.

While the former can be done at the last minute if I desperately want an iced coffee, the latter yields a much better tasting, richer, and not so diluted cup of iced coffee.

The best part is that cold-brewing doesn’t require anything special. Actually, you can cold brew coffee without any special machine or equipment. You just need a little time.

The night before, I pour 1 part ground coffee and 2 parts water into a seal-able container. I mix it up a little bit and leave the coffee in the fridge overnight.

The next morning, I place a coffee filter over a cup or jar and make sure that it is fastened to the container so that it doesn’t fall in with the coffee. I like using a ball jar because I can make sure the rubber band, or twine in my case, is anchored in those groves. This part takes a little bit of patience. I pour the coffee mixture up to the top of the coffee filter then walk away and let it go to work. Then I give it a minute or so the fill it up a bit more.

This step also takes some time. But you can do this well ahead of time and store the filtered coffee for the week to use whenever you want a cup. If you like a nice big cup of black iced-coffee in the morning, then I suggest brewing 1.5 to 2 cups of water for every day you want a cup (for 5 days, I would brew 5 cups of ground coffee with 10 cups of water).

But if you are like me and like a healthy dose of milk in your coffee, then you may only need one cup of water for every day (for 5 days, I would brew 2.5 cups of ground coffee with 5 cups of water).

Do you switch to iced coffee in the Summer? What is your favorite way to brew it?

Sugar-Free Strawberry Lemonade

May 27, 2014

Summer has not officially started yet, but as usual no one has informed the weather that June 21st has not yet arrived. For the past few weeks we have experienced some pretty warm weather almost everywhere, at least below the Mason-Dixon line.

I don’t know about you, but one of my all time favorite Summer (or really, anytime) drinks is strawberry lemonade. I love lemons. I could eat lemons raw, that’s how much I love them. I also love strawberries, so what could be better than the combination of the two, right? One of the things I don’t love about lemonade is how much sugar is in it in order to counter act the sourness. Instead of sugar, I used Stevia, which is great to use in drinks because it dissolves pretty easily without having to heat up your liquid. It is also much sweeter than granulated sugar so you can use less.

The strawberry juice also adds some extra sweetness which means you can use less sugar. There are a couple ways to add strawberry juice to the lemonade:

1. Juice the strawberries using a electric juicer;

2. Puree the strawberries and add it to the lemon juice, seeds and all; or

3. Puree the strawberries and run it through a sieve in order to remove the seeds and pulp.

I choose option #3. But all are fine options.

If you do plan on making this recipe, use it more of a guideline. Start with your lemon juice and strawberry juice, then add part of the sugar and water, adding more until you get the desired sweetness and concentration. You may want to add more stevia/sugar/sweetener and water than I have listed in the recipe. Like most of my recipes, I encourage you to play with it and make it your own.

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