Luxury burgers and more...

First off, I'd like to receive thanks and adoration for allowing my brother to post on this blog. Yes, I am a beneficent ruler of my blog...I allow the people to speak.

Now to the good stuff. R and I dined well this weekend. First off, another trip to the 'Bees happy hour. I know it's crap pub food, I know it's crap drinks, but they are CHEAP drinks and CHEAP food folks. We can drink enough to make us think we're in college again - well, maybe not. That would probably be bad. But it is a fun way to start the weekend nonetheless.

Saturday, we prepared a fab meal of crostini with gorgonzola, walnuts, and honey; grilled luxury burgers (more to come); grilled corn; and Emeril's Guinness onion rings. Finished with homemade strawberry ice cream, also courtesy of a modified Emeril recipe.

First, the crostini - a Giada recipe,* of course. I sliced a baguette on an angle, brushed with olive oil, and baked in a 375 deg. oven for about 6 minutes. Meanwhile, I mixed about 3-4 oz of gorgonzola dolce with some chopped toasted walnuts. When the crostini were golden brown, i spread a dollop of the gorgonzola mixture on the toasts. I placed them back in the oven and allowed the cheese to melt. I took them out, plated them on the lovely Shamrock Fiesta plate, and drizzled honey over top. Note - you NEED the honey in this, without the honey, the cheese is too sharp. The walnuts, bread, and honey mellow the cheese into something fabulous.


Then we got down to business. We had a few shoulder roasts of beef in the freezer, so we whipped out our handy dandy Kitchenaid food grinder, and got to work. Note to self - acquire aprons before next meat grinding project. Meat juices were rocketed onto my shirt.



Preparation of the luxury burgers begins. We seasoned the beef with salt, pepper, a splash of olive oil, and roasted garlic. My burger was then stuffed with crumbles of gorgonzola. R's burger was topped with slices of smoked mozzarella. Both may or may not have received some bacon. I also made a mayonnaise, brown mustard, roasted garlic, salt/pepper spread. Mmm. While R manned the grill, I made the Guinness (in our case, Smithwick's, that's what we had) onion rings.

Dessert was strawberry ice cream, out of our fab ice cream maker. I made sure to add some whole bits of strawberries (allowing them to macerate, so as to prevent them from becoming inpenetrably frozen blocks of fruit inside the creamy ice cream) to the mixture before the final freeze.





*The actual recipe is from "Giada's Family Dinners," her most recent cookbook. The Food Network version is a slight variation.