As you probably have realized, I love stuffing burgers. I had this great Jones Dairy Farm Sausage and I was wondering how to make it into a stuffed burger. The first thing I thought of was going with a bangers and mash theme with the burger. I made a cheesy mashed potato that I let cool and harden, and then I stuffed it into the sausage patties. The resulting burgers came out amazing!
Well, I don’t know if anyone else did, but I sure had a lot of fun this week doing all these kombucha posts. Honestly if a single person tried kombucha for the first time because of me then it was all worth it! Thanks for baring with me if you hate kombucha. The thing is, when I get really excited about a food that is new to me, I just need to start exploring it as much as I can, and that’s why I did a whole week of these posts.
If you drink kombucha strictly for the medicinal benefits, you might be confused by using it in recipes. Especially in a cocktail! I drink and love kombucha though for its super tasty and refreshing qualities, and I thought it would go great in some boozy mixtures. What’s interesting is that kombucha itself usually carries around 0.5% ABV. The line between kombucha and alcoholic beverages is already blurred as a couple breweries are even using kombucha in beer making!
When I was brainstorming ideas for what to cook with kombucha, I did a quick google search for recipes with champagne in them. To my palate, champagne, sour beers, and kombucha all have a similar thing going on and if one works in a recipe, the others should too. I saw a lot of champagne risottos which struck me as a little odd because with a small amount of champagne in a risotto you really aren’t going to taste it. Sounds like a waste of champagne! I decided to adapt the champagne risotto idea for kombucha, but use some ingredients that would enhance the tea flavor profile, and use a nice amount of it so that you could really taste it in the final dish.
I’ve seen orange soda in ceviche before, so I thought that the sour effervescence of kombucha would be a welcome addition to a fresh fish ceviche on a hot night last week. I used GT’s “trilogy” kombucha for this recipe which is lemon, raspberry, and ginger, and pretty much one of the best things I have ever tasted. Some fresh peaches and a little bit of habanero helped bring everything together and make this a meal to remember.
For this mac and cheese I used a creamy mild mix of colby and muenster cheeses to create a perfect backdrop for the bold, savory and stringent flavors of bulgogi and kimchi.
I had some leftover pesto but it was only basil hazelnut and garlic, there was no cheese in it. I was brainstorming on how to repurpose the pesto, and because of the lack of cheese I was thinking of going Asian with it. Basil with a nut made me think that a vaguely Thai dish would work. I was thinking of mixing the pesto with some rice noodles at first and maybe popping some pork I had in the freezer on top, but when I was at the store, I was persuaded by the fresh summer corn and zucchini, and some really tasty looking potatoes. I ended up mixing the pesto in with mashed potato, and topping it with a mixture of the pork, corn, and zucchini dressed with some sriracha and fish sauce. It all came out fantastic, summery, and bright, and somehow light yet hearty and filling.
At a recent grilling party with some friends, someone had taken the liberty to break into the s’mores a little prematurely. Watching the marshmallow perfectly brown I happened to be standing in just the right spot that the marshmallow was directly in front of a burger on the grill in my eyeline. I laughed to myself thinking that the gooey browned marshmallow looked like cheese on the burger. I then stopped laughing and took out my phone for a quick note-to-self. MAKE S’MORES BURGERS IMMEDIATELY it read. And why not? Marshmallow, chocolate, and graham are one of the best flavor combinations in the world, and it’s no secret that chocolate and burnt sugar go great with a bit of salt. I showed up at my friends place this weekend with the ingredients and about 5 options for how we might do this. We narrowed it down to the 2 best ideas and got to work!
A big bowl of super cheesy greens, pork, and pasta is simply go-to comfort for me, and this version with ditalini, mortadella, and a creamy mustard sauce is one of my favorites!
Because I work at a burrito shop that has great tacos, I don’t usually make them at home. The craving came up the other day though for plantain tacos so I whipped some up! They were much different than what we have at work so I was happy that I had made them. I highly recommend these as a filling vegetarian dinner and something new to eat next week!
One of the best moments from my recent trip to Italy was exploring the Bacari in Venice and sampling the bar bites known as Cicchetti, Italy’s version of tapas. My family and I basically stick out as tourists and can be spotted from a mile away. As we piled into these hole in the wall spots down the side alleys of Venice in the pouring rain we would first get interesting looks from the waiter/bartender/food preparer. Once he could tell that we sort of knew what we were doing with little things like ordering wine as “ombra” instead of asking for house red, everyone relaxed a bit. In the Venice bacari, ombra means a small glass of local wine. Once we got settled with our wine and dried off a bit, it was time to get to the food. All of the small bites would be lined up behind a glass case and it was easy to point at what we wanted. Little bit of this, couple of these, maybe one or 2 of the weird looking one, and we were ready to eat! We went to 3 or 4 bacari during our time in Venice, some more traditional, and others more modern, and we sampled tons of Cicchetti, most of which I hope to recreate for posts in the coming months.
The third and final meat at the meat slicer party this past weekend was a homemade mortadella. Making the mortadella was quite the undertaking but I had a lot of fun doing it! I used a recipe from Marco Canora that was published in Lucky Peach #4 and it came out absolutely delicious. Big thanks to Moody’s Delicatessen for selling me the sausage casings in an emergency!
The second meat at my meat slicer party last weekend was roast beef. Roast beef is insanely simple to make at home, especially when you have a meat slicer to cut it paper thin. If you make this same exact recipe and try and cut it with a knife it is going to come out a little chewy unless you really are able to cut it very thin. Anyways, roast beef is roast beef right? Yea it was perfectly cooked and seasoned, and really fresh, but still just roast beef. What made these sandwiches truly memorable though, was the crispy shallots and hint of horseradish mayo, along with fresh baked onion rolls from a local bakery near my friends house who hosted the party.
