Salsa Burgers

Salsa goes into burgers, burgers go into pan...this added a little spice to the burger, but was just ok.  The Beef is nice, the salsa is nice, but together they are less then they are apart.  Not that it couldn't be better, maybe by adding a sauce, but I heard it mentioned in a conversation I was passing buy and it just struck me as having the possibility of being a good idea.

Pork Burgers (from La Ventosa Ranch)

I was hoping, hoping that this could match the love affair that I have with the Berkshire pork, but it doesn't.  It is not bad, it just didn't have that same effect that that heritage piggy does.  Anyways, made up like burgers, eaten, still pretty good, and not as tasteless some of the pork that you get in the grocery store, it still does have quite a bit of fat in it.

Bratwurst

There were these blue cheese brats that I saw a Dahls from Lewright Meats, I am a sucker for new products, especially ones from companies that I am usually a fan of, but this was not blue cheezy at all.  So all in all a decent bratwurst, but not what I wanted out of it.

Omelet Soufflé (p36 July 2011 Food & Wine)

This was an utter failure for me.  either when I was mixing the yolks back in with the whites, or in cooking (it still had foamy height on the stove), but somewhere after then it just totally collapsed and ended up a little tough.  The other thing about this, is that it really only serves one, so either I have to quickly do a second one, or just make it for myself, because I just can't see myself buying another non-stick pan just to do this.

Spaghetti Bolognese (p7 August/September 2011 Cook's Country)

This was very good.  Sometimes you spend an hour+ on dinner and you think, why did I spend all this time to do this?  This was not one of these times.  I used replacement dried mushrooms (bought for something else and ended up not using them), but it was really quite the fine dish and relatively simple to make (so much so that I spent most of the time making something else).  In fact I'm going make this again this week (I already half half a package of pancetta left for it)

Spaghetti Bolognese (p7 August/September 2011 Cook's Country)

Buffalo Chicken Quesadillas (RC August/September 2011 Cook's Country)

Simple, turned out well (ended up using Sriracha instead of something like Frank's Red Hot, because I was out of Frank's).  Was a good dinner on a very hot night.

Buffalo Chicken Quesadillas (RC August/September 2011 Cook's Country)One thing that I really noticed this week, even though it wasn't terribly hot in my kitchen (no hotter then normal), with the heat and the humidity that have been going on all week, I was less likely to want to cook, at all.  So I suppose it was a good thing that most of the meals that I made this week were very simple.  Which made up for the fact that I wanted to spend no time in the kitchen.  Though on Friday, I did bake cupcakes, Saturday I made ice cream, ice coffee, iced tea (lots of ice in there).  So it still turned out to be a lot of time in the kitchen, but large chunks of it was without the stove being on.  Anyways, I hope it cools down a bit more.

So I made Cherry Ice Cream with expresso ganache last week.  The problem with it was that the expresso flavor asserted itself over pretty much everything else.  So it wasn't really right for the ice cream.  It still looked good though.

Cherry Ice Cream with espresso ganacheSince I kind of messed up making the cherry puree in the first place (added a lot more sugar then I intended so I went back and just doubled the amount of cherries so I had enough for 2 batches of ice cream), it was easy to whip up a second batch of ice cream.  I made sure to make plain ganache this time around and this time around it worked out very well (and was popular at game night).

Cherry Ice Cream with chocolate ganacheSo the new process I've been using goes like this:

1. When about to cool the ice cream base, separate out 1 cup of base and freeze (~4 hours to cool, ~4 hours in freezer)
2. Combine frozen portion and cooled base, and mix together until it becomes a super cooled base
3. Use machine almost as normal (may take less time)
4. Use a frozen metal pan to freeze the ice cream in the first stage (spreads the liquid over a larger area, and metal conducts heat (or lack there of) faster then plastic.  I do this for 1-2 hours
5. Move into final container for hard freeze.

This has been working really well and created a smoother ice cream.