It’s been a great holiday, but I’m glad to say I’m home again. Sitting on my comfy couch. Watching one of my favorite movies- Persuasion. Everyone ditches me as soon as it goes on, so I’m all alone. Nice and quiet after weeks of kids running and yelling and having fun. Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds) is pretty handsome. I do like them tall, dark and handsome. So cliché I know, but that’s the way it is.
Day 1: We drove to Monticello, Utah on the 30th, where we dined at PJ’s.
At first glance we were thinking we should look around. If you look in the far back of the photo you’ll see the stoplight. Well, it’s the only stoplight in town. We drove in all four directions. Two restaurants were closed, one was a pizza shop, and the other was PJ’s. So we stopped.
Inside, this is what we found:
The kids were thrilled to play pool with their dinner!
Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think shooting with your eyes open is preferable.
Technique is this ones strategy.
Can’t leave the little guy out of the action.
Onto dinner. It was pretty good. Everyone but me had burgers and grilled cheese. All thumbs up. I had the Cobb Salad. My favored avacados were missing, and they added white onions instead of red, but it was really good. No dressing for me- I like to enjoy the flavors of the veggies by themselves. One thing I was quite impressed by PJ’s was their quality of fresh veggies. Not a wilted leaf in sight.
Day 2: The drive home consisted of lots of Nintendo DS and The Incredibles on our ITouch’s. For lunch though we got out and ran around a bit. Typically I don’t like fast food, but when it’s a long drive like this one with kids in tow and a husband who just wants to get home I don’t really get an option. The two options were Taco Bell and McDonalds. I was out voted. Thank goodness I wasn’t too hungry anyways.
This handsome guy was starving. Who’d have thought he could eat so much? I remember my mom talking about having a thousand dollar food budget every month when I was a kid because of my brothers. I didn’t think she was being realistic then. But now I see how possible that is. See this smile? It’s like finding a four leaf clover.
Uh oh! I’ve been caught! Gotta cover it up!
There it goes- into hiding.
As for a really good hamburger- no offense McDonalds, but we all know what we’re eating when we go there- this is how I like to make mine:
Get some really good beef: corn fed chuck, 80/20. Now I know a lot of you don’t like 80/20, and go for something like 93/7 (Yuck!), but here’s what every Chef Instructor would tell me at school- FAT IS FLAVOR! So suck it up, get the good stuff, and reap the rewards. Truly, much of the fat will melt away and you’ll have all the flavor left. Here in AZ I like to get good, corn-fed beef at Midwestern Meat Market. http://www.midwesternmeats.com/
Put your ground chuck in a bowl, add the seasonings of preference (depending on your taste-buds preference that night) and pat into patties. I usually stick with the simple but delicious garlic salt and fresh ground pepper. Garlic salt in my house growing up was as essential to every dish as water is to drink. So it’s in almost everything I make. When I’m feeling a little adventurous, or culinarily snooty, I might make my burgers like this: mix my meat with egg, kosher salt, and fresh ground pepper. I’ll fill the center with bleu cheese, which my whole family loves including my kids, or a mixture of diced garlic, red onion, and feta cheese. When making burgers like this you’ve got to be sure the center is evenly covered so your filling isn’t oozing out while cooking. Don’t forget to let the kids help. This is so fun for them! Here’s a trick I learned from Rachel Ray: let the kids make the burgers into balls, placing them on a sheet pan. Take another sheet pan and press gently but firmly on top to make nice round patties. If you need to finish off the edges you may want to do so.
Good stuff.
Lastly, grilling your burgers on a charcoal grill is preferable. I only have a gas grill right now, and hopefully by this fall I will have ventured out to the charcoal side of life, but for now I must be sure to have the best ingredients because that’s what I’ll be tasting.
I hope you all have had a fantastic New Years Day. Here’s to good cooking and fun family times! -tina
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