Halfway Done!!!!!!!

Seven more days to vote on what I should do next!

Although I cannot come up with a good reason why, it seems fitting that I breach the 50% mark on the Fourth of July.  I'm glad that it happened on a holiday and that I could celebrate it with red meat.  Very little is more American than a grill out with hamburgers and hot dogs, so The Bride and I invited a few family members over and fired up the grill.  As I had a bunch of heirloom tomatoes ready for consumption, I started with the Fresh Tomato Salsa on page 49 as an appetizer.

The recipe calls for one and a half cups of chopped tomato, so I set my adjustable measuring cup to that mark and began processing the tomatoes.

I cored the tomatoes, squeezed out excess juice and seeds, and diced the flesh.  I made sure to use a little of each type of my heirlooms.

There's not too much more to say...it's salsa.  Everything got chopped up and mixed together.

The Bride and I figured that burgers would be a simple way to go with the family, as they tend to eat less eccentrically than we do.  There were only a couple of burger recipes left, and the closest one to being "American" was The Ultimate Bacon-Mushroom Cheeseburger on page 90.  

When working with portabellas, the first thing to do is to rock the stem back and forth until it breaks off.

Those gills turn black and mushy when cooked, and can visually wreck a meal, so it is best to remove them.  I like to use the side of a spoon to scrape them off the underside.

Instead of just using salt and pepper to season the burger, I had some leftover Holy Smoke Seasoning from Colonel De Ray's at Findlay which also had onion and garlic.  How could that be bad for the burger?

I cooked the bacon and saved the grease to oil the caps for the grill.  This seemed very American to me.

Three of the burgers I made as prescribed, but the other two I stuffed with cheese to create an inside-out burger.  What can I say, I was bored.

The burgers and caps cook for the same amount of time, which was convenient.  Everything looked great!

Burger, bacon, mushroom, cheese...awesome!  

The salsa was good, but needed more heat.  To be honest, I completely omitted the jalapeno from the recipe as my in-laws tend to be very plain about their food.  Thus, I cannot accurately describe what was intended.  Otherwise, it seemed like pretty good salsa.  The freshness of the tomatoes makes a big difference, and by using four types of tomatoes I had a very broad flavor spectrum.  

The burger was highly recommendable.  I liked the inside-out technique as it added an extra layer to the variety of textures this burger contains.  The bacon was crispy, the portabella was spongy, the burger was crunchy on the outside, chewy underneath, and filled with gooey cheese.  The garlic and onion were nice additions, and I also threw on an onion for good measure.  Go America!

188 recipes complete

185 recipes to go!