Dave Giffin’s Killer Jalapeno Bacon Hamburgers

It is finally warming up here in the Northwest and I’m loving it! Time to dust off my favorite summer recipes, shut up the house, and do all my cooking on the grill. Summer, in my mind, is the time for hamburgers—freshly cooked, outside, with bits of charcoal mixing with the juiciness of the burger. If you add in baked beans and some potato salad…what could be better?

For years, I made my burgers pretty much the same way every year—burger, a bit of finely chopped onion, salt and ground pepper, and sometimes a little garlic powder. Then I met Dave and it goes without saying that my burgers will never be the same again!

Before I share his recipe, which he graciously gave me permission to do, let me tell you a bit about him. Dave is one of those extraordinary individuals, people like me dream of meeting. A kitchen kindred spirit…a dump cook…a guy who dreams up recipes and rattles them off the top of his head…a little bit of this and a bit of that, and...Voilà! Magic! Every time I see him, he has some new recipe he is perfecting, and he’s not afraid to try things in combinations that an ordinary person wouldn’t dream of.

The following recipe yields, in my opinion, the best, most favorable burger I’ve ever tasted. Feel free to be creative with the proportions. For those of you worried about the jalapeno…don’t be. In this recipe, it adds flavor, not heat. Enjoy!

One last thing...thinking of family traditions and hamburgers, I'm reminded that my grandfather ate peanut butter on his burgers. I'm curious, what's the strangest thing you've ever eaten on a hamburger?

Dave Giffin’s Killer Jalapeno Bacon Hamburgers

2-4 jalapeno peppers—seeded and deveined

4-5 cloves of garlic

2 lbs burger (your choice of kind, [grins] living in N. Idaho, we use ½ elk-½ beef)

1-2 lbs of bacon—cooked crisp

½-1 onion

salt and pepper

Instructions:

Pulse peppers, garlic, bacon, and onion in a food processor until you have a fine dice. Mix into burger, and add salt and pepper. Form into patties and grill. Serve with the usual hamburger condiments of buns, lettuce, tomato, relish, ketchup, and mustard.

Variation: If you like cheese with your burgers, try adding 1+ cup of sharp cheddar, jack, or crumbled blue cheese to burger before forming into patties.

Pizza!

What’s not to love? A crunchy, chewy crust, loaded with cheese, artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes and feta. Just writing those words sets my mouth to watering. On the other hand, maybe you prefer the Combo, loaded with spicy pepperoni, sausage, olives, and mushrooms, the Hawaiian, or the simplicity of fresh basil, garlic, tomatoes, and mozzarella—whatever your pleasure, pizza never fails to entice the soul to rapture.

We have always made pizza at home. This is not to say we don’t order in now and again, but for the most part, it is a homemade labor of love. Fresh ingredients and the freedom to be creative have given us a better pie than any a chain pizza store could produce, and that quality, taken together with our current economy, makes homemade pizza an awesome choice.

Homemade pizza is not hard. The crust is simply flour, water, oil, salt, and a little yeast—or if you’re feeling very creative, as I have been lately—sourdough. Often we will make pizza the night after having spaghetti and use the leftover sauce on our pizza. The toppings can be as simple or complex as your imagination allows. You don’t even need a red sauce if you don’t want—Italian herbs and garlic in olive oil is just as tasty. Here is a simple but wonderful recipe for pizza dough. It makes four small pies (~8 inch).


Pizza Dough
1 cup warm water
1 Tbs extra virgin olive oil—can us any oil really
1-2 tsp honey or other sugar
3(+/-) cups flour
1 tsp kosher salt—less if you use table
1 package yeast (2 ½ tsp)

In a small bowl, mix the yeast and honey with ¼-cup warm water –let sit for 5 minutes. In a mixer with a dough hook, combine remaining water with the flour, salt and oil and your yeast mixture. Mix on low until the dough comes away cleanly from the sides of the bowl, about 5 minutes. Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead for 2-3 minutes. Place in oiled bowl and cover with a piece of plastic wrap or damp tea towel. Allow to rise for 30 minutes.

After rising, divide the dough into 4 pieces, shaping it into smooth ball like clumps. Allow to rise for another 20 minutes. Your dough is now ready to use. Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. If you have a pizza stone, place it in the oven to heat.

We use ‘no-stick’ tin foil or parchment papers to prepare our pizza’s as it makes for easy cleanup. Gently stretch your dough into a circle. Add the toppings of your choice—be as creative as you like. Bake for 10-13 minutes or until crust is nicely brown and cheese is melted.

(This recipe can also be made in a bread maker. Put the ingredients in your bread maker in the order in which they appear. Use dough setting. Rise for 30 minutes, shape into balls and rise additional 20 minutes.)

One other note: Sometimes it is too hot outside to use the oven. We have used this recipe and baked the pizzas successfully on the grill. If you want to do this, my best advice is to limit the amount of toppings so they cook quickly and to use the no-stick tinfoil. You'll have a super crispy and delicious crust. Enjoy!

Creamed Eggs on Toast and the Cheese Mystery

Left over Easter eggs—some are so pretty you almost hate to use them. They sit in their basket, beautiful reminders of the rite of spring. Renewal. Nevertheless, use them you must, so you’ve made deviled eggs, egg salad sandwiches, and potato salad and you still have more to use. What to do?

The start of my families Easter egg breakfast ritual is unclear but after much research, here is what I know. My grandmother took home economics in 1942. Her curriculum included making many recipes, among which was Creamed Eggs on Toast. My mother and her sisters all grew up eating this delightful dish on Easter morning and it was one of my favorite breakfasts as a child. It was a hard and fast Easter ritual—after the Easter egg hunt, everyone brought their eggs to Mom (saving out the prettiest) and she would make Creamed Eggs on Toast for breakfast. No one I talked to however, remembers whose idea it was to add cheese. My grandmother says she never made this dish with cheese and her eldest daughter, my aunt Vickie, does not make it with cheese. My mother, who is second eldest and her younger sister, my Auntie Pam on the other hand, both use cheese. My mother does not remember a time when she did not make this dish with cheese thus for my family, it has been made this way for at least forty years.

I can still remember the first time I made this for my husband and his ho hum attitude at my mention of our beloved Easter ritual. It only took seconds for him to embrace our favorite breakfast as he too had grown up with no cheese in his ‘Eggy Toast’. I searched the internet today for possible origins for our recipe and found that none of the recipes I looked at contained cheese—thus the mystery.

My internet search did bring to light many interesting facts about the history of food. The base for this recipe is a basic Béchamel sauce whose primary ingredients are a 1:1 ratio of butter to flour, making a roux, and milk. Adding cheese to this turns it into a Mornay sauce often used in soufflés and gratins. Béchamel Sauce or white sauce has long been considered one the four basic ‘mother’ sauces of French cooking. Chefs have used it since the mid 1600’s. (If you are interested in reading about its history I found a very interesting web site, you can view here.) For our Creamed Eggs on Toast we start with the béchamel and use it as the base for my favorite Easter breakfast and the best way to use up those extra Easter eggs.

Note: Traditional Béchamel sauce contains butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. For this recipe, we are going to leave out the nutmeg and add onion and garlic powder.

In addition, followers of this blog please note: This is another ‘dump’ recipe in which I usually do not measure exactly…feel free to play around with the proportions as needed.

Cheesy Creamed Eggs on Toast
(Serves 4-6)

1/3 C butter
1/3 C flour
4 C milk
1/8 t or fair sized pinch garlic powder
¼ t onion powder
Fresh ground pepper
Seasoning salt to taste—can add either while cooking or allow people to add their own at the table
1 ½ C Cheddar Cheese (usually don’t measure…this morning it was three large handfuls)
4-6 hard-boiled Easter eggs—sliced
Hearty whole-wheat toast (to be healthy…)

To make your béchamel, melt butter over medium heat, in a saucepan and add flour, stirring to mix with butter—this is your roux. Allow roux to cook, stirring continuously for about 1 minute. Do not allow it to brown. Whisk in milk and continue whisking until roux is dissolved. Sauce will thicken as the milk warms. Stir frequently to prevent sticking. (To thicken quicker, warm milk in microwave prior to adding to roux.) Add garlic and onion powder, pepper and seasoning salt if desired. When béchamel is thick and beginning to bubble, add cheese and stir to melt. Sauce should be smooth and creamy. Do not allow it to boil. Remove from heat and add eggs. Serve over toast.

My husband and children like to add Baco bits to their ‘Eggy Toast’. My parents and I eat it with seasoning salt sprinkled at the table. Crisp bacon bits are also tasty. Enjoy!