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.

Winter Comfort and Italian Sweet Cream

What do you make for breakfast that just comforts the soul?

At my house, it’s oatmeal.

During my growing up years, I didn’t have oatmeal often because my dad—who usually made our breakfasts (Mama worked swing shifts and didn’t get up in the mornings before we went to school) wasn’t overly fond of the mushy, gummy mess that posed for breakfast as his mother had made it. (Instead, he was a master of scrambled eggs cooked in the microwave. Sounds gross, I know but somehow they always turned out fluffy and delicious.)

When I was in college, I dated a man who taught me to make oatmeal (and triticale—his favorite) with nothing more than boiling water and time. It was quick and tasty and that was how I made oatmeal until about a year ago, when I stumbled upon a recipe for Irish or steel cut oatmeal. Wow! What a delightful find…we were immediately hooked. Even my “I don’t eat mush!” husband fell in love.

Our favorite way to eat steel cut oats is with a little Italian Sweet Cream and a dollop of raspberry or strawberry freezer jam. Frozen huckleberries and slivered almonds with brown sugar are also good. I usually make extra because they heat up easily in the microwave for a quick and tasty breakfast when you’re in a rush and they never last long in the refrigerator…someone always wants a snack.

I have to confess to an ulterior motive for sharing this recipe now. Recently, I’ve been on a baking kick and I’ve been using leftover oatmeal in a fun and simple oatmeal raisin-cinnamon swirl bread. Stay tuned for further recipe postings. J

Note: this recipe is great for both steel cut oats and Scottish oatmeal.  What’s the difference? Scottish oats are stone ground into a medium fine meal while steel cut or Irish oats have the oat groat cut into two or three pieces. I toast them both before cooking and the finished product is very similar. The Scottish oats cook in about 10 minutes while the steel cut oats take 40-50 minutes depending on how soft you like them.

Irish Oatmeal

1 cups Irish or steel cut oats—may also be called pinhead oats

1 Tbs butter

pinch salt

3-4 cups boiling water

Instructions:
Melt butter in saucepan over medium heat. Add oats and roast for 3-5 minutes, stirring constantly, until oats are toasty brown. Remove from heat and carefully add boiling water (it will spit and boil up a bit). Cook on low heat, stirring every 5-10 minutes (to prevent sticking) until oats are soft. Enjoy with toppings of your choice.

Italian Sweet Cream: 

This is pure decadence in a bottle and definitely not meant to be eaten on a daily basis. J (I haven’t tried it but I’m sure you could make something similar with fat free half-and-half.)

1 pint heavy whipping cream

1 cup sugar (more or less to taste)

½ tsp vanilla (optional)

Stir all ingredients gently until sugar dissolves. Place in glass jar or bottle. Serve over hot oatmeal. 

Snickerdoodles!

Now for my current baking craze. Do you ever get these?

I’ve been on one—bread mainly (more on that soon), but cookies too. It strikes me that it’s been a long time since I posted any cookie recipes and so today, I thought I’d share the family Snickerdoodle recipe.

These crinkly topped cookies have been always been one of my favorites. Nana would let my brother and I help her make them when we were kids. It was great fun. Who wouldn’t love rolling dough into balls through a sandbox of cinnamon sugar, then licking the extra off your fingers? It was much more fun than play dough!

At my house, they MUST be made in the traditional fashion with cream of tarter and baking soda. No modern variations for us…

Spicy, sweet and crispy tender, you’ll find it impossible to eat just one.

Snickerdoodles

Makes about 5 dozen—don’t worry, they freeze beautifully.

1 cup     butter

1 cup     margarine or shortening

3 cups    sugar

4            eggs

2 tsp.     vanilla

4 tsp.     cream of tarter

5 1/3      flour

2 tsp.     baking soda

½ tsp.    salt
1 cup     cinnamon sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Beat butter, margarine, and sugar until fluffy, add in eggs one at a time, beating until each is thoroughly incorporated.

In a separate bowl combine dry ingredients.

Add dry ingredients to butter and sugar mixture—mixing until all dry ingredients are moistened.

Form dough into balls and roll in cinnamon sugar.

Bake for 8-10 minutes.

Cookies will look a little under-baked. Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes on the baking sheet before moving to cooling rack.

Nana's Fresh Fruit Pie

Summer is in full swing here in the North. Our county fair is next week. My garden is producing green beans by the bushel, zucchini, sweet peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, and lettuce. As for fruit, we are still picking raspberries and huckleberries and peach season is coming soon. Strawberry and blueberry seasons are finished and the jam is in the freezer.

I think that aside from my garden, fresh fruit defines summer for me. Watermelon, blueberries, and juicy ripe peaches capture the very essence of the season, in all its glorious splendor, and nothing does a better job of showcasing that splendor than a fresh fruit pie.

Not just any fresh fruit pie…but Nana’s extraordinary fresh fruit pie…a pie with an amazing secret—its cheesecake middle. (For those of you who had this at Kevin’s client appreciation luncheon and have been awaiting this post, I apologize for being so long in getting it up.) The pie can be made with any fresh fruit you like…softer fruits work best for obvious reasons—all berries, and peach are wonderful. I’ve never tried banana, pear, apricot, plum, or cherry, so if you do, let me know how it turns out. Enjoy!

Nana's Fresh Fruit Pie

(Recipe make 2 small pies or 1 large pie)

4-6 C Fresh Fruit

Crust:
1 Pkg Graham Crackers, or equivalent (6 oz/~2C) Vanilla Waffers or Animal Crackers
½ C Sugar
½ C Melted Butter

Middle:
8 oz Cream Cheese—low fat is OK but will give a softer set
1 Can Sweetened Condensed Milk
1/3 C Lemon Juice
1-2 tsp. Vanilla

Glaze:
2 C Cold Water
1 C Sugar—or if fruit is sour, more sugar to taste
1 Small Pkg. Jello
5 Tbs Corn Starch

Crust: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place graham crackers and sugar in food processor and blend into crumbs. Add butter and mix until crumbs are moist. Press crumbs into pie pans or baking dish. Bake for 10-15 minutes or until crust turns slightly more brown. Remove and allow to cool for 10 minutes.

Middle: Place cream cheese, and sweetened condensed milk into food processor and blend until smooth and without lumps. Add in vanilla and lemon juice and blend until mixed. Pour immediately into crust and allow to set (10 minutes).

Glaze: The type of glaze you make will depend upon the fruit you use to make the pie. In most cases you can match the jello to the fruit and make the glaze as follows:

Place water, sugar, cornstarch, and jello into a small saucepan and whisk until cornstarch is disolved and there are no lumps before placing over med-high heat. Heat until glaze is thickened and you can see a ‘faint line’ after pulling the spoon through the glaze(runny pudding consistency). Glaze should be clear.

For certain types of fruit, the pie is better if you use fresh juice and lemon jello. This is true of blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries etc. For these fruits, cook approximately 2 cups of berries in 1 cup of water until boiling and fruit is mushy. Strain through a cheese cloth to get juice. Then take: 1 cup juice, 1 cup water, 1 small pkg. lemon jello, cornstarch and sugar and prepare as above.

If using peaches as your fruit, add ¼ tsp. almond extract to glaze mixture.
If using blueberries or huckleberries, add ¼ tsp. vanilla to glaze

Make sure berries or fruit is well drained and heap onto pie. Allow glaze to cool about 10 minutes before pouring over fruit. Chill well before serving or until glaze is set.

Microwave Caramel Corn

This is for Valerie…

Remember Cracker Jacks? There was no mistaking the box with its bright red and white label, little blue sailor and dog. As a kid, I wasn’t overly fond of caramel corn but I loved the peanuts. Of course, the hidden toy was the biggest draw and I would always dump a little out, and then dig through the rest, until I found it. Invariably it was at the bottom. It didn’t work to open the box from the bottom either—the toy would be on the top! You never knew what you would find—tattoo or stickers, maze and ball puzzles, rings, toy cars or animals. Compared and sometimes traded, it was magical to get the coolest one.

These days the toys that come in Cracker Jacks aren’t nearly so fun. I asked my husband this morning if he had liked Cracker Jacks as a kid. His reply; “you bet. But now the prize is just some stupid riddle on a piece of paper.” Clearly, I was not alone in my love of those little prizes.

This recipe for caramel corn came from Nana. It’s been in our family practically since the invention of the microwave. Now you too can make Cracker Jacks at home…the prize at the bottom as creative and cool as your imagination will allow.

Microwave Carmel Corn

6 quarts Plain Popcorn—no salt or butter

1 cube Butter

1 Cup Brown Sugar

½ teaspoon Cream of Tarter

¼ Cup Karo Corn Syrup

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

1-2 Cups nuts—your choice (Almonds or Peanuts work well) optional

Pop corn and place in a brown paper grocery bag. (We use an air popper to pop our corn, and 6 quarts is about two poppers.) Add nuts to popcorn. In a 3½-quart saucepan, melt butter. Add corn syrup, brown sugar, and cream of tartar. Bring to a rolling boil. Add soda and stir like crazy for 10 seconds. (The caramel will foam up so be ready to pour over popcorn in a hurry if it looks like it might overflow your pot.) Immediately pour onto the popcorn and mix well.

Fold top of bag down tightly and place in the microwave for 6 minutes, stirring after each minute. Dump the cooked caramel corn out on to parchment paper and spread to cool. Enjoy!

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!

Sour Reconnections

What is this longing to reconnect and acknowledge the past and those who came before? Is it a quest to understand—to remember? We study history. We read books about the past and try to place ourselves in the lives of the characters who lived there. We imagine what it would have been like to be a gold miner on our way to Alaska, a baker living in San Francisco before the Great Earth Quake, or a fur trapper in the wilds of Montana. We might imagine our great, great, great grandmothers on homesteads throughout America and wonder what delicacies were created in their pioneer kitchens. In some instances, we are lucky and those recipes are handed down through the generations. In others, they are forever lost. What fun then, to rediscover recipes long forgotten?

With that in mind, I’ll tell you about my new pet. It lives on my kitchen counter and is very well behaved. Aside from needing to be fed once or twice a day, it requires very little in the way of love and affection. I never have to take it out for a walk or do the pooper scooper thing. In all, not a bad pet. In return for my care, my yeasty beasties give me wonderful baked goods—the most delicious sourdough imaginable.

No one knows who first discovered the process of leavening bread with yeast but historians think it happened in Egypt. Imagine you are an Egyptian chef in the palace of the pharaoh. One bright summer morning, you’ve combined water and flour, maybe a little milk and oil to make the pharaoh’s hard, flat dinner cake, when in rushes a messenger.

“Baker,” he yells at you, “you must come quickly! There has been an accident. You are needed urgently at home.” The pharaoh’s dinner forgotten, you rush home. While you are away, natural yeasts present in the flour and milk, and maybe others floating in the air which land in your bowl, begin to ferment in the warm summer sun. The yeast uses the flour and water as food and produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct of their reproduction. When you finally return, hours later, you barely notice the bubbles now present in your mixing bowl. You go about making your flat cake as usual, mind preoccupied by the crisis at home. When you pull your cake out of the oven, you are horrified. Pharaoh is expecting his dinner and his cake looks nothing like it usually does. It is abnormally thick and deformed. However, you haven’t anything else to replace it, so with trepidation and remorse you set it before the king and hope for the best.

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(Fabulous!) He shouts. “Promote this baker to head chef.” You sigh and return to the kitchen thankful to have escaped death and clueless as to what you did to make the cake so delicious. Thus began a series of experiments that gave us yeast and sourdough today, thousands of years later.

Sourdough and bread made with beer barm, (the yeast 'overflow' that rises to the top of fermenting beer or mead and obtained from the dregs when the beer is racked) were staple foods for the next 5000 years. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that commercial yeast was introduced by Charles Fleischmann at the Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, 1876). This marked the rise of modern bread making, and some would argue the decline of good flavor in our bread—think ‘Wonder bread’—as the incredibly complex flavors of sourdough and the techniques used by our great grandparents disappeared beneath the increasingly busy schedule of the modern family.

There are hundreds of strains of yeast and all give different flavors to bread. Wouldn’t you like to make a loaf of bread made with the yeast native to Egypt? Bread that would taste very much like the one you served to pharaoh all those many years ago. Since my pet was given to me, I have made innumerable loaves of breads, a batch of cinnamon rolls, and loads of hotcakes. I’m still learning…experimenting with ingredients, rise times, and reconnecting to the breads made by my great grandmothers. I don’t have a recipe for you but here are several links I’ve found helpful in my own explorations. If you don’t want to hassle with making bread yourself, I would at least encourage you to visit an artisan bakery and experience the wonder of great bread made the old fashioned way.

Sourdoughs International : a good place to get starters from around the world
Sourdoughbreads.com: starters, instructions, and recipes
The Basics
History of Bread Yeast

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!

Waffles!

This is actually one of Marguerite's recipes, but I enjoy it so much that I thought I'd post about it. I believe the original recipe came with my grandma's (Marguerite's mom) waffle iron years ago. Marguerite doctored it up a bit to make it even tastier. Here's what you need if you wish to make these yummy waffles at your house:


1 1/4 cup flour (we use unbleached, but any white flour other than self-rising should work)
1 tsp. +/- cornmeal (optional--makes the waffles a little crispier)
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 egg (we use white eggs, but I'm sure brown would also do the trick; we've never tried this with egg substitutes, but I don't see why you couldn't)
1 cup milk (we use whole milk)
1/4 cup oil (I like canola because it doesn't have an overpowering flavor)
1/2 tsp. vanilla (Marguerite likes to go easy on the vanilla because it is kind of pricey, but I think a whole teaspoon adds a little something)
Powdered (confectioner's) sugar (optional)

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside; crack the egg into another bowl and beat it with a fork or spoon; add milk and oil to beaten egg; stir; stir in flour mixture; add vanilla last (for stronger vanilla flavor); bake in waffle iron according to iron's directions (ours clicks when the waffle is done, but yours may differ). Sprinkle powdered sugar or top, if desired (I think it tastes just like a funnel cake, only healthier, with the powdered sugar), or add waffle toppings of your choice. Makes approximately four round waffles in a standard waffle iron.