Hong Kong Burgers

I know what you're thinking. SO MUCH red meat for an ex-vegetarian!

Personally, I view burgers as a sort of edible plate for whatever you are going to put on them. More of an excuse to put pimento cheese, jalapenos, and a fried egg on a bun for dinner than anything else. This is why, even after I abandoned vegetarianism at the age of 21, it still took until I was about 23 (and on my first date with Judson!) before I ate a meat burger again. If it's just a vehicle for burger toppings, why not just skip it in favor of the less expensive veggie burger options?

My view of burgers as little more than “the thing you have to serve if you're hosting a cookout” means I've never had to make them before because I'm always over in the corner plotting a dessert that won't melt in the sun. Someone else always views them as the quintessential expression of American cooking, and so I've always been exempted from making them. But not this time, and it turns out burgers are pretty easy-- even these weird ones. The texture of these is great: the patties are equal parts meat and bean sprouts, so there's a lot more going on than in a typical burger. And the fact that the flavour is more unique than just the “dump a packet of onion-soup-mix into a pile of ground beef” style of burger that I grew up with means you get to dress them up in a totally unique way. (Eleanor not guaranteed to approve, but, hey. You gotta do what you gotta do.)

We ate ours with acorn squash and roasted fennel, which I burned to a crisp. Life in our house is très glamorous.

The Verdict:

3 spoons out of five. Judson, a burger connoisseur, loved these. I thought they were good, too, but I got stuck eating the leftovers for lunch two days in a row, so I got bored. If we lived somewhere that wasn't Scotland, where it occasionally got warm enough to cookout, maybe I'd add another spoon, but, alas. Plus, I'm subtracting a spoon because the recipe called for ¾ lb of ground beef and ¼ lb of ground pork. Good luck finding ground pork anywhere, and if you do, good luck convincing someone to sell you only ¼ lb. We used all beef and it was fine. 

Note: If you're vegetarian or just not so into ground beef like I am, I think these would be really good made with black bean veggie burgers with a heap of steamed bean sprouts on top, garnished as noted below.

The Recipe:

Bean Sprout Burgers

The Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef
1 lb bean sprouts
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp garlic powder
¼ tsp ground ginger
Hamburger buns

Optional garnish: feta cheese, red onion, hot curry ketchup (1 tsp curry powder, 1 tbsp sriracha, 2 tbsp ketchup)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Combine all ingredients and shape into 5 or 6 patties (bean sprouts will stick out).
Chill for 30 minutes to allow flavours to mix.
Broil 2-3 inches from heat to desired doneness, turning once (about 5 minutes).

Yields 5-6 large-ish burgers.

Thumbprint Cookies with Chocolate Filling

Lately I've been alternating between recipes from the box that are so easy they don't even properly deserve to be called recipes (I'm looking at you, beer bread and the upcoming tomato soup recipe I'm sharing later this week) and dishes that, strictly speaking, include multiple recipes just to get to a finished product. This is one of the latter.

I've said already that I'm not wild about melting chocolate. I find it to be a really fickle project, and for every batch of chocolate I've successfully melted, there's another one out there somewhere that I've either burned or seized. Luckily, so far with the box, there have been no major incidents (but that doesn't mean I love the process)... until now.

I made these cookies for Judson to take to work for a game night he and some friends organised, and I was super excited about them because the cookies are supposed to be filled with “jam, citrus peel, or chocolate,” and I recently found a recipe for “chocolate filling for cookies,” so I got to use two recipes at once this time. (The recipe card for the cookies is worn and stained with Eleanor's notes in the corner, so I know she made these a lot. The chocolate filling recipe looks practically brand-new, so I don't know that this is what she used to fill the cookies, but we liked them pretty well.)

Eleanor wasn't pretentious enough to call the filling of these cookies ganache, but that's more or less what it is. It's the same chocolate mixture I used in the Chocolate Key Lime Pie from earlier this week, because I made these cookies first and was so excited about the results. Anyway, I was anticipating disaster, but sometimes it turns out if you follow a recipe to the letter, good things WILL happen.

These cookies are perfect cocktail party food: they look supremely fancy, they're rolled in nuts to give them a nice toasty flavour, and the rich, smooth, almost bitter chocolate filling contrasts really well with the sweet and crumbly shortbread texture of the cookies. You could fill them with jam, lemon curd, or candied citrus peel, but I think the chocolate is the most elegant/least messy of those options (and you know how we love elegance in this house. Ahem.).

The recipe seems overly detailed, but I'd encourage you not to skip the step of rolling the cookies in egg whites, even if you skip the nuts: the whites help give the cookies some body and keep them from splitting apart as they cook-- important since you'll have to press down the centers while the cookies are still hot. The recipe only makes about 16 cookies, so this is the perfect treat to bring to a friend's house to nibble with coffee, though it's easy enough to double it (and evidently, Eleanor often did, as she scribbled in the doubled amounts next to the original ingredients). Plus, I've now made this chocolate filling twice, with two different types of chocolate and two different procedures, and it's come out beautifully each time. If I can do it, so can you. Good luck!

The Verdict:

4 Spoons out of five. The cookies are straightforward enough, if a bit detailed, and the chocolate filling is surprisingly foolproof. They're rich enough and the chocolate is dark enough you're not going to want more than one at a time, so make them for a party or to go with coffee, not to get a major sugar rush.

The Recipe:

Thumbprint Cookies with Chocolate Filling

The Ingredients:
The Cookies:

½ c shortening (or Stork, if in the UK), softened
¼ c brown sugar
1 egg, separated
½ tsp vanilla
1 c sifted flour
¼ tsp salt
Finely chopped nuts (I used a mix of almonds and pecans)

 

 

 

 

The Filling:

1/3 c sugar
1 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg, beaten
6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
Handful of whole pecans

THE DIRECTIONS:
THE COOKIES:

Preheat oven to 375F/190C.
Mix shortening, brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla together in a large bowl.
Stir in sifted flour and salt (texture will be dry and almost like wet sand, but should stick together well).
Roll dough into 1-inch balls.
Dip in lightly beaten egg white, then roll in finely chopped nuts.
Place about 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake 5 minutes, then remove from oven and quickly press thumb or small spoon on top of each cookie to make a dip where the filling will go (if you figure out a way to do this without burning yourself, tell me how).
Return to oven and bake 6-8 more minutes until golden brown.
Let cool on a rack before filling.

THE FILLING:

Stir together sugar, milk, butter, vanilla, and egg in a bowl and set aside.
Melt chocolate in microwave at 10-second intervals, stirring after each interval until smooth.
Allow chocolate to cool slightly for about a minute, then pour in sugar mixture.
Stir constantly and quickly until mixture is smooth and glossy-- it may seize for a moment and get slightly grainy, but keep stirring briskly and it should smooth out quickly.
Spoon filling into each cookie's centre, topping with a whole pecan while still warm.
Filling will set and become semi-firm, but it will always be soft and fudge-like, not hard like a bar of chocolate.
(If you have any leftover filling when you've filled your cookies, dig around in your pantry and see what else you can dip in chocolate-- I used some clementines and a handful of saltines to finish up my chocolate-- yum!)

Yields approximately 16 cookies

Simple Prime Rib of Beef

You know that scene from the Flintstones where they pull into the drive-thru and the server puts a giant side of dinosaur ribs on the tray attached to the car, and the meat is so big it tips the car over?

Yeah, that's what we had for dinner last week with our chocolate key lime pie.

I found a “recipe” for prime rib in the box a few weeks ago. It's barely a recipe, really: anything with only four ingredients, two of which are salt and pepper, hardly counts as creative kitchen cooking. But that was an added benefit as far as I'm concerned-- I didn't want to ruin a cut of meat that cost more than I usually spend on meat in a month, and with a food this pricey, simple is always better. (Plus, I had just spent about a hundred hours making a key lime pie by the time I started this, so I was stoked to have something a little simpler to make.)

Considering the clipping with this recipe dates from 1989, I'm not sure Eleanor ever had a chance to make it. She might have just saved the clipping because of the advertisement in the bottom corner for personalised Bingo chips with matching earrings (a highly Eleanor thing to have, by all accounts), I don't know. However, with a husband who loves red meat and rarely eats it because we don't often think about buying it, I figured our anniversary was as good a time as any to make something so over-the-top fancy. After all, prime rib, according to the recipe, is a 'traditional dish that celebrates everything bountiful and elegant.'

There's an incredible local butcher shop on our block where I knew I wanted to buy the prime rib, but... well... I get really nervous every time I have to go alone. It's a perfect storm of anxiety-producing stimuli in there: A) meat (which I know nothing about and can't convincingly pretend to understand), B) lots of small talk in thick Scottish accents which I've come to understand pretty well as long as it's not noisy, but C) it's always insanely noisy with a meat grinder going, wind whipping in the open door, and customers yelling jokes about sausages to the butchers.

Last time I went in alone was to buy a piece of pork back in the fall. I ended up stuck in there for twenty minutes trying to explain a crock pot to the poor butcher, who probably was just trying to make small talk. So this time I did my research: found that sometimes prime rib over here is called 'forerib,' and that it is technically a standing rib roast. I forgot to research quantities, though, so when the poor butcher offered me a single rib, I thought he was joking. It turns out, though, that one rib is plenty for two people (in fact, we ate it for two nights in a row, so I think you could pretty easily use a single rib for a dinner for four). It's not a cheap meal, but it is surprisingly easy and if you have something to celebrate but don't want to spend all day in the kitchen, this is a great option.

The Verdict:

5 spoons out of five. (Can I give it six spoons? Just this once?) Our rib was about a kilo (2.2 pounds), and it cooked in under half an hour. Sprinkled generously with pepper and sparingly with salt, studded with a dozen garlic cloves, it was the perfect, easy, celebratory dinner.

The Recipe:

Prime Rib

The Ingredients:

1 prime rib of beef (approximately 1 rib for every 2-4 people)
½ tbsp salt
2 tbsp pepper
12 garlic cloves
1 jar prepared horseradish

THE DIRECTIONS:

At least 3 hours before cooking, place roast in a dish on the counter to come to room temperature.
Sprinkle each side with salt and pepper.
Push the garlic cloves into the fat on each side of roast, as deeply as possible.
Cover tightly and let sit until time to cook.
Once meat is at room temperature, preheat oven to 400F/204C.
Transfer meat to a roasting pan (you can use the rack if you'd like, though I didn't bother) and cook 15 minutes per pound until internal temperature reaches 125F/52C for rare.
After removing from oven, allow to stand for 15 minutes before carving and serving with horseradish sauce.