well, this marks the first of our food posts here in the land of peaches & dream... and what a start it is! summer is the time for bbq's, burgers, hot dogs, potato salad... you know the drill. as i previously mentioned, we went to our friends seth & isis' house for a memorial day bbq on monday and to say it got us excited for summer meals would be a huge understatement! so it was no surprise that while at the grocery store yesterday we grabbed ourselves some lean ground meat and all the fixin's to make some seriously delicious (and huge!) burgers...
cheddar-stuffed bacon avocado burgers:
i started with two thin, hand-pressed patties of 90% lean ground angus beef, each about the size of my palm and 1" thick. i then placed thinly sliced cheddar (i specifically like using the cabot extra-sharp that comes pre-sliced for sandwiches) in small pieces on top of one of the patties, leaving about 1/4" of a border around the cheese so it wouldn't melt out from between them onto the frying pan. then i just pressed the two patties together, sandwiching the cheese between them, and cooked over medium heat in a frying pan over the stove.
as soon as i put the burgers on to cook, i started in with the bacon - fried over medium/high heat until cooked to perfection. each burger got one long,thick slice of bacon (cut in half) on top.
when the burgers were about 3 minutes from being done, i placed more cheddar on top (each burger used 1 slice from the package - one half of the slice inside the burger and the other half on top) and let it melt over the heat. once that was finito, i placed the patties on lightly-toasted buns and topped each with a quarter of a sliced avocado. we also had onions, lettuce and tomato as garnish, and they were *delicious*!
arugula & beet salad:
this was the dream's contribution to last night's meal which is odd for us because he is usually the one who cooks! i decided to give the guy a break and make the burgers, so he handled the salad. i should take a moment to note that he is a former long-term (11 years long!) vegetarian & vegan, so he's still finding his way around cooking meat. he's great with chicken & fish, but he's never tried to make burgers and, if i do say so myself, i certainly know my way around making a dang good burger!
anyway, enough of my tangent and onto the simple salad! dream started with arugula-based mixed greens (he loves him some arugula!) and added chickpeas (garbanzo beans), chunks of yummy beets and sliced onions! we topped it with annie's low-fat honey mustard vinaigrette et voila! a light & easy salad was the perfect balance to a hefty (albeit delicious) burger. we paired our meals with our fave cheapo beer - the *champagne of bottled beers*, in fact! i guess it's true what they say... you can take the girl out of the state university, but you can never really take the state university out of the girl...
now i'm off to see what the dream is cooking up tonight! my tummy is grumbling impatiently and i'm not allowed to peek - it's a surprise!
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