I Don't Need To Comment On the Quality of the Burgers. Again.

    Last week, we were AWOL.  I had to lifeguard all day, and I had hoped that Cy would pen the blog.  Sufficed to say, he did not.  He did make dinner though, a picnic, that they took up to the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, underneath the St. John's Bridge.  Like last summer, these next few weeks, we will be gone a fair bit.

     We're home this week though, and we're going to make the most of it.  This afternoon we went to see The Beasts of the Southern Wild.  Mom cried, which I guess is as good a review as you can get.  Then Cy, Dad and I ran off to the David Douglas High School pool for "swim lessons" with Dennis Baker, an Olympic Trials finalist, and Masters World Record holder.  We got home around five-thirty, and got started on dinner.  Mom had lit the grill for us, and Dad and I went to work on the burgers for tonight's meal.  The burgers take only a few minutes on the grill, and as Dad watched them I prepared the requisite burger toppings.  As a side we've got grilled baby bok choi with romesco sauce and asparagus.
     After more than two-and-a-half years of Sunday Dinner, I don't need to comment on the quality of the burgers again.  The asparagus was excellent, greasy and crunchy with salt, the bok choi was good, though charred and far from great.  We've got a blueberry yogurt pie for dessert, and the Olympics for a finale.  Like whenever we make burgers, nothing spectacular, but still very good.

     Next week we probably won't be posting, though we might have something for you from our first day in Maine.

Stir-Fry (And Stir, And Stir, And Fry, And Fry)

     This weekend was the annual campout at our friend's cabin on Mt. Hood.  Every year, the kids will tromp through the woods on massive games of capture the flag, hide and seek and tag, and the parents sit around the campfire and drink.  They are so wrapped up in their own conversations that when, after a particularly intense game of capture-the-flag, a kid can stumble past the fire, blood dripping down one leg, hair matted with sticks and twigs, a dish towel clutched in their hand.  The parents reaction?  What reaction?  In other words, just like every year.  So, after I drove, and Dad biked home (50 miles), we knew we didn't have the energy for an elaborate tonight.  So we picked out something relatively simple, and good.
     While the beef for this stir-fry marinaded, Dad and I prepped the rest of the stir-fry, blanching broccoli, and chopping up red bell peppers.  Once the beef finished it's marinade, we cooked it in peanut oil, stirring and flinching a lot, the oil spitting it's small painful darts at us.  As with any stir fry, we had to make a mis en place, cook each item, then recreate our mis en place and put everything together and cook it again.  Ultimately though, the work was worth it.

     Like a good stir-fry, this one had more flavors than can be catalogued in a single bite, or many bites for that manner.  Unlike most stir-fries though, this one was
 followed by blueberry pie.  Even though today has been
rather gray, it was a good reminder that it IS summer.

Last Thing We Want

     Yesterday Cy and I had our first swim meet of the season.  While we were crushed by our rivals (and my high school teammates), a better day could not have been picked for jumping into and out of a pool.  It got up to a sweltering 90º (though that's admittedly nowhere near the heat baking the East Coast).  Today has been much the same, though minus the pool.  With that in mind, Cy picked out a meal that wouldn't heat up the house, and would require minimal effort from our heat-addled brains.

     He and Dad mixed up some burgers and kale-carrot salad for us, and then we retreated to the basement, which is ten degrees cooler, and infinitely more comfortable, to eat.  The burgers were quite good, as they always are, though the kale-carrot salad left Cyrus, Dad and I rather alienated, Cyrus having added more cayenne pepper than called for, and more than any person in their right mind would put in a salad of that size.  I stayed away from the salad myself, additional heat being the last thing I, or any of us, want on a day like today.
     To save our laptop--and my brain--from overheating I'm going to leave it at that for today.  Hopefully the national heat wave will have cleared off in a weeks time.

Road-Trip 2012

     The last two weekends we've been out of town, road tripping down the coast to San Francisco, stopping in Coos Bay and the Redwoods.  Yesterday we drove back from San Francisco.  It took us eleven hours fifteen minutes, including breaks.  Lunch was at the Black Bear Diner in Mt. Shasta City, and dinner was at an A&W just off I-5 outside of Albany, Oregon.  Cy'll be back next week with something that will (hopefully) improve upon anything on that A&W's menu.

Happy Father's Day

     Cy and I got out of school on Wednesday, and what a summer it's already been.  It seems like the sun waited until the end of school to finally come out. It was overcast on Wednesday morning, but not that afternoon.  We went to Simpatica http://simpaticacatering.com/  for Father's Day brunch, and went on to a whirlwind of a day- working in the garden, making tomato cages, and picking out new rental art.  Now we've finally got a chance to rest, as tonight's chicken is on the grill.
     I'm making grilled chicken sandwiches tonight, and they should be great.  It's a fairly simple recipe. As I write this, Dad is bringing the chicken in from the grill, and I've set up all the other ingredients inside.  Dinner will be ready in a few minutes.
 

     Dinner was really good, the olive tapenade and mayo spread was immensely flavorful, and it set off the roasted red peppers nicely.  The chicken was nice too, and the arugula gave the sandwiches a little crunch.  We had asparagus on the side.  A good meal to top of a good day.  Happy Father's Day.

Grandma Got An iPad

     Yesterday we bought Mimi an iPad.  Cy and I have gotten to use friend's before, but this is a new experience.  As we were teaching Mimi to use it, she was amazed, and reminisced how when she was a kid she had gone to the neighbor's to watch the (recorded) coronation of King George V.  Now, she had a "television" not an inch thick, that she could hold in her hand, take with her wherever she wanted, and watch events of much lesser consequence than a coronation in much less time.  She's playing with it in the living room right now.  While she play's Cy is making us dinner.  Even though this is a really nice day--possibly heralding that summer is here for good (we hope), he's not out on the grill tonight.  Instead, he's opted to try out the reuben's I made a few months back.
     Dad's on the oven, which he and Cy have turned into an impromptu sandwich grill, placing buttered sandwiches in cast iron skillets, and pressing them with pots weighted with water.  If last time was any indication, these are going to be some really good sandwiches.
     In addition to the reubens, Cy is putting together some catalonian asparagus and tater tots.  Both are in the oven, and are heating up the house to the edge of comfort, but I'm sure they'll be good, and in a few months this side of our house will always be uncomfortably warm.

     The sandwiches were a little burnt, though I think that might be Cy's fault for letting him grill them, as Dad is notorious for burning any sandwich that goes on the stove.  The tater tots and asparagus were goo, and all the dishes, Dad and Cy said, were fairly easy and no-frills.  It was a little stove-heavy for a day like today, but otherwise it was good.

The Price of Meat These Days...

     This weekend's been a busy one for me, Saturday was the lifeguard skills test day, 4 hours of practice saving people, and today we had to pick up our uniforms.  It didn't give me much time to think about dinner, so this morning, after I ate dad's excellent waffles, opened up the gourmet cookbook, put my finger down, and discovered I was going to make a rosemary beef fillet for dinner.   It looked quick, easy, and good, if not seasonal.  The last was fine though, as the weather isn't very seasonal either.
     When we went to the grocery store, we were planning to get the cut of beef the recipe called for--three and a half pounds of center-cut beef tenderloin--but the price threw us off.  Seventy dollars for three and a half pounds felt a little exorbitant.  So we got a much smaller piece for the five of us, and forked over the thirty-five dollars.  It's a good thing that was the only thing we needed to buy for dinner.
     When we got home I cut rosemary from our bush outside, working carefully not to bring in any spit-bugs.  Then I patted the thirty-five-dollar roast dry, and rubbed it with the rosemary, garlic, salt and pepper.  Then it was into the oven for the rest of the evening.
 
     The roast is out of the oven and it looks other-worldly, with countless sprigs of rosemary sticking out from it at odd angles. I left it to dad to carve, and he's serving it up too.  It's a great cut of meat, though not worth it's excessive cost.  We had side dishes of a salad, completely grown in our backyard, and asparagus.  While the meat was not worth it's cost, the meal was very much worth the effort that we put into it.  The meat was flavorful, the garlic and rosemary rubbed off nicely, and the outer edges were super salty.  Good, but way to much money for what we got.