Meal No. 3895: Juicy Burgers on the Grill

Last Friday was a gorgeous summer day to coincide with the Fourth of July. I finally talked myself into one of my overdue yard projects: trimming a bunch of limbs from the Bradford pear tree in the side yard. And from that I worked up a pretty good appetite. The holiday, the weather, the belly rumbles: I knew of no smarter option than juicy burgers on the grill, well-covered with doubled cheese, plus homemade souped-up Thousand Island dressing on the brioche buns.

When I first stepped outside to light the grill, though, I was distracted by a plaintive cry, coming from under the firewood rack behind me. I opened up the rack cover enough and spotted a poor left-behind fur-ball.

I fetched some tucked-away cat food that I have on hand, more often used when it's necessary to trap a feral cat. But it was the cool water that seemed much more appreciated by this booger with its beautiful eyes. I pulled it out just to give it a quick look-see, and it had a lame rear leg.

That's the reason the shelter took her when I bundled her up on the first Saturday of July: because she had an injury they'd try to help her recover from or heal and then put her up for adoption. I think some family could really love her, with all her sweetness and readiness for human contact. We just could not be that family.

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Adapted from "Grilled Juicy Burgers," originally from Pillsbury Classic Cookbooks recipe magazine, July 2003, p. 52-53. After Pillsbury was purchased in 2001 by General Mills, home of Betty Crocker (founded in 1921, mind you!), it basically ceased to exist as a company and lives on just as a brand. I guess that's why a Pillsbury cookbook recipe from 2003 is now only found on the Betty Crocker website.

"Thousand Island Dressing," which was based on a version from Graybert on GeniusKitchen.com.

Meal No. 3894: Chicken Broccoli Ranch Supreme

Coming up from deep in my childhood was a delighted memory of a simple (but to us: exotic!) dish my mother learned from someone, a variation from our meat-and-two-sides pattern, and it inspired a created on-the-fly dish Thursday a week ago. Spiced and sautéed chicken breast morsels, plus roasted broccoli florets, dressed with a creamy sauce, hinted with lemon, enhanced with a mix of spices and herbs, and topped with grated parmesan to be finished under the broiler. It worked, a little too well!

Meal No. 3893: Emeril's Skillet Beef Stroganoff

The latest three-diners dinner for a midweek boost occurred Wednesday of last week, and it featured a long time comfort dish: skillet beef stroganoff. The hearty beef, the soft egg noodles, and the balanced spice in the slightly creamy broth base put tasty temptations in our sights.

Dessert was also required, of course, and I whipped up (as I often do, at the last minute) a vanilla bean pudding cake. It wasn't as soft and pudding-y as I've become accustomed to, so I may have botched some part of the recipe this time. But was it still good? Yeah. C'mon: sugar, vanilla, cake, sauce. It was good.

If you’ll forgive the quick cell phone photo through the window (and its screen), I had to capture a remarkable convergence on the fence of this central urban downtown lot: a bluebird and a goldfinch just inches from one another. The bluebird family has been here for weeks but goldfinches are rare! Given that I have not been caring for or cultivating the bird population here, I’m glad to have witnessed this happy coincidence.

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Based on "Beef Stroganoff Hamburger Dinner in a Skillet," by Emeril Lagasse. Found online at The Food Network and also on Emerils.com.

Meal No. 3892: Roasted Salmon & Broccoli

The first day of July found me in Virginia presenting at a conference but I was home by 4 pm...just in time to prep for a roasting dinner of spiced salmon and broccoli. Happy to have it on the plate just briefly, and happier to watch it disappear in short order into me.

Meal No. 3891: Bacon Grilled Cheese + Lovely Flowers

Well, it's certainly been a long and continuing ride on the bacon train around here, thanks to my recent obsession with a chile-rubbed approach to baking those heart-crushing strips of porky goodness. My attentions on the final Monday of June were devoted mostly to preparing a conference presentation and hitting the road, so a mid-day meal of bacon-cheese sandwiches was the easy fill-in.

I did take time to look around the yard in the early morning hours that day, and here are a few photos of how the blooms are faring.

It cannot with certainty be determined if a couple of the tall and stately lily stalks were felled by our recent storms, by that impish pup Scarlett (on her usual bird or skink hunts), or by the sheer weight of all that beauty.

Still, this random collection, planted from a bag of bulbs from Costco, is putting on a marvelous show this summer.

Some volunteer pansies have rebounded from previous years' plantings and popped back up in their seriously-neglected planting spots.

While I love liatris, it does not seem to love living with me. My varying locations and attempts to sustain these interesting plants have mostly been a dice roll of snake eyes. Here's a short one with stamina near the front wall, though.

Meal No. 3890: BBQ-Glazed Grilled Pork Kebabs

Sunday a week ago with storms in the general area, but leaving us mostly unmolested, I was back at the grill for a quick repeat of BBQ-glazed grilled pork kebabs. It had been a two-for-one sale on pork tenderloins and the second package was nearing its use-by date...and this is such an easy meal and perfect for summertime. A quick skillet of Rice-a-Roni plus some green beans completed the plate, and I indulged in more than the recommended allowance of pork morsels.

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"Grilled Pork Kebabs with Barbecue Glaze," by Andrea Geary. Recipe was an online extra from Cook's Illustrated and based on "The Best Way to Grill Pork Tenderloin," Issue No. 134, May & June 2015, p. 6.

Meal No. 3889: Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato Sandwiches

Welp: the broccoli crowns looked pitiful Saturday a week ago when I went by my usual Harris Teeter, so my hopes of roasting salmon had to be put aside. But there was bacon in the larder, and a tomato on the counter, and butter lettuce on sale, and some fresh sour dough loaf ready to be toasted. With Duke's mayonnaise to slather top and bottom, amazing BLTs were for the taking once the spice-rubbed bacon came out of the oven. It was a fine supper for a slightly stormy Saturday evening.

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"Chile-Rubbed Bacon," by Rick Martinez. In "D.I.Y. B.L.T. O.M.G.: Bake Better Bacon (Upgrade Idea No. 1)," Bon Appétit, July 2016, p. 44.

Cinnamon Brown Sugar Rice Krispies Treats

I ought to have left well enough alone but I'd had a lunch meeting on Friday a week ago and was a bit nibbly by evening. It'd been months and months since I last made cinnamon brown sugar rice krispies treats and that's what I decided to go with. And even though the marshmallows were probably getting past their prime, you still can't beat those treats, really.

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"Cinnamon Brown Sugar Rice Krispies Treats," from Christine Goff and published on JustAPinch.com.

Meal No. 3888: Grilled Chicken on Salad

Enough grilled chicken breast remained from the previous evening's super sandwiches so that the final Thursday of June could be a night of that on top of Romaine salad, with homemade Thousand Island dressing and the standard sprinkling of roasted sunflower seeds. The heatwave was still operational but had begun to moderate a bit by that afternoon, which made the succeeding walk to a movie at a/perture quite delightful.

Peach Butter Swim Biscuits

When Amy comes for dinner, I sure don't want to let her down by failing at the dessert challenge. She's also so very easy to get along with and that means I get to try out and experiment, which is what happened on the final Wednesday night of June. While it was a bonus that she filmed her Instagram reel wearing a UNC Tar Heels shirt, Zee the Introvert sold me on peach butter swim biscuits: easy to put together, and so satisfying to consume. I'd saved a couple of containers of the dense New England-style vanilla ice cream to go with it. You shoulda been here.

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"Peach Butter Swim Biscuits," from Zakia Boyd. On Instagram: zeetheintrovert. [Published 17 May 2025]

Meal No. 3887: Bacon Chicken Spicy Ranch Sandwiches

On the final Wednesday morning of June, with an oppressive heat dome too well-settled over the eastern half of the United States, it was another cool evening with Amy on hand for dinner and hanging out. But how best to balance that miserable weather, and how it put us all in slow motion, with a desire to make the menu appealing? I had a notion to shake things up a bit from my regular features. With a tomato, some Romaine, and ciabatta baguette from Trader Joe's, I pulled recently-prepped bacon out of the fridge to go with a batch of spicy ranch dressing I'd made; I pounded and marinated chicken breasts and then grilled them to a juicy perfection; before shutting down the grill I added provolone slices to the bacon'd bottom halves of that loaf and got them good and gooey. Then it was a matter of assembling the sandwiches to one's liking. As for me, that was a good slather of spicy ranch on the top bun, and Romaine and tomato and grilled chicken and provolone and bacon...and a two-fisted supper that satisfied.

Another variety of my mixed lilies was blooming fine that week, as noted above.

The low temp here at the house that morning was a stunning 80°F when I got up at 6 am. That was consistent for both outdoor monitoring stations. I quickly ruled out even a pre-dawn stroll. A morning meeting with a student in the Ed Leadership masters program I’m working with got me out of the house, and it was a great conversation at a popular coffeehouse in Kernersville. That’s what got me to the grocery store but I scampered back to the wonderful retreat of the Roediger House as soon as possible!

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"BEST Quick and Easy Chicken Marinade," by Tiffany Azure of Creme de la Crumb. [Published 18 April 2020 / Updated 11 August 2021]

"Spicy Ranch Dressing," from Alexa Blay of Key to My Lime.

"Chile-Rubbed Bacon," by Rick Martinez. In "D.I.Y. B.L.T. O.M.G.: Bake Better Bacon (Upgrade Idea No. 1)," Bon Appétit, July 2016, p. 44.

Meal No. 3886: National Detroit-Style Pizza Day

Ah, June 23: you rolled up on us with the extra gift of a National Day celebration of Detroit-style pizza, and I was ready to do my part to mark the occasion. No one has demanded that I employ tricks upon myself to increase variation in meals and other culinary pursuits...I just need these ruses to help me shake things up from time to time. Like the Dungeons & Dragons dice roll I created a year or so ago, following along with the National Day of "_____" calendar also forces my hand a bit. That’s how Monday a week ago found me getting an early afternoon start on Detroit-style pizza, for National Detroit-Style Pizza Day.

Sticking with a standard approach and depending still on the recipe I’d used the two previous times I’d made it, the outcome was just what I’d hoped for. These are gorgeous gracious loaded squares, once cut from the special pan, all cheesed and amply (and freshly) sauced, the charred bits giving crunch and the pepperonis giving slight heat. It was especially good that night, a joyous dinnertime where the delights were all culinary in all the best ways.

I was glad for the leftovers as well, because the following evening I had a chance to bring a virtual presentation to a group of doctoral students working under Dr. Zwadyk, and an early microwaved supper helped me work around that happy commitment. It was also wise to keep the oven off...and I forewent my evening stroll since that Tuesday night it was still almost 90°F (and real-feel of 102°F!) at 9:30 pm!

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"King Arthur's Detroit-Style Pizza," from King Arthur Baking and inspired by SeriousEats.com. See also the accompanying blog post, "A Pair of Pan Pizza Recipes," by PJ Hamel. [Published 18 June 2019]

Meal No. 3885: A Popover Breakfast

As we entered the blistering summer-starting heatwave the weekend before last, I utilized that Sunday afternoon indoors time to whip up an odd supper. Blame the dice roll game that we use to get me digging back into the recipes magazine archive, which pointed me to a limited set of options from Cook’s Illustrated and a simple recipe for popovers.

I’d tried these over 13 years ago without finding much to crow about, and I was not expecting much better this time. But were they ever some gorgeous popovers when I pulled them from the oven!

With no way to predict success or failure, I went ahead and compensated with chile-rubbed bacon and some Gruyère cheesy scrambled eggs, though. Two popovers proved too much and the plates were not quite cleaned…but there was just enough satisfaction to deem the night a success.

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”No-Fail Popovers,” by Andrea Geary. In Cook’s Illustrated, Number 168 [January & February 2021], p. 14-15.

"Chile-Rubbed Bacon," by Rick Martinez. In "D.I.Y. B.L.T. O.M.G.: Bake Better Bacon (Upgrade Idea No. 1)," Bon Appétit, July 2016, p. 44.

Meal No. 3884: Patty Melts

Saturday a week ago, as we moved into the front end of an oppressive early summer heatwave, I put aside ideas of grilling and instead put together a scrumptious and quite filling meal of patty melts. The sweet onions were slow sautéed in butter to a succulent tenderness, and the beef patties were well-flattened before earning their crowns of American cheese. A short spell of buttered griddling for the bread slices and the schmears of homemade burger sauce made it all rather delicious.

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"Beef & Cheddar Melts Sauce," a Roediger House creation. [Published 14 October 2022]

Simple burger seasoning pulled from "Simple Smashburgers," from the Roediger House. [Published 04 September 2024]

Dense, Chewy New England-Style Vanilla Ice Cream

If one batch can be amazing, there's all the more reason to double it, and that's how I handled the oversupply of separated egg yolks back in the middle of the month after using all the egg whites for the super epic rainbow layer cake. That's right: I had no choice but to make delicious ice cream, in abundance, and it was freakin' awesome. This meant pulling out the chest-style ice cream freezer, with the churning motor and all the ice and rock salt, and letting it hum away in the utility sink in the laundry room for a while. The first bowl of it served as dessert Friday night a week ago, and then other scoops made their way into evening affairs on subsequent days.

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"Dense, Chewy, and Rich New England-Style Ice Cream," from Max Falkowitz, former senior features editor of SeriousEats.com. [Updated 26 July 2022]

Meal No. 3883: Caesar-Dressed Power Greens with Herbed Chicken

Last Friday night was right for salads again, with homemade Caesar dressing and herbed chicken breasts pulled from the freezer and dropped into the sous vide immersion circulator that afternoon. Roasted sunflower seeds are essential and this simple meal brought a fine end to a pretty pleasant first day of summer.

Meal No. 3882: Toasted Bacon Sandwich

Last Thursday’s dinner option got reduced down to something quick yet again, and I had been unable to shake a mental fascination with a toasted bacon sandwich in all its small-plate simplicity. The chile-rubbed bacon that I recently discovered also has proven tough to shake and that’s the route I chose yet again.

The co-incidence of Juneteenth and the final official day of spring offered up a dish of stormy intensity just as dinnertime approached. A couple of flickers of the lights without a loss of power allowed dinner to hit the table on schedule nonetheless, but many other parts of the city were not so fortunate. Above is a photo from just up the street, where a tree has caused a power pole to crack but still hang taut on the tension of the lines.

But our neighbors a few streets over on Poplar were not quite so lucky: the huge limbs that came crashing down took out power lines.

That also was the case at the intersection of Glade and Clover just down from the house, in the West End neighborhood.

A couple of lanes of Marshall Street were blocked by the portion of a large tree across from the Benton Convention Center:

Here on our happy quarter acre, it was instead a ton of tiny branches mostly, and a few larger limbs that were easy to manage. The trash cans blew around, and a shingle or two landed on the driveway, and there was more washing of the soil in The Grove and along the line of azaleas on the south side of the driveway.

Once the rains stopped, I donned gloves and work boots and did as much cleanup as I could in the evening dusk light. Since that Thursday was a holiday, I was glad that the yard cart pickup occurred the following morning, since I’d stuffed it full of all that detritus.

This shingle above was flung from the roof with such force that it put a huge scrape on the trunk lid of my old Volkswagen CC. Better that than my new car, of course!

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"Chile-Rubbed Bacon," by Rick Martinez. In "D.I.Y. B.L.T. O.M.G.: Bake Better Bacon (Upgrade Idea No. 1)," Bon Appétit, July 2016, p. 44.

Meal No. 3881: Grilled Glazed Pork Kebabs

Ah, the advent of summertime! In spite of the remaining drizzles from a squall that passed quickly over us late afternoon last Wednesday, I stuck fast to my plan for grilling for three of us that night, featuring barbecue-glazed pork kebabs. Pretty perfectly cooked and nicely flavored with that homemade sauce, brushed on at the right intervals, these tender morsels went well with a heap of yellow rice and roasted herbed whole green beans. We were back to full sunshine by the time dinner was served, and it was a pretty nice June night.

On Thursday, as the final hours of spring expired, we spotted our first shed exoskeleton from a recently-emerged cicada nymph, another happy sign of summer. Alas, because I'd left the camp chairs on the porch through the winter, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that one of them became a nesting spot. I hope I didn't ruin their temporary homestead when I started to grab the chair so I could clean it up. Both the mother bird and I were very surprised by one another.

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"Grilled Pork Kebabs with Barbecue Glaze," by Andrea Geary. Recipe was an online extra from Cook's Illustrated and based on "The Best Way to Grill Pork Tenderloin," Issue No. 134, May & June 2015, p. 6.

King Arthur Baking's Original Cake Pan Cake

Last Tuesday I tried the recipe for King Arthur Baking's original cake pan cake. I'd tried the vanilla version a while back but this was the inaugural cocoa-based single round layer, all so that I could put to use the trial run of a white chocolate whipped ganache. When I'd made the super epic rainbow cake the weekend before, I was unsure how the quantity of Swiss buttercream would work out, and I had to have a back-up ready to go since there were six for our dinner gathering. Anyway: I didn't need the ganache base I'd prepared and didn't want to let it go, so here's the cake I made to go under it.

Probably because of all that good cake, I felt compelled to make my Tuesday evening downtown stroll a bit longer and somewhat aggressive, clocking in at just over 4.5 miles. Once again, that left me kind of soaked. But as I cooled down out in the side yard, I was exceptionally happy to hear the first cicada love song of the summer season, for me a most joyful noise.

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Based on "Original Cake Pan Cake," from PJ Hamel of King Arthur Baking Company. [Published 01 October 2015]

"Vanilla Whipped Ganache," from Christina Marsigliese of ScientificallySweet.com. [Published 12 August 2024 / Modified 12 June 2025]

Meal No. 3880: Salmon Caesar Salad

If it's not roasted and spiced just so, it's not the salmon of my dreams. Perhaps this helps explain why I take such joy in the kitchen endeavors here: I can make what I like just the way I like it. Such was the case last Tuesday evening, when I prepped and roasted salmon fillets but also whipped up a fresh batch of creamy Caesar dressing, all in service to a salad on power greens, adorned with a fair shake or so of roasted sunflower seeds.

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Based on "Easy Lemon Caesar Salad Dressing," by Kim Hardesty of lowcarbmaven.com.