Tag: winner

YXE Le Burger Week – challenge accepted!

~ Dad's Turn To Cook ~ Leave a comment

I guess before I go on any further, I should mention and clarify a few things…

  1. If I mention a product or business, it’s because I use said product or business.
  2. If somebody ever (for whatever reason) decides to toss some cash or comp’d product my way, I’ll be quite transparent about said endorsement.

All good?  Let’s proceed.

It turns out this is Le Burger Week in Saskatoon, my new hometown.  From what I gather, something like 15 different restaurants are crafting their best/wildest/most delicious burger concepts and letting the public and their patrons decide the winner.  I’m not a chef, and the concept of a gourmet $20 burger gives the Scottish skinflint in me the chills, but through trial and error here’s my take on a scratch made burger that’s a winner around these parts.

Jo-Ella’s 2 hour buns

The buns.  I said “scratch-made” and I meant it.  If I have time, I’ll knock out a batch of these.  Takes around 2 hours to start getting your first batch out of the oven.  They’re light and fluffy and you get to knead and punch dough which can help you burn through some frustration.  This recipe can apparently be found on the big bags of Ellison’s All-Purpose Flour that at one point (maybe even still) could be purchased at CostCo.  I’ve never had a pantry big enough to house one of those bad boys, so I don’t use their flour, but the recipe is a very versatile one (and very forgiving).  Mrs Friesen (not my mother-in-law) back in my hometown of Calgary used to use this recipe all the time for buns, cabbage buns, cinnamon buns…it’s good.  I go 50/50 whole wheat and all-purpose white flour, I find the whole wheat dries things out more so you’ll probably need a bit less flour overall than if you went straight all-purpose as listed in the recipe.  After making a few monstrous buns, I have since learned that about 75grams of dough will give you a good ‘burger size’ bun following the final proof and bake.  My wife bought me a digital kitchen scale for Christmas this past year.  It comes in handy!

The fries.  Okay, I lied about it ALL being from scratch.  With the oven being claimed by the fresh baked buns, I really didn’t have time to knock out some roast potatoes (to do ’em right takes about an hour and change…) so good ol’ McCain SuperFries to the rescue.  They only take about 25 minutes which I was able to manage while my buns were on their final proof.

The burgers!

We don’t have a barbecue at the new place yet (have a natural gas hook-up though – I can’t wait until grilling season gets here!), but our trusty old George Foreman grill does a serviceable job on making the meat hot.  Again, while the Chef’s at all the restaurants will be breaking out crazy meat blends featuring chuck and steak and whatnot, I’m on a budget here.  This is my quick and dirty burger blend.

Dad’s Turn To Cook – burgers

  • 1 lb lean ground beef
  • 0.5 lb ground pork (yup – keeps things very tender)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 handful of oats (can also use breadcrumbs or crush up some crackers)
  • 1 teaspoon minced garlic
  • 1/4 cup diced onion – chopped REALLY fine so the kids don’t notice 😉
  • quick shake of cinnamon (shrug…I like it?)
  • 1 tablespoon mustard
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • and then a few cranks of salt and pepper from our grinder (I usually overdo it)

Form them into patties.  With that amount of meat, that should make 8 of them.  I usually vary the patties in size a bit.  A couple bigger ones for Dad and a couple smaller ones for our younger kids.  It’s a veritable Burger Family!  Toss them on the grill (or Foreman) and cook them until the internal temp is in excess of 160 degrees F.  The other Christmas gift I got was a digital cooking thermometer.  I LOVE that thing.

That’s it!  Burgers!  Add your toppings how you like and you’re good to go.

As for the budget, all in all, you’re looking at about $2 (and some time) for the buns.  I got 20 burger size buns out of that recipe and then a behemoth to use up the rest of the dough for the fun of it.  The ground beef worked out to about $3.50/lb, the ground pork was about $2 for a half-pound.  Add it all up, including the SuperFries, and I knocked out 8 scratch-made burgers for the family for about $10 (plus condiments).  I’ll take it!

-g

Banana Oatmeal Cookies (Happy Back To School!)

~ Dad's Turn To Cook ~ Leave a comment

After spending nearly every waking second with the kids over the summer as we marketed, sold, moved, and started getting settled in our new place I finally understand the sheer joy on those parent’s faces in the Staples commercials.  They’re going baaaaaaccck!

🙂

Now, as the kid’s new school, like pretty well every school on the planet, is decidedly ‘nut free’…and as I completely over-bought banana’s the last time I went to the grocery store, I decided to put together some snacks the kids will be okay taking along in their lunchkits (and burn through a couple mushy banana’s in the process).

Spoiler alert.  These are really really good.

Gotta be honest.  I was really hunting around for a recipe that would utilize the time honoured banana/chocolate combo.  Until I remembered that we burned through all of our chocolate chips before the move.  That is an issue that has since been rectified with a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips that weighs more than a small-to-medium sized child.

I like chocolate.

But as the chocolate level-up occurred AFTER I made these, I needed to hunt down a recipe that used bananas, and no nuts or chocolate chips (sad face).  Enter….

Banana Oatmeal Cookies

Tada!  What this recipe lacks in chocolate it more than makes up for in sheer volume of sugar.  Brown sugar AND white sugar?  Insanity!  Part of me wants to tackle this and see if I could replace at least some of that processed sugar with honey or some other sort of natural sweetener.  Then again, why?  They taste pretty good as is.  How could they not?  These are a very chewy and tasty treat.  I didn’t deviate from the recipe as listed, as long as I have all the ingredients in hand, I tend to follow baking instructions verbatim (for at least the first attempt).  I like my cookies a bit bigger than the recommended 1 tablespoon size they itemized in the recipe.  Only real change that occurred was to extend the baking time by about 5-6 minutes each batch as a result of a more substantial amount of dough that required a bit more time basking on the beach.  Or baking on the pan.  Whichever you prefer.

5 thumbs up from everybody in the family.  I think I’ll try these with some chocolate in them next time around – just for the fun of it.

Have a great school year kidlets!

-g

Sunday Pancakes

~ Dad's Turn To Cook ~ Leave a comment

Hope you enjoyed your Sunday.  I’m pretty new at this blogging world and am still trying to find my feet and a content schedule as to how often and how much I’ll be putting out into the digital universe, I do know that I’ll most likely be taking Sunday’s off from publishing anything.  Personal preference, we try to keep things as ‘screen free’ as we can for at least one day a week, and Sunday seems like the best fit overall.

It’s also the day that we typically wind up working through any leftovers from the previous week, so not a lot of new tastes being manufactured in the DT2C Kitchen!

I will pass along a recipe that I’ve been knocking out weekly for the past 10 years at least.  Sunday Pancakes.  It’s a family tradition…everybody needs some of these.  A special meal you eat exclusively on a certain day, whether it be a holiday, or a weekend.  We have a few such traditions around here.  1) Christmas morning waffles.  That one started up about 30 years ago when my brother and I teamed up to buy Mom a waffle maker for Christmas and we all just couldn’t wait to try it out.  and 2) Sunday Pancakes.  To be honest, this was really the start of my foray into the kitchen.  I took ownership of making Sunday lunch for one meal a week to help my Wife out and give her a break on a day that always seemed to be rushed and harried getting everybody gussied up and out the door for Church that morning.  It’s fairly quick, almost impossible to screw up (believe me, I’ve pulled it off a few times) and if there’s leftovers they’re a quick snack later in the week.

Here’s the recipe I’ve been using.  I had to go hunt down the card in the recipe box as I make this one so often it’s been ingrained in my memory.  Although I do need to refresh myself on occasion if I’ve taken a week off due to travel, etc.

Sunday Pancakes

– 3 eggs
– 2 1/4 cups milk
– 3 cups flour (I use 1.5 cups white and 1.5 cups whole wheat)
– 3 tablespoons sugar
– 3 tablespoons oil of choice (canola usually, we’ve used melted coconut oil too)
– 1.5 tablespoons baking powder
– 1/2 teaspoon salt

Instructions

Crack the eggs into a large bowl, whisk the until fluffy.  It doesn’t really get ‘fluffy’ per say, but the yellow yolk lightens a shade or two and you start seeing some air bubbles in there.

Add remaining ingredients.  I start with flour, end with milk.

Mix it all up.  Don’t under-do it or you wind up with ‘flour bombs’ as my one child puts it.  Don’t over-do it or you’re making glue.

Warm up a griddle.  When you can sprinkle some water on it and the water sizzles and dances, you’re good to go.  Spoon batter on.  Wait until the bubbles in the batter stop popping and you can see a bit of a ‘curl’ on the edge of the pancake forming, then flip.

This makes about 24 pancakes.

(edit – we’ve been using this one for so long, I forgot where it came from – my Wife tells me this can be found in Betty Crocker’s Entertaining Basics – only real change we’ve made is to go 50/50 with the flour and I believe the original recipe asked for 4 eggs, so we’re at 75% of the remaining ingredients)

You can serve these however you want really.  We thaw some blueberries and strawberries and put some syrup on the table.  My one child eats them plain, my other coats them with chocolate peanut butter.  On the side we fry up some Butterball turkey bacon (waaaaay less grease and hassle than regular bacon) and usually serve some orange juice to drink if we’ve remembered to pick some up.  It’s easy, it’s simple, the kids can learn stove safety and help measure in the ingredients and flip the pancakes.  I like it.  If the batter winds up too runny, add some flour.  If it’s too thick, add some milk.  If you add too much sugar, you’re basically making a cake.  I have honestly forgotten at least one ingredient in this recipe at least once over the years and it somehow still seems to turn out – it’s pretty ‘DOH!’ resistant.

-g

 

Spinach Pork Tenderloin Pasta Toss

~ Dad's Turn To Cook ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, I made that.

I thought it was about time to actually share a recipe on here.  After picking up an absolute killer deal on pork tenderloins at Safeway the other day (seriously, I think it worked out to about $3 each in a pack of 5) we’ll be burning through some pig.

Tenderloin is of course a very tender (hence the name) and easy to cut to cook.  It’s also very lean.  Doesn’t have a ton of natural flavour, we’ll get to that.  Having gone through my ‘usual’ pork tenderloin recipe a few days back, I decided to shake it up and try something different and this one I found on the Kraft site was a definite winner.

Spinach Pork Tenderloin Pasta Toss

A few substitutions on my end.  We used ‘regular’ parmesan cheese to finish before serving.  Didn’t feel like buying a bottle of ‘shredded’ for one recipe.

I also substituted regular mustard for dijon (personal preference) and fusilli pasta instead of rotini (again, we had fusilli pasta on hand and curly pasta is curly pasta).  I made more pasta then they recommended.  I like pasta and it lets you stretch this a bit more.

This one worked out great.  Thumbs up from all the family, even “the picky kid” who really only asked if I could make it without spinach next time.  No.  I can’t.  Spinach totally finishes this.  It feels like you’re putting a whole salad bar into the pot, but MAN that stuff will shrivel down when it finally catches the heat and starts to wilt.

This is a very soft taste on the palate and will definitely be going into our tenderloin rotation.  If anything, as mentioned above, the tenderloin could stand a bit of seasoning prior to going into the pot to kick it up a bit.  With the mustard/pepper/spinach already in the dish…hmm…I think I’d go for a bit of garlic and curry powder.  I’ve got this recipe bookmarked so I’ll try that out in the future and document the results.

Budget:

Tenderloin (on-sale) ~ $3
Spinach (uses most of a bag) ~3
Chicken broth ~$1.50
Cream cheese ~$1

Breaking it all down, even if you don’t get a sweet deal on the protein, you’re looking at about $10.  This fed our family of 5 and had a little bit left over for my Wife to take to work as leftovers.  Again, add some more pasta if you want to stretch this a bit.  It’s a very liquidy sauce and having some extra surface area to soak it up doesn’t hurt one bit either.

-g