Guest cook!

I came home to a surprise.

My wife had pulled a pound o’ ground out of the freezer and thawed it by the time I got home.

Furthermore, she’d whipped up some home-made flour tortillas, and pulled up a batch of her home-made ground beef seasoning for tacos. Dinner was almost ready.

Grass-fed beef tacos on home-made flour tortillas. I’m a very lucky man.

Here’s a quick recap of what happened while I was out.

pre-tortillas

A griddle helps.

Done.

I arrived just as she was starting to brown the beef.

The mise:

aka, "the mess."

So many spices!

I love it when my wife cooks, and she’s very good at it. But we have very different styles.

I’m of the Prior Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance school of kitchen-y arts. I tend to prep everything in advance, clear away anything that’s served it’s purpose, and clean as I go. I hate cleaning, but I like a clean, uncluttered workspace.

My wife cooks in what I call Schrodinger’s Kitchen. She enters, and then the place looks like a food bomb has gone off. Oil on the walls, flour on the ceiling, ingredients akimbo… little dust storms of polenta and confectioner’s sugar kicking up intermittently and throwing around tiny piles of fresh herbs like prairie twisters. I can check in to see how she’s doing, but there is really no way to tell.

When my wife cooks, the meal is simultaneously both ruined and sublime until we take our first bite. Then, the wave function collapses, and we see how everything turned out.

Today, it was lovely.

Yay, Wednesday!

The verdict? A simple, fast weeknight meal. Flour tortillas aren’t hard to make from scratch, and I highly recommend doing so.

Likewise, seasoning the ground yourself is much nicer than the prepackaged taco spices.

The Wife Says: I am Escoffier reborn.

The Husband Says: A quick, healthy, and delicious weeknight meal. Two thumbs up.

Ground – Kofta Kebabs

Helluva weekend.

Took in a Dodgers game, hit the Getty, and got some stuff done around the house. It was both productive and fun, which is the best kind of weekend.

Sunday afternoon, it’s time to think about dinner. I want to do something a little out of my normal routine.

I’ve been considering doing kebabs for a while. And I don’t remember how the idea got into my head, but I’ve been wanting to do kofta kebabs, specifically. I think I had them in a restaurant at some point in the vague, detail-deficient past. I enjoyed them, and I certainly have no shortage of ground beef.

Kofta kebabs are essentially balls of spiced ground beef or lamb (usually lamb), grilled on a kebab skewer. I want to do them up with a little tzatziki sauce and maybe a little feta. The recipe I’m roughly basing this on is here.

The tzatziki sauce will take the longest by a fair margin, so I start with that. Grate a cucumber, pinch of salt, and let it chill in a bowl for a half hour or so to jettison some of the water in the plant. All that water will mess up the creamy loveliness of the sauce.

Seeded...

...and grated.

On to other things. Beef, grated onion, parsley, and spices go into a bowl, as does a clove of garlic, smashed with a little salt.

Meat properly spiced, I pause to consider. The recipe calls for chilling the beef for a period of time to let the spices mingle, but also, I believe, to firm up the fats so the little kofta balls will stay kofta balls. Time is at a premium for me right now, so I won’t be chilling them very long. I’d like some insurance.

So I break an egg into the meat. That should help bind the meat together. Other recipes call for it, this one doesn’t, but an egg certainly won’t hurt anything.

Right. Meat’s chilling, back to the tzatziki. I drain the cuke, add into the Greek yogurt (which is considerably thicker than common whole milk yogurt, so don’t try to sub straight across), a little salt, extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, another garlic-smashed-with-salt dose, and mint. Into the fridge with it.

Nothing left to do but wait.

"That's the box where Deliciousness lives..."

Thirty minutes later, I’m grilling.

They're like Rockettes.

Thirty five minutes later, I’m done.

I pull the tzatziki, toss out some feta and grill some pita for a few seconds. To the table.

Plating, and we’re golden.

Literally, golden. Check out that magic hour.

Verdict? Not bad. Not a show-stopper by any means, but not a tragedy. And we had plenty of leftovers, so I’m going to be doing this for lunch all next week.

Everything was a touch salty for my tastes. I think I know why.

I believe this meal fell afoul of some technical difficulties on my part. Remember the garlic crushed with salt into a coarse paste? That salt acts as an abrasive to the garlic, ripping up cell walls and letting all the garlicky goodness permeate its surroundings. I used that technique for both the meat and the tzatziki. Plus I added some salt, as per the recipe. Plus I added feta, which carries its own not-insignificant sodium load. As a result, I believe the meat itself became a touch oversalted, then the tzatziki and feta compounded the problem.

If I were to make it again in the future, I’d probably cut the salt by at least twenty five percent. Further, and perhaps more importantly, I wouldn’t abrade the garlic with salt. I’d just chop/smash/mangle the heck out of it. I think the benefit from abrading the garlic is offset by the danger of over-salting the dish.

For lunches this week, I’ll ditch the feta and possibly the sauce. Hell, I may even remake the tzatziki, since it’s so easy.

EDIT: I checked the reviews of this recipe on the Foodtv website. The overwhelming majority of the reviewers say this dish was too salty. I concur. It isn’t just me. Dial it back. Dial it way back.

The Wife Says: Six thumbs up out of ten. Too salty.

I’m gonna get a glass of water.

Ground – Cheddar Pancetta Burgers

Nobody ever talks about the Fifth of July.

Sure, the Fourth is sexy. Friends, family, drink-drink, boom-boom, nosh-nosh, yay!

But the Fifth — The Fifth is an altogether different beast.

The Fifth is trying and failing to sleep ’til 1.

The Fifth is two weeks of laundry in two and a half hours because you were too busy having fun the day before.

The Fifth is rummaging through singed grass and Black Cat wrappers to find the fingers you blew off  twenty-four hours ago.

The Fifth is just about getting to the sixth.

Still, a guy’s gotta eat.

Time is at a premium, and I’m beat up from the feet up. Burger time.

I haven’t done straight-up hamburgers yet for this project. But I don’t intend to start now.

My wife and I split tasks. She was looking for something to bake today, because she finds it relaxing. She finds a recipe in Bittman for Bacon Cheddar buns, but she isn’t interested in using bacon today, largely because we don’t have any. (I have it on good authority that the entire local bacon supply was consumed in some sort of explosion at my friend Ben’s place the day before.)

We do, however, have pancetta. So she whips up some cheddar-pancetta hamburger buns.

I have a pound o’ ground thawing. I usually hit my burger patties with salt, pepper and Worcestershire, because I dig that fermented anchovy, garum-y goodness. But not today.

I know Sum’s worked hard on those buns, so I want to do something to bring that out. I have some sharp cheddar in the fridge. That’ll do nicely.

But I’m in a mood. Let’s make this a surprise.

Salt, pepper, then I build the patty around the cheese, rather than melting the cheese over the top.

This burger could sneak Greeks into Troy.

I'm sneaky.

…though my subterfuge didn’t hold.

Maybe if we made a giant badger...

In the end, everything came out beautifully. And unlike yesterday, did not take double the projected amount of time.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Also, I’ve learned my son loves corn. Like, really, really loves corn. Like, “Hey, your son is one year old. And he just ate a burger and two full ears of corn. I’m a little afraid of him” -loves corn.

You're next.

Next: sleep.

Ground – Mini-burgers

My wife made mini-burgers. They were lovely.

But she took no pictures. It’s almost as if we had a hundred and forty pounds of beef in a freezer, and she had a hungry toddler to feed.

Regardless, I’ll recap here. She didn’t quite do ‘em like you’d expect.

Some ground beef. Ketchup, mustard, cheese.

But buns? Puff pastry. Completely sealed around browned grass-fed beef, baked in a stupid hot oven.

My wife is both smart and innovative.

Result: Yum. I’m gonna eat these for days.

Advice: Brown the beef, and set it aside. Bring the puff pastry to just below room temp, fill with ground beef, add a little good cheddar, seal the puff, and bake. It’s like a Hot Pocket filled with every good thought your mother ever had about you.

Good ingredients.

Don’t mess ‘em up.

Yum.

…poof!

Ground – Taco Pie

Alright, so haute cuisine this ain’t. (Also: correct grammar this isn’t.)

Hell, it uses Fritos as an ingredient.

But these are the facts: my wife and I work long hours at our jobs. We have limited time with our toddler son. And dinner needs to be on the table at an hour that works for all of us. (And this meal is damn tasty.)

Also, we have a hundred and forty pounds of ground beef at our disposal.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present Taco Pie.

This is an heirloom recipe. Summer learned it from her mom, who learned it from Alice Waters while they were on a sabbatical together in the Hamptons. They read Gloria Steinem to each other and got matching tattoos. It was beautiful.

I can’t comment on the ground beef, other than to say this: there are no fat-content labels on the beef. All our meat came from a single animal. Whatever didn’t become a cut became ground. Fifteen percent fat? Ten? Seven? Three? No idea. Since it came from a single steer, it likely reflects the overall fat content of the animal, rather than an amalgam to hit a particular fat-content number. In short, a healthy fat-content animal will give healthy fat-content beef. And this was a healthy fat-content animal.

The animal has less fat overall than a grain-fed beast, but the high-quality grass finishing is intended to add a layer of fat to the outside of the primals to preserve the actual muscle tissue during dry-aging (which most beef doesn’t have to worry about, because they don’t dry-age) so a precise measurement is difficult.

Regardless, there was very little fat left in the pan after browning the beef. Less than grain-fed, anyway.

Ingredients:

1 lb ground beef

some sour cream. Enough to make a layer on top.

A block o’ cheddar. Shredded

Regular sized bag of Fritos , crushed. (yes, fritos.)

1 can of crescent rolls, for the crust.

Miscellaneous Texy-Mexy spices, easy on the salt.

Water.

Love.

Brown and season the beef. Make a crust out of the crescent rolls in an eight-ish inch pie pan. Add a layer of crushed Fritos, a layer of beef, a layer of sour cream, a layer of cheddar, and top with another layer of crushed Fritos. Bake at 350 for thirty minutes.

Ta da:

taco pie

The diff: I won’t say grass-fed tastes gamier yet, because I don’t have a large enough sample size. But there was definitely less fat in the pan than with grain-fed. Sum claims to taste the difference; I reserve judgment.  Regardless, I do appreciate knowing where my beef comes from. I met the guy who slapped my steer on the ass to move it to fresh pasture. Most beef doesn’t have That Guy, and most beef doesn’t have fresh pasture.

In all, Taco Pie doesn’t make a hero out of grass-fed beef, but it’s a quick, vaguely healthy weeknight meal. And my todder loves it, I’ll sing its praisies to the rooftops.

Next: Ribeye.