Roast Beef, Blue Cheese and Onion Jam Panini

 

 

There's something so satisfying about a well made sandwich. Not a sandwich where you just throw on some deli meat and condiments and call it good, but one where you layer the flavors and combine ingredients and textures to create something that's more than its individual parts.  

Baked Apple Dumplings

Let's do Fall right this year. That means lots of apples and pumpkins. So let's start with apples this week and then I'm going to have an awesome pumpkin recipe coming up next.

We're going to take an apple and make it anything but healthy. As in, even though there's still some fruit in this, there's no way it can be described as anything but, hide in your closet and eat two of them and love every second of it, indulgence.

Homemade Hummus Flour Tortillas

Here's a fun and simple recipe that pretty much anyone can make; Flour tortillas! These are so simple and you'll end up with tortillas that taste so much better than anything you can get at the store. And by using Sabra hummus, you can essentially make them any flavor you want. I used their Chipotle variety in this batch but I can't think of any of their flavors that wouldn't make an excellent tortilla.

Dinner in the Garden 2014

For the last couple years, each summer we have hosted a dinner in the garden where we set up a formal dinner outside and celebrate the wonderful foods that we are growing in our own and local farmers gardens. We missed last year with all of our remodeling so we were excited to get back on our normal routine.  I love creating the menu and cooking some fun new foods and sharing them with our friends.

Mango and Peach Salsa Burgers

It's summer and for my birthday last month I treated myself to a new grill and smoker. I love smoking meat but I wasn't a huge fan of the electric smoker I purchased a few years ago so I didn't use it much except for a turkey at Thanksgiving. My new grill is a Traeger and it smokes as well as grills and I've been experimenting with it as much as I can. My favorite thing so far has been the huge pork butt I smoke a few weeks ago. We used it for over a week and had everything from sandwiches to tacos with the meat. My mouth waters even now when I think about it.

Lemon Coconut and Strawberry "Shortcake" Cupcakes

 We've redesigned our entire backyard this year and have been hard at work rearranging, creating new garden boxes and re-purposing our old patio. Part of all the movement included digging up hundreds of our old strawberry plants and replanting them in their new home. We've got a whole dedicated area for them now and hope they go crazy and produce tons of new berries. We figured with all the movement they wouldn't produce anything this year but after getting them back in the ground, they perked right up and are now in full blossom and ready to fruit! Our Minnesota winter puts us behind most of the country though so it will still be a few weeks before we get to pick the fruit.

Wild Rice and Hummus Burgers

I don't like the idea of veggie burgers more for the reason that people are typically trying to use them as a substitute for a real meat burger. And there is no substitute. Period. But if instead you just want to have a really good sandwich and it happens to not have any meat in it, I'm all for that. And honestly with these Wild Rice and Hummus "burgers" I'm OK with them not having any meat. I almost topped them with some bacon though. And that would have made them just that much better.