Turkey Burgers

Cheryl came over the other night and we were trying to think of something relatively healthy to make. We ended up making these turkey burgers with tomato corn salsa and they were pretty good! I dumped a lot of cumin in there with the turkey, possibly too much, but it was still tasty. And it turned out to be quite cheap too! Cheryl took this picture which came out much better than we thought it would. Good work!

Peach Shortcake

We are moving!

The best part of moving is that we are moving down the street from a farmer's market. Which is extremely awesome. We started with a bucket of peaches ($4)

The skins went into a cup of water, cup of sugar and sprigs of mint to boil up and simmer down into a nice syrup to cover the peeled fruit.

J made shortcake. Having made a special trip to the store to get ice cream and whipped cream, we forgot a round cookie cutter, but he found that the large star one works just as well.

Combine all and then eat. Yay!

Fish Provencal

I decided to make this recipe, despite not having a grill. It was excellent! When you open the foil the smell is amazing. I used tilapia instead of cod. To get around the no grill situation, I just stuck the foil in the oven. I had about 1/3 a pound fish and the oven set at 350. It took about 30 mins, though I'd definitely recommend checking on it often. Make this recipe! It's great, easy, and there are almost no dishes to clean afterwards!

In honor of Italy

We are eating spaghetti with meat sauce tonight.

Just sayin'. Nothing gourmet about this meal. But, we're leaving for Italy in four days, so it's time to eat what's in the house. Creative and quick meals for the next four days.

Sonal's Birthday Feast

For Sonal's birthday this year, we decided to throw a pot-luck picnic in Central Park. It of course rained the whole afternoon (as it has done every time we decide to throw a pot-luck picnic), so we moved the party indoors to a bar. The owner was more than happy to have 12 people fill her otherwise empty bar at 1pm on a Saturday. They don't serve food at this bar and completely welcome outside food. It's the perfect place to relocate a pot-luck picnic. I made:

Chocolate Fudge: Uber easy -- who knew! I keep telling it's as easy as making rice krispee treats (something I mastered at age 10). The other nice part about making fudge was that I could make it a few days in advance.

Tomato, Corn, and Avocado Salad: this is my new favorite dish! So quick, hardly any mess to clean up. I actually had a bunch of leftover ingredients, so I made it again for dinner later in the week.

Macaroni Salad: another new favorite. there's something so yummy about the way this tastes. I made it with whole wheat noodles, so you don't feel so bad eating all those carbs. Again I had leftovers of most of the ingredients so I made it again for lunch one day. I didn't have any prosciutto left, so instead I sliced up some chicken breast lunch meat and put that in. It worked really well. I might have even liked it better that way. A couple tips:

• don't toss all the goat cheese in before you put the noodles in. The heat from the pasta kinda melts everything (in a good way b/c the pasta gets really well coated with the sauce), but its nice to have some un-melted pieces of goat cheese too. I put about half in before and saved the other half to add later, once the whole thing cooled down a bit.
• double the quantity of tomatos, cheese, and meat that you use compared to the pasta otherwise you end up with mainly noodles. I caught that tip in the comments people left on the recipe so I just did it, but I can easily see how it could happen.

Strawberry Cream Cake: This was our birthday cake. I'm going to admit - I made the cake part from a box mix to save time, but I used to rest of the recipe for the cream and strawberries. Also, don't listen to them when they tell you to whip the cream until you get "soft peaks" -- its a lie. You need "firm peaks" - as any other whipped cream recipe will tell you.

Chocolate covered strawberries

The other day we were at a Godiva store where they were selling chocolate covered strawberries for like $4 each. Insane. The next day it just so happened that LZ brought home this huge bar of chocolate from work - free! (It had expired - something I don't worry about.) I wanted to think of something to do with it that wouldn't result in my eating the entire thing that very night. Chocolate covered strawberries were the perfect thing! Then I decided I needed a double boiler so I ran out and got one. And finally, these beauties were born. There's plenty of chocolate left so I'll be making more tonight!

Mulberries!

A lady in my neighborhood has a couple huge mulberries trees that drop an incredible amount of white mulberries during June and July. Her neighbors complain that she doesn't clean up after it so she said anyone who helps sweep the sidewalk can have all the mulberries they want. I figured I'd give it a try and I collected all these mulberries. They look pretty gross don't they? Like albino blackberries. Or caterpillar parts. Too bad it turns out they don't have any particular taste. So I mixed them with some cherries and blueberries and made this berry crisp. It was good, but the mulberries didn't add much besides volume. Picking them and meeting the mulberry lady was an interesting experience though!