Kosher-Style Pork Cracklins

Jay has a new grill, so I have been trying to find opportunities to use it. I found a yummy sounding recipe in Cook's Illustrated that I wanted to try for making medium-well to well-done burgers. The point of the recipe was that you can cook your meat well and have a tasty, juicy burger in the end. Well, it worked! I don't think there's anything in the recipe that we would have changed. We used hamburger meat from HEB that was free with a coupon. We had sharp cheddar cheese melted on top and used Pepperidge Farm Premium Bakery Rolls (the whole wheat version) for buns.

We had a little friend over for the evening, so I thought hamburgers would be more kid friendly than the other recipes I'd been planning for the week. We also baked some frozen french fries in the oven that were leftover from my birthday party. Everything was so yummy!! (Jay even raved about the burgers to his coworkers the next day!)

Sara couldn't wait to work with the raw meat.

Sara helped me mix up the meat with the other ingredients.

Jay was our backyard chef, and did an excellent job with the burgers!

Sara found some cute potholders given to us by Jay's parents.

• Well-Done Burgers Done Well (Cook's Illustrated #81, August 2006, p. 20-21)
  

This dish turned out looking beautiful and tasting even better! The beef was incredibly (you guessed it...) tender. Very very easy to make. The recipe calls for a whole beef tenderloin (about 6 pounds), and I decided we'd do this with about half. My local HEB didn't carry anything close, so we tried Whole Foods. They only had sliced beef tenderloin at the counter, but were more than happy to slice up a whole (or a half!) for me. It was fun and amazing to watch. I think I picked the end that was slightly thinner, and I think he cut half, although it may have been less. It came up as 1.8 pounds and I okayed it while marveling at the price. ($30 per pound! Woah. Thank goodness it wasn't 3 pounds!) The butcher trimmed the meat well so I didn't have to figure out what the "chain" was or trim any other excess fat.

The Red Wine Sauce that accompanied this recipe turned out delicious! (...the second try.) I was supposed to reduce it to a cup total. I ended up reducing it to 1/8th of a cup at the most. Part of the problem was I tried using a coffee filter to strain the shallots and thyme out of the sauce. I think it just absorbed a lot of it and didn't strain anything. A regular strainer worked fine. (Because the thyme was still attached to the stem. duh!) I was so displeased with its taste and appearance. With the sauce being so much effort and the beef being so special (if only by price at that point), I decided to try it again. This time, I turned the temperature down, too, so it didn't reduce so quickly. Ahh... this time I hit 1 perfect cup exactly! Plus it tasted quite a bit better. While the sauce was good, I think the meat held up just fine on its own, too. (This is me saying I'm not sure it was worth all the effort!)

I tried a recipe for lemon and thyme mashed potatoes from epicurious. With all the thyme flavoring the beef, I didn't taste it much in the potatoes. They were good mashed potatoes, but I think garlic mashed potatoes would have gone better with the tenderloin.

• Slow-Roasted Beef Tenderloin with Thyme, Red Wine Sauce (Fine Cooking's Weekend Cooking 2007, p. 70)
• Mashed Potatoes with Thyme-Lemon Butter (epicurious)