Burgers with Cantaloupe Salsa

Thinking ahead for once, I realized that I was going to want to have something pretty easy for dinner on Sunday. We haven't had burgers at home yet this summer, so that sounded like a pretty good option, though it left open the question of what to have for a vegetable. There was a cantaloupe in our CSA this week, and so I thought, why not use that to make a salsa to put on the burgers? The sweetness of the cantaloupe should go well with the spiciness of the peppers and the beefiness of the burgers. Poking around the internet, it turns out I wasn't the first person to think of this, and I found a good recipe to use as a base.

About 40 minutes before cooking time, I took the ground beef out of the fridge, shaped it, and seasoned it with some salt and pepper. I want to shape the ground beef into patties while it's still cold, since the beef resists my manipulations somewhat, and so maintains a bit more texture. But, it should be room temperature when I throw it on the grill, so that it cooks evenly. Seasoning it early helps the seasonings seep throughout the meat, and the salt helps structure the proteins. I was fortunate enough to have a wife who made the salsa the night before, so once the patties were shaped, I just had to pour the coals into the chimney to get ready to cook.

The hamburgers turned out well, with a nice crust but juicy and meaty on the inside. I was a bit nervous about how it would pair with the salsa, but it went really well together. The salsa was just nicely sweet and a little spicy, so with each bite, you got a bit of juicy spicy sweetness. If I had to do it again, I might spice the burger with some allspice or some cajun spices, but this works quite well with just some salt and pepper.

Marinated Hanger Steak

One of our favorite cuts of beef is the Hanger Steak, so-called because it 'hangs' from the diaphragm. It has all of the beefiness of rib-eye at a much lower price. Due to the coarser structure of the meat, it also takes well to marinades, and that's what we decided to do this past weekend. I used a recipe from Serious Eats as a baseline, but I added some Arbol peppers, since that's apparently what I was doing that weekend.

One of the reasons hanger steaks are as cheap as they are is that they're a bit of a pain to trim. There's typically a lot of excess fat and silverskin you need to remove before cooking. And you need to remove it! I tried it without once, and it wasn't nearly as good. Not to mention that if you're grilling, all that fat will cause massive flare-ups. After trimming, you'll see a thick sinew running down the middle of the steak. You need to cut the steak in half to remove; it's too tough to eat. I always recommend cooking steaks medium rare, but with hanger, it's almost a necessity. Any less, and it'll taste mushy.

I enjoyed the recipe below. I marinated for about four hours, and that probably wasn't quite enough. There was some spiciness from the pepper, for example, but with a few more hours, there could have been a better level. Also, I should have used some indirect heat to finish up the thicker bits. But it was still really good, and I look forward to cooking more hanger in the future. Recipe after the jump.

Pork Tenderloin with Ginger-Rum Marinade

We bought some pork tenderloin earlier this week, with which my wife made a lovely meal, but there was too much for just one meal, so we froze half of it. Now that the weekend has arrived, it's time to grill, and I figured I'd try my hand at grilling this great cut of meat. Now, I also bought some rum a few days ago. After poking around the internet for a while, I found a great recipe for a Ginger-Rum Marinade.

I'm not sure what type of rum would be best in this recipe, but I just bought some Kraken dark spiced rum, so that's what went into it. Rum always has me thinking of the Carribean, and the pineapple juice just encourages those sorts of thoughts, so I added some Allspice to the marinade. I also added some smoked sea salt, just to help the marinade penetrate and maybe give it a bit more smokiness. My little grill could use all the help it can get! So I let it sit for a few hours, then got ready to grill.

Once the grill heated up, I put the tenderloin on for four minutes a side. I'd grill a steak of similar thickness for about 12 to 13 minutes, and pork should be cooked a bit longer than steak, so 16 minutes seems about right. I also made sure to baste it at regular intervals with the remainder of the marinade. It turned out perhaps a trifle overcooked, but was still really juicy. You could definitely taste the pineapple, but it was more refreshing than overpowering. A very good marinade. Recipe after the jump:

Hot Sausage Dinner

The nice thing about getting off of work early is that I have plenty of time to go to the grocery store and make dinner. Sometimes, that means planning an elaborate dinner, three courses or some such, going to the store to get the fixings, and going at it. This time, it meant going to the store and seeing what looked good and/or was on sale.

It so happened that they had really good looking hot Italian sausage. It was a nice day, so I figured I could grill it, have a nice meal outdoors, and enjoy the bottle of Brewer's Art Green Peppercorn Trippel I had picked up. But I wanted a meal a bit more complicated than just sausage on a bun. Preferably involving vegetables. I grabbed some jalapeño for spice and some onion. I wanted something green, so I grabbed some cabbage. I thought maybe I could make some sauerkraut, but that was too complicated, long, and involved ingredients I didn't have. Or at least two of the three, depending on the recipe. So I made German coleslaw.

After starting up the grill, I put the sausage on the grill to cook a little while I cut up the onion and jalapeño. I sliced each in half and brushed some olive oil on the end. I set the onion on the grill, flipped the sausage, and a bit later, set the pepper on the grill. I wasn't going to, but looking at the way the jalapeño was cooking, I flipped them over before I took them off. Everything cooked up fine, but I wish I had sliced the onion before cooking, rather than cutting in half. The caramelized bits were great, but the caramelization didn't penetrate very far.

Once everything was cooked, I piled it on toasted buns. Sausage, coleslaw, jalapeño, mustard, and onion on a bun. It wasn't bad. Stone-ground mustard would have been better, but I only had Dijon. I had the aforementioned problem with the onions. The jalapeños were great though, and the coleslaw gave the contraption a really satisfying crunch.