Grilled Sweet Potatoes with Harissa and Ham-Burgers

I'm having real fun with the versitility of the grill lately. Grilled pizzas, fries, veggies, you name it. My aunt in Ottawa does nearly all of her cooking on the bbq nowadays. She even bakes her cakes using the bbq as an oven. Now all I wish I could have access to is a charcoal or brick bbq. No more propane for me.

To make grilled sweet potatoes or regular potatoes, simply toss relatively thick slices of them in oil with salt, pepper and whatever flavouring you want (I added some harissa) and grill till charred on the outside and soft on the inside. It takes a good half hour on medium-high heat but the result is better than trans-fat laden deep-fried fries any day. "Fries" this way are actually healthy.

With the grilled sweet potato I grilled some ham-burgers (ground pork with 25% ham) from the market and a nice simple tossed salad with orange segments, asian greens and bean sprouts. I put spicy jerk bbq sauce on the burgers and sandwiched them in some English muffins which are way better than the crappy air filled burger buns you buy from those cheap bread industrial bakeries.

With a generous dolop of harissa, this meal was nice slow food...meaning that I took the time to select and gather ingredients and then took time cooking and eating it while enjoying my time with my girlfriend. Life is good on the slow side.

Sweet Hamburgers with Stuffed Potato Skins

I hate making something really basic and simple without doing something creative with it. For example, making a hamburger pattie with nothing but ground beef topped with ketchup, relish and mustard is simply boring. In this particular instance I cracked some fresh pecans that come from my in-laws land in Mexico, the remainder of my fig and balsamic sauce, some honey, chopped onions, chunks of parmesan and a bit of Tabasco chipotle hot sauce. I'm trying to learn to balance flavours better. Sweet. Salty. Bitter. Creamy. And so on. Plus I don't mind making a burger pattie where beef is little more than a binding agent for other deliciousnesses.

Though I didn't buy fresh bread for the hamburger bun I toasted the halved buns on the grill and removed some of the flesh of the bun so that my hamburger isn't all bread. I hate having a sandwich or hamburger that's nothing but bread. It's like you have to procude five times the amount of saliva just to swallow one bite.

Given that I made an effort to make a tasty pattie, I kept my toppings simple and complimentary to the flavours already present. Some grainy mustard which has a nice sharp, earthy taste, a thin slice of tomato and some onion sprouts than are milder and earthier than regular old yellow onions. All in all, it was a nice tasting burger.

To accompany the burgers, I made stuffed potato skins. The recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook said to basically throw away the cooked flesh of the potato skins and sprinkle the potato skins with toppings such as tomato, bacon, green onions and cheese. Instead of doing that, I made a sort of mashed potato with the flesh and put all sorts of ingredients in the mixture. Here's the recipe....or something close to it

Impromptu Stuffed Potato Skins

4 medium sized baking potatoes
1/4 cup sour cream
2 tbsp butter

1/3 cup shredded cheddar, colbe, mozzarella
1/4 cup grape tomatoes, cut in irregular sized pieces (any tomato is good so long as it tastes better than those big wattery ones)
1/4 cup diced onion
1 hot pepper, sliced with seeds (be adventurous...go with habanero)
1/4 cup shredded and dehydrated Mexican style pork (or shrimp or bacon or assorted seafood...so basically whatever protein you have on hand)
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp chilli powder
salt and pepper

1. Brush potatoes clean and prick all over with a fork. Place potatoes on a baking sheet and pop into a 475 degree oven for 40 to 45 minutes.

2. Take potatoes out, slice in half and scoop out the cooked flesh making sure not to tear the potatoe skins. Mash potatoes together with sour cream and butter.

3. Add about one third of the cheese and all other ingredients to the potato mixture, season and fold together to distribute all ingredients evenly. Scoop mixture into the potato skins and top with remaining cheese. Put potatoes skins back onto baking sheet and bake for another 10 minutes to heat all ingredients through. Switch to broiler to make the cheese nice and golden. Take potato skins out of oven and serve without forks. It makes a mess that way. Fun times.

It's amazing that all of this meal came from my fridge which contains little more than leftovers and odd bits. I also threw away like 4 containers of sour cream. Why I had so much sour cream is beyond me. How does a person accumulate 4 extra containers of sour cream? And one had never been opened! Weird.

Barbecued Perogies...Who Knew?

I haven't touched my barbecue lately on account of a ridiculous schedule and all too frequent downpours. But these last two days, sitting at home and reading the latest escapade of our friend Harry Potter, I finally had time to cook...even though it was nothing very fancy.

Two days ago my girlfriend revealed that she had a craving for perogies. When it comes of those little morsels of carbs and starch I'm really not one to refuse. So, taking the frozen grocery store variety out of our freezer, I boiled the perogies and prepared a frying pan in which I placed bacon, chopped onion and garlic. But this time, instead of transferring the perogies to a skillet full of peanut oil, I brought the little dough balls to the barbecue. The result was nicely charred, crispy and puffy perogies accompanied by the bacon mixture, sour cream, salsa and hot sauce. And anyone who says "Ew!" to salsa on perogies hasn't tried it yet. They're a match made in heaven

In my book (dans mon livre à moé) everything can be grilled except the obvious exceptions such as eggs and other liquid food items. I cook corn (without the husk) directly on the grill and make sure to get loads of barbecue sauce in between each individual kernel. Today I even cooked some bacon strips on the grill to go with my hamburgers. They sizzled beautifully over the flames they were feading in the bottom of my bbq. I then sandwiched them between the patty and a slice of processed cheese, waited for the cheese to melt and then splattered my face in the tomatoey, pickle, onion, jerk bbq sauce goodness of the hamburger more appropriately called a manwich. Simple but delicious.

Now I just have to figure out a way of making my patties taste less bland, a feat I haven't yet achieved dispite the fact that I load it with flavoured bread crumbs, cajun spice mix, chopped red onion, and an egg. Sigh *