Where's the (Ground) Beef?

No, seriously, where's the beef?  After dreaming all day about perfectly-cooked, juicy, medium-rare burger, Allie and I were horrified to discover that the fattiest ground beef that we could find at our local grocery was 93/7 (compared to our preferred burger mixture of 80% lean, 20% fat, which, in our minds, yields the juiciest, most tender patties).  After talking to the butcher and confirming that there was nothing close to what we were after, we did the only thing that would enable us to enjoy the burgers that we'd been lusting after all day: we bought a rib eye and decided we'd grind it ourselves.

HOUSE-GROUND RIB EYE BURGERS
Ingredients

• Rib eye Steak (~1/2 pound per person)
• 1 T Butter (Melted)
• Salt
• Pepper
• Buns

Directions

1. These directions actually start at the store itself.  When buying your steak, you should look for a few things: Great marbling (ensuring that there is a good amount of white fat flecks in the muscle itself), a rich pink color, and a non-mushy texture.  You can buy bone-in or boneless (but if you buy the former, you'll need to cut the bone out yourself).

2. After getting home with your steak, cut it into long slices, sprinkle liberally with salt and freshly-ground pepper, and put it into the freezer for about 10 minutes.  This will firm the meat up enough so that it can be easily ground.

3. After the meat is nice and firm, it's grinding time!  We used our meat grinder attachment for our trusty Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and used the larger of the two dye plates.  After grinding the chunks of meat once, we put the once-ground beef through the grinder again, which further mixed the fattier bits with the leaner bits.

4. After grinding all of the meat, we formed it into patties by starting with balls and gently flattening them out.  We also made sure to leave an indention in the middle of each patty, so as the meat expands as it cooks, the burger doesn't get too round.  After the grill was preheated, we melted the butter in the microwave, brushed one side of the burgers, and put them, butter side down, onto the hot side of the grill.

5. After about three minutes, we quickly buttered the uncooked tops of the burgers, and flipped them.  Note: Thou shall NOT push the burgers down with the spatula (lest you lose the delicious juices.  Be prepared to combat any flare-ups with a squirt-bottle of water.

6. After another three minutes or so, we pulled the burgers (internal temperature around 115).  We then let them rest for between five to ten minutes so that the juices could re-introduce themselves into the meat (and not go running as soon as we bit in).

7. After the burgers had rested, we put them onto the toasted buns, and kept toppings to a minimum (balsamic-caramelized onions and mayo).  We cut in, and enjoyed.

All in all, we were frustrated by a cruddy meat selection at first, but necessity is the mother of amazing burgers.  The lack of decent ground chuck led us to improvise with rib eye, which we will absolutely be repeating in the future.

Seattle Restaurant Week: Six Days in Heaven

It was late March when Allie and I heard about Seattle Restaurant Week, a 9-day event in which over 100 restaurants in Seattle would offer a 3-course prix fixe meal for $25. Allie and I immediately started planning how we would take advantage of some great food for an even better price. We looked at the menus for the stand-out restaurants on the list (both places we’d been and placed we’d been dying to try), and both rated each of them from 1 to 10, splitting the difference when our scores differed. After reading through more than 30 menus, we ranked them, picked our top six, and immediately made reservations.

We knew that this was one of the best ways that we could sample some of the pricier places that Seattle has to offer, and that we would eat like kings for a week. On the other hand, we spent the rest of the month eating leftovers to ensure that our wallets would be able to compensate for Restaurant Week. (Six restaurants at $50 a pop without tax, tip or beverage(s) can still add up, you know!)

Here’s a recap of the amazing restaurants we visited, and our favorite dishes we had at each of them. (And yes, we were the dorks taking pictures of everything that was put down in front of us. But, sometimes being a dork pays off…)

Crush (2319 East Madison Street)

Grilled pork belly served atop stone-ground grits*

Palisade (2601 West Marina Place)

Wagyu Sirloin with fingerling potatoes and grilled asparagus (this was seriously melt-in –your-mouth incredible)

Spring Hill (4437 California Avenue Southwest)

Perfect vanilla pudding with root beer Madeline’s and toffee crumble

Joule (1913 North 45th Street)

Korean-influenced Alaskan black cod*

Nell’s (6804 East Greenlake Way North)

Pork Tenderloin with cauliflower and pea tendrils

Dahlia Lounge (2001 4th Avenue)

Made-to-order doughnuts with rhubarb jam and vanilla mascarpone cream. Yes, they live up to the hype.

Dahlia coconut cream pie with white chocolate and toasted coconut.

*These photos were two of the three winners of the Seattle Restaurant Week photo contest. Yep… we’re award-winning photographers! Plus, we ended up winning gift certificates to two of the restaurants that barely missed the cut when we decided when we’d go during Restaurant Week itself! Plus the budgeting continues, so we’ll take all the help we can get in supporting our dining habit.