KITCHEN ADVENTURES: TRAYF! …Okay, only the actual cheeseburger was trayf, and I’m not going to tell you how to make a cheeseburger. But here are two new things I’ve made in the past couple days.

A thing to eat with your cheeseburger: Chop up some heirloom tomato* and jalapeno. Saute it in the pan with your burger. (Obviously, this won’t work if you have a grill, rather than a studio-apartment kitchenette; in that case, I guess saute the vegs in olive oil rather than yummy yummy beef fat.) Season with black pepper, a dash or two of cinnamon, and some cumin. You can put it on the burger or whatever.

This was really delicious–dark, rich, only a little bit sweet. I don’t cook meat very often, but I’ll definitely break this out the next time I make cheeseburgers.

* I’m sure you could use regular tomatoes–I only used a big, greeny-red heirloom one because it was on sale–but I think using the spiffier tomato did help the flavor. There was a really neat, unexpected aroma and hint of almost a butternut squash or even pumpkin flavor. Very subtle, and you wouldn’t think that would work with the burger, but it completely did. I’m assuming the cinnamon brought out that aspect of the tomato.

Bombay-Style French Toast Sandwich: The idea for the toast comes from the “TWOP Chef” forum at Television w/o Pity; the sandwich thing was just me in a sandwich mood.

Break an egg into a dish, finely dice maybe 1/3 to 1/2 a jalapeno and add it to the egg, add some milk, and season with curry powder (and again, a dash of cinnamon, because I’m slightly obsessed). The TWOP Chef recipe also had onion in the egg mixture, but I left that out because there would be an onion in the sandwich filling. Anyway, mix this stuff up with a fork until it’s all mixed together. Soak two slices of bread in the mixture.

Melt a big hunk of butter in a pan. Fry the eggy bread in the butter (and dump the leftover mixture on top), turning as necessary. Top one slice with a thick slice of tomato (I used the same heirloom tomato, but it didn’t seem to make any difference in this dish), a slice of sweet onion, and a slice of munster cheese, then put the other bread slice on top. Cookity cookity cookity until cheese is melted. Eat with your hands if no one is watching.

the verdict: This was serviceable. I liked the savory french toastiness of it. I still haven’t learned to make french toast as well as my mom does, though; and because the toast was so flavorful and hot, the filling inside tasted kind of bland and didn’t add anything to the dish. So while I’ll make the Bombay-style french toast again, I don’t think I’ll do it in sandwich form.


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