French Dip Sandwiches (with homemade bread!)

Pinterest is my life. I use it whenever I have a free moment to meal plan for the week, and look for new and interesting recipes that my very picky family will eat. It's very hard to eat healthy when the people you cook for favorite food groups are bacon, butter, cheese, and meat. No veggies, no fruits, no whole grains, so I gotta sneak them in when I can. Luckily the baby will eat anything without much objection. Usually after a meal or two of me making them eat more healthy, I reward them with something extra delicious. I saw this pin a few months ago and added it to my board, Recipes to Try.

Zuppa Toscana

Yesterday I made a pot of this tasty soup for a few reasons; 1. I LOVE this soup!, 2. I had all the ingredients on hand from an earlier meal, and 3. I was cleaning out the fridge and needed to make something before it went bad. I understand for some people that soup isn't really a summer staple (I'm in California remember? It's hotter earlier here!) but I just love soup all the time, and it's just a great and quick lunch to have on hand.

I posted this on my Facebook page and got a few comments regarding wanting the recipe, so I figured, why not? Here you go!

 Zuppa Toscana

(An Olive Garden inspired Copycat Recipe, after the cut)

Father's Office.

So for years I have been hearing about the "Best Burger" East Coast/West Coast battles. Those rivalries extend past rappers, and into food you know. And since then I have also been on my own quest for the best burger ever. It's hard to decide what exactly makes a burger the best, and even then my tastes will differ from the next. All I know is I want some medium cooked juicy hamburger, some amazing toppings, and the satisfaction that I must have this again soon. I got that last night with Melissa at Father's Office. Let me share it with you.

Santa Monica Location
1018 Montana Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90403
(310) 736-2224

We started off with some beers. Father's Office has a at any given time at least 35 awesome craftsman beers on tap, Melissa go the Maredsous 10.

I had an Old Speckled Hen. It was nice and light, and heavenly creamy.

One of the main problems of Father's Office that I've heard and the main reason (besides laziness) that I've stayed away is the crowd partnered with the Soup Nazi style of ordering. This isn't the kind of place you would want to go on a first or second date to, in fact let's keep this place for something more along the lines of a 6th or more date.

You wait outside in an astonishingly long line, only to be slowly trickled in by the doorman into a tiny hole in the wall sized room, lined with tables, with a bar at the far end. Mozy up to the bar and wait to place your order, and don't even worry about finding a place to sit yet. Grab a beer, and just wait.

FO's is famous for its burger envisioned by Sang Yoon, a self proclaimed "chef and a beer sommelier", and what we both ordered. It comes stacked high with arugula, soft tender onions caramelized in bacon, and a blend of melted blue and gruyere cheeses piled on big burger cooked to order (anything cooked longer than medium is blaspheme.) on a soft roll. For a bit more add an order of shoestring fries with parsley garlic aioli. Don't even think about substituting anything because, well, you can't. It comes as is.

After we ordered, it only took about 5 minutes to find a place to sit, and another 10 to get our burgers despite the large crowd on a Thursday night. My burger was cooked medium, juicy and AMAZING. I'm usually a burger purist and just dig meat on some bread with light condiments, but wowee was this burger worth it. The onions were quite possibly the best thing I've ever tasted on a burger, ever. The fries were thin, crispy and tasty with the aforementioned parsley garlic aioli, which tasted like fancy ranch. I think what made Melissa the most happy is, you will not find a drop of ketchup in this place, so don't even bother to ask.

The Father's Office burger definitely ranks up there in my top 10 burgers of all time, and I will be enjoying another one very soon.

The Del Mar Fair

As a kid, one of my fondest memories of San Diego was going to the Fair every summer. To some the fair means shoddy hastily put together rides, to some it means looking at animals and to some it means randomly booked concerts of people who you thought weren't even touring anymore. But to most it means any kind of food you can think of, battered and deep fried, awaiting your hungry mouth.


Every year there is a "new thing" at the fair. Some new fried anomaly that probably should have just never been thought of, yet you want to order and try anyway. Becca and 1 month old baby Jackson joined me on our quest to find the BEST OF THE FAIR! Read below...

We started off at an old favorite and staple, the Australian Battered Potato. Now I'm not exactly sure if this is something that people actually eat in Australia, maybe my reader from down under can chime in and let me know, but these babies are delicious. They are essentially slices of potato, battered, deep fried and drizzled in an array of toppings of your choice. We chose ranch.

Afterwards, we decided to get some zucchini. Becca swears up and down that Juicy's has the best, but I disagree!!


After ordering some fried zucchini, obviously we weren't going to order more from somewhere else to prove my point, but trust me, Juicy's is only second best.


We needed to let the fried settle, so we went to check out the booths and pitchmen inside the halls.

Inside Becca found the tiny baby donut maker and we just had to get a half dozen.

We didn't stop the fried food bonanza there! After a while we were feeling pretty hungry again (I have no idea how) and Becca wanted a funnel cake, and I wanted a churro. We found the best of both worlds....

MEXICAN FUNNEL CAKES!!! They also had Chocolate Covered Bacon (which we didn't try, but I hear it's all the rage)

It's like a PLATE OF CHURROS! This was the best of at the fair for me, and I would be hard pressed to find something else this year that made me quite as happy.

We mozied over to Chicken Charlie's cuz Bec was jonsin' to try this insane new crazy weird fair treat called a Zucchini Weeni. It's a hollowed out zucchini, stuffed with a hot dog, and you guessed it, battered and deep fried.

It was weird. Mostly because I couldn't figure out what to dip it in. Ketchup on a zucchini sounds nasty to me, and ranch on a corn dog is blaspheme.

For "dinner" we ate the "Fair Special Plate" at Chicken Charlie's.

Chicken strips, onion strings and zucchini curls with like a million kinds of dips. We both left stuffed and smelling of hot frying oil.

The Fair runs until July 5th.

Taco Soup

Yet another suggestion from Brian and his family! The original un-tweaked recipe can be found here at RecipeZaar, but mine is a bit different.

When I first looked at the soup recipe and saw the calorie content in that sucker I was incredibly hesitant to try it. I ran down the list of ingredients and figured I could make a lower calorie version of this without much effort and decided to give it a go. My tweaked version can be found below.


Ingredients



* 1 1/2 lb ground turkey
* 1 white onion, diced
* 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can tomato sauce
* 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can corn
* 2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans ranch style beans
* 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes
* 1 ounce taco seasoning
* 1 ounce powdered ranch dressing mix
* 1 tsp paprika
* 6 ounces diet cola, I used Coke Zero, but Diet Dr Pepper will also work
* 1 tsp garlic powder
* 4 cloves of garlic, smashed and added whole
* 1 tsp oregano
* 1 tsp cumin
* 1 tsp seasoning salt

I started off by browning the turkey with the onions. You can also opt to add the garlic at this point. The whole cloves were an after thought for me, so I didn't add them until later, but if when I do this recipe again, I would add them now.



The best way to dice onions is to cut in half, and then make long slits without going through the onion entirely. It makes it much easier to keep the onion from slipping around and you get a nice uniform cut.



While that cooked up, I added everything else into the crock pot, starting with the canned items. Beans, corn, tomato sauce and tomatoes, and then the special secret ingredient...



Yes! 8 ounces of soda. The original recipe called for regular Dr Pepper or Coke, which adds an extra 100 calories to the dish. If you don't like diet, or soda, you can also use beer, the alcohol will cook off I swear. I didn't even taste the diet soda in the soup honestly, but it did add a nice sweetness.

Next I measured out the spices in my little kitchen scale.



Below are my tweaks and additions to the soup; fresh garlic, oregano, seasoning salt, and cumin.



Next I drained the grease from the mean and onions (there wasn't much on the turkey, but I can imagine how much there is in the beef version), and added it to the soup, stirring and mixing it all in the crock pot.



I let it simmer for most of the day on low for about 6 hours, and served it with mini pepper jack quesadillas on the side, which are very easy to make and just require some cheese, and 2 corn tortillas. They were great for dipping.