Thursday Dinner - Burgers 'n Fries

Tonight's menu:

• Smoked gouda hamburgers
• Beer-battered potato wedges
• Carolina coleslaw

This was another completely unplanned dinner...so unplanned that we forgot some key ingredients at the grocery store (lettuce, tomato, canola oil) and ended up with slightly different burgers than we had anticipated. Due to the lack of forethought I have no real recipes for these dishes, we kind of just made them up. It's a way of cooking I'm not generally comfortable with, but tonight it worked!

The burgers consisted of ground beef, diced smoked gouda cheese, diced onions, minced garlic, Worcestershire, soy sauce, salt, and pepper in whatever proportions seemed good in Matt's head. He cooked them in a skillet and we served them on toasted buns, without much in the way of accoutrements. Fortunately the burgers were so tasty it didn't seem like they were missing anything.

Matt also handled the fries, which were amazing. He peeled a potato, sliced it, and battered it with a mixture of flour, garlic powder, onion powder, cajun seasoning, paprika, salt, pepper, and beer. Those were also pan-fried in lots of oil and they came out perfect: crispy crunchy on the outside, soft and hot on the inside. Way better than any fries I've ever eaten out.

I took on the coleslaw as a personal challenge. I hate mayonnaise-based coleslaw. I actually kind of dislike mayonnaise in general, but that's another issue. So I did a quick Google-search for "coleslaw without mayonnaise" and came across this Chowhound thread...apparently I'm not the only one! It seems this oil-instead-of-mayo coleslaw is referred to as "Carolina slaw" and the thread had lots of suggestions for ingredients. I didn't follow any of the recipes exactly, but pulled from several. Our final salad had red and green cabbage, sweet onion, canola oil (the tiny bit that was left in the bottle), toasted sesame oil, apple cider vinegar, pepper, and tons of Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt. The sesame oil and Jane's salt completely made the coleslaw. The only coleslaw I've ever liked better is from the Salt Lick, our favorite Texas barbecue joint. I've tried in vain to find the Salt Lick's coleslaw recipe online and to recreate it myself. Somehow I just can't get that special barbecue-side-dish flavor.

On a side note, Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt is a random seasoning I learned about from my mom. She always had it around and added it to everything...I never realized, until I started cooking, how great it is for giving a bland dish that little something extra to make it pop.