Art of the Odd

I’ve been craving a cheeseburger for days. Yesterday I said, “We should do cheeseburgers tonight! We’ve got that double gloucester/stilton blend that we should really try to eat before we leave for Ireland, and we can make sweet potato fries, which’ll get rid of some yams, too.”

Of course, I had to get buns, but those can be frozen before we go. “We’ll also need a tomato,” I thought, but then I remembered – we have a jar of sundried tomatoes. Might as well get those out. Ooooh, and look! Just enough spinach left to put that on the burgers, too!

We do have some hamburger patties in the freezer – left over from the last barbeque – but I didn’t want beef. I wanted venison. Fortunately, thanks to my stepfather, we’ve got quite a bit of that. (Our wedding gift from my awesome mother and her husband – a small chest freezer and a regular supply of game meat. Sam’ll take any excuse to do more hunting.)

Then NovySan got home and made some brilliant additions to the meal – like chopping one of the leeks that’s been languishing in the crisper drawer into the meat, with a generous helping of garlic. (This is where I complain that I looked everywhere for the jar of crushed garlic a week or so ago, and Novy found it behind the much larger jar of minced garlic. Which I also didn’t find. Gnomes are hiding my groceries.) And then, because as long as we’re finishing off cheese before we go, we might as well finish it all, he topped the Gloucester with herbed goat cheese.

There are reasons I love this man.

And as long as I’m talking about food…

I made this back in January. White bean and sweet potato soup, with walnut-sage pesto. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever made. The recipe is here. I substituted a pepper-infused olive oil for the walnut oil, to give it some heat.