Friends, please forgive me for the delay in blogging yesterday’s Sunday Cookout! I mean, here it is Monday and I’m just getting around to Sunday. Yesterday got away from me a bit – LeeLee and I went kayaking for about four hours, and by the time dinner was over we were both exhausted! So I had a choice: Phone in my blog post (so to speak) or hold off for a day until I got my act together. I decided on the latter, obviously! So here I am.
(But what about tonight’s meal, you ask? Actually, LeeLee and I went out tonight to celebrate Alexandria’s Restaurant Week. I’ll be writing an article for the newspaper about it shortly, and will share it here on these pages!)
Anyway, back to last night. We have CSA vegetables coming out of our ears these days, so I knew that something protein-based would be just the ticket to accompany all the great greenery! So I pulled four veggie patties out of the freezer and arranged some veggie bacon on a plate as well. Then I sliced an onion and a tomato and washed some romaine lettuce to accompany the burgers. Next, I prepped my veggies – snapping the ends off the HUGE number of green beans that came in last week’s Great Country Farms box and washing two potatoes for baking – and then fired up the grill! (While baking the potatoes indoors, of course.)
As the grill heated, I finished preparing my green-bean recipe. I put the green beans in an aluminum pan along with four links of sliced vegetarian sausage, about seven or eight halved tomatoes, some onion powder, some salt and pepper, a dash of cumin, and a pat of butter. I mixed everything together well and then topped the beans with some panko bread crumbs before covering the pan thing with foil. I grilled the pan for about 30 minutes, and the final result was a wonderfully crisp-tender side dish!
Next, I cooked four veggie burgers and several slices of veggie bacon. I tell you what, there’s just nothing like bacon cooked right on the grill grates! It crisps up beautifully and has such a nice sizzle to it. Within just a short while, the bacon was ready, and soon the burgers were too. So I took them off and put on two buns to toast for a moment as I prepared the rest of the meal – pulling the baked potatoes out of the oven and the like.
The weather was glorious last night, so we sat down at the backyard table to dine al fresco. And let me assure you, we feasted like royalty! Instead of ketchup, LeeLee proposed that we add barbecue sauce to our burgers, which gave them a wonderfully smoky taste, and the fresh farmer’s market tomato and onion (and store-bought lettuce, but still fresh) were the perfect accouterments. The green-bean recipe was as charming as always, and who doesn’t love a perfectly fresh potato, just a week away from the ground?
We had two remaining burgers for lunch today; LeeLee polished off the first one, and I’ll have the second for lunch tomorrow myself. I do love a successful cookout!
:)