Tag Archives: Burgers

Jul4

Quarantine cooking 2020

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Various days, weeks, and months in early 2020

 

Hello! Welcome to “cooking pretty well”! I’m your host, Ben!

Today, I’ll be showing you some of the things that I cooked pretty well! Thanks to COVID-19, everything’s shut down here in Oregon. I’m very glad that everything’s shut down, but it does make getting interesting food fairly difficult.

Luckily for me, I like cooking! I’m even okay at it usually!

 

I didn’t post any individual articles about these while I was cooking them, because they’re frankly not that particularly interesting or impressive on their own. But when taken together… this shows a history of creativity and can-do attitude! Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Short version – I had a lot of fun trying new recipes, and cooking things that I’m not well versed in. It was fun, and almost everything came out quite tasty!

  • White Castle burgers!
    I followed a youtube recipe (link below) which walked me through the various steps to preparing and cooking semi-accurate White Castle sliders. I can’t comment on how authentic they tasted, since I’ve never actually been to a White Castle, but I can say that I was happy with how they came out.
    As a bonus, I couldn’t get buns from the grocery store, so I made my own!
    Solid 7/10
  • Brisket!
    I followed my standard recipe for this one, and I’m happy to say that it came out exactly as well as I’d expect.
    8.5/10
  • Hamburger Sliders!
    Not similar at all to the White Castle burgers, these were cooked directly on the skillet, and didn’t have any onions included… but dang, did I do a good job.
    I even learned that they’re good as leftovers, either re-heated in the toaster, or just microwaved and eaten like a savage.
    9.5/10, good things here.
  • Steak.
    Is steak. Was good. Yes.
    9.5/10
  • Mega-Extra bacon cheese burger!
    Normally, I don’t put lettuce or tomato on my burgers. It’s not that I’m against it, mind you, it’s just that I don’t think that they add enough to justify the effort of getting all the extra ingredients. See, I don’t really buy “hamburger materials”, it’s just stuff that I like to keep stocked in the kitchen. Lettuce and tomato though… those don’t last long enough to keep stocked regularly, so I don’t.
    Which means that, sometimes, I decide to get fancy and make a full-power burger. Like this one!
    9/10, yay burger!
Aug14

Exploring Fort Stevens and Astoria… IN OREGON YO! This is my new JAM! – Day 1

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Exploring Fort Stevens and Astoria… IN OREGON YO! This is my new JAM! – Day 1

Wednesday, 17-June-2015

Our first day at camp, and my first day (yes, my first day ever) in Oregon! I know, it’s kind of crazy… but I got hired to this new job sight unseen – I did two phone interviews, and then they offered me a job. No in-person, nothing. And I’d never felt the draw to take a trip out to Oregon – it’s beautiful, I’m sure, but there were other places that had called out to me just a little bit louder.

But now, I was in Oregon. Our tents were set up, and the cars mostly unpacked.

So we packed back into the cars, and headed into town. If you had asked me, I couldn’t have pinpointed for you exactly why I wanted to visit Astoria… but for various reasons the name stuck out in my head.

(Ed note: Dark Astoria, from the City of Heroes video game. So Long, Astoria, the album that Ben loves. The Goonies, a pretty damn good movie. The name just generally being freaking cool)

So we headed in, looking for the one thing that we did know Astoria was famous for – its breweries.

Since we had driven all day, we didn’t aim to do a full pub crawl – instead, we picked one place and hunkered down for an evening of food and tastings. Our choice was Buoy Beer… mostly because it was easy to get to, and highly rated on Yelp. Yeah yeah, make fun of us for using yelp. We were on a road trip and you weren’t, ohh fancy-pants.

Buoy Beer Brew House. Bison Burgers. Bevies of Bountiful… Boysters. And beer. We ate hamburgers and drank beer and slurped oysters. It was delicious and amazing. I’ll admit, hindsight being 20/20, that the oysters weren’t as good as New England oysters. But the Bison burgers and the beer were very much top notch.

Top notch enough that we could barely move as we wandered Astoria after we’d eaten and drank our fill. But we did – we explored a bit and walked off some of the food coma. Or at least enough of it that we could make it back to camp that night, and pass our surprisingly early.