Kitchen playtime - the catching up extended version

Well, it's been an interesting couple of weeks at the Dominic household. I haven't done this column in a while because first I had a stomach bug and couldn't stand to think about food. And then Hubby got some sort of stomach ickiness, and we passed it back and forth for a while. We were still not thinking about food. And then the Dekalb water crisis hit, and suddenly we couldn't rinse vegetables, first because we didn't have water, and then because we had to boil the water first. As Hubby said, it's third world water service at first world prices. Seriously, we're in this situation because a mower hit a fire hydrant, which then broke a water main. No, I'm not sure how the physics of that works. We don't have silly things like physics in Dekalb County, Georgia. At least that's the only explanation I've got for why some neighborhoods like ours were essentially without water for two days and then with minimal service for another one.

Rant over. On to the food. I'm going to give you the highlights of the past couple of weeks.

Let's rewind to two weekends ago. I was just recovering from the stomach bug. Hubby had yet to get it. He had ended up with a huge bunch of time from the Dekalb Farmers Market and had searched for stuff to do with it. We decided to do a simple Sunday dinner of turkey breast, roasted potatoes, and green beans. Hubby made a Honey and Thyme-Brined Turkey Breast (recipe from the ridiculously popup-riddled MyRecipes/Cooking Light website).

He also found a fantastic recipe for roasted red potatoes: Thyme-Roasted Potatoes with Garlic. I'm glad to be sharing this one so I can have it handy.

I sauteed some green beans and carrots to go with it. It turned out to be a lovely meal. Since I was getting over being sick, I didn't have any wine.

I did, however, drink wine for Bastille Day. Hubby pulled out the Julia Child cookbook and made Steak au Poivre. It went well with the leftover potatoes and veggies.

Yep, there's butter in that there pan.

Summertime means summer veggies and all the fun things you can do with them as long as you don't heat up the oven. Thankfully Cooking Light had a recipe for Summer Veggie Pasta that doesn't even involve cooking the vegetables.

Of course you can't have summer without burgers. I'd had my eye on the Cheesesteak Burgers with Pickled Peppers, Onions, and Cucumbers from the time the June issue of Cooking Light arrived in my mailbox. Yes, we still get paper magazines. How quaint. The pickled veggies were easy, and the burgers really good. I would never have thought to put dill in a burger, but it worked. Yes, that's a salad in the wooden bowl to the left. Just trust me on this one.

Hubby decided we need a subscription to Garden & Gun magazine. To clarify, we don't shoot things for fun, and I kind of suck at gardening. I was a little iffy on the idea until we got the most recent issue, which included a recipe for Tomato Grilled Cheese sandwiches with Beer and Bacon Marmalade. Um, hello. They're actually as good, if not better, than the best grilled cheese ever, which can be found at Cafe Lily in Decatur. Here are the magazine's photo and mine. Notice the artful stacking of the sandwiches:

We're in one of my favorite parts of summer, which is eggplant time! I roped Hubby into grilling some eggplant, and we made this grilled eggplant parmesan. It was really good:

Quite yummy.

Speaking of eggplant, tonight we made Ratatouille and had it with some of the leftover lamb from Easter. Yes, this lamb. And the Ratatouille recipe came from The Art of French Cooking. We were surprised that there wasn't any butter in it. We drank it with a lovely French Pinot Noir (pictured).

No rat included

And here's the kitchen fail of the week. We tried to make the Honey-Thyme Chicken-and-Apricot Kebabs from Food & Wine Magazine yesterday evening. Notice in their picture how their apricots hold together beautifully after ten minutes on the grill:

These apricots must be Photoshopped

And here's ours. Notice how the apricots liquified. We didn't even know apricots had a liquid state.

That's more liquid than we saw from Dekalb County this weekend.

We're melting!

Oh, well. They tasted good.

So those are our cooking adventures the past couple of weeks. I do recommend the wines pictured. Both were very good.