The 12.95 Elk Burger

For the Greenland stop of our culinary world tour we made a traditional soup called Suaasat (check out the full blog here), which used deer chops generously donated by a family member, who was also kind enough to send us off with some elk burger.

While we actually didn't care for the Suassat (or the deer chops for that matter), the elk burger was quite tasty and has a great texture that's much different from standard beef. For fun we decided to make actual burgers with them, even though it's too cold now for outdoor grilling. The finished burgers looked so good we joked they were something you'd buy at a nicer restaurant, so we're calling these the "12.95 Elk Burger."

Here we're mixing the meat with a standard array of seasonings: onion and garlic powder, garlic salt, McCormick southwest seasoning, and black pepper.

To go along with our burgers we decided on fries, which will be homemade of course! To get the right shape we slice a whole potato in half across the middle, flip each side over and slice them apart lengthwise, and then cut those length slices in half.

We brush them with a little oil and sprinkle the same seasonings over the potatoes as with the meat.

While cooking game-type meat of this variety on the stovetop you need to use a bit of oil, and there's very little fat in elk and you won't get any grease like with beef. We're also cooking up some white onion to go on the burgers.

The fries are now coming out of the oven hot and crispy, which will be dipped in our homemade ranch and buffalo wing sauces.

The burgers are coming together now, topped with cooked onions, tomato slices, avocado, serrano pepper, and a layer of melted pepper jack cheese.

This our finished "12.95 elk burger" with a handful of delicious oven-baked fries!

Coming soon we'll be sharing how to make the perfect stromboli, and revealing the Icelandic stop of our culinary world tour: rustic lamb pie with rye crust!

Halloween 2012: Final Fantasy 7 Costumes

And now for something a little different! Instead of our regularly scheduled food blog, today we're taking a look at a home project of sorts: putting together our own Halloween costumes. This year we decided to dress up as Final Fantasy characters.

Vincent Valentine for me:

And Aeris Gainsborough for Megan:

We found cosplay costumes online that were spot on, but they were way, way more expensive than we were interested in spending, so we decided to make our own by raiding thrift shops and sewing together our own costumes. To start off with I've got a few yards of red fabric.

After some searching around we found a free cape pattern online and printed it off on standard paper, cutting it up with scissors into the appropriate shape. Since the cape was meant for a woman, we decided to make it larger and longer than the pattern, which turned out to be a bad idea, as the cape was way much too big at first. We used a simple hand sewing machine to stitch it together.

After some alterations, we're down to something more along the lines of what we're looking for.

Here we've got the top part of the cape done, along with some extra bunched material for the neck piece. You can also see part of the black pants here covered in random belts and zippers. These are actually pants from Hot Topic that normally go for around $50, but I found them at Salvation Army for $7! They were just slightly too small, but we weren't going to let that stop us, as we got a small piece of stretchy black fabric and just sewed it behind the zipper.

Here we've sewed the back part onto the cape and then added on small strips of black vinyl with large buttons to the front piece. Cristal happened to have a can of metallic gold spray paint, which took care of the button color.

The shoes are just my regular black Skechers, but with cardboard folded over and spray painted gold. To keep them in place, we stapled some nylon strips and wrapped them around the back and bottom of the shoes.

And here we are on Halloween night with Cristal as Lulu and Glen as Auron from Final Fantasy 10!

Megan gets in the picture with her finished Aeris costume, complete with pink hair bow and a staff.

To get the over coat looking right, Megan cut the sleeves off an old shirt she never wore and sewed some belt parts onto the sleeves. The staff is a dollar dowel rod from Walmart with three pieces of foam paper glued on.

Final Fantasy is famous for its battle and victory poses: here's Glen and Cristal enacting theirs!

We're ready to head out and show off our costumes for a great Halloween night!

These were a good deal of work, and we put them off until the weekend before and ended up spending two full days getting them done, but we saved a ton of money and had a lot of fun doing it. My costume ended up costing around $20 total to put together.

Check back in soon as we return to our regularly scheduled coverage of fantastic breakfasts, lunches, and dinners!

The Final Grilling Season '12 Recap

This summer was a grilling extravaganza that saw us trying out many new ways to cook with charcoal, and we've posted quite a few entries covering most of the more exciting recipes. The overflow caused us to already post a previous recap of everything that didn't get a full blog entry on its own, and now it's time for a second (and final) recap of the '12 grilling season.

In our previous recap and other blogs we went step by step into how to make several grilled meals well beyond the normal burgers and ribs you might expect, with offerings like pizza and pork roll-ups. Here's another grilled entree we tried out you won't see in many backyard barbecues: stuffed tomatoes.

To start these, get large slicing tomatoes (don't use something smaller like romas) and cut off the tops, then scoop out the guts and sprinkle in some salt.

We're filling ours with our traditional stuffed mushroom filling: cream cheese, ground sausage, and a variety of seasonings.

Get the coals heated up nice and hot in the chimney starter and cook them over indirect heat so the tomato flesh doesn't burn.

And here you've got some amazingly flavorful stuffed mushrooms that are a meal on their own, with some rice on the side. The smoke flavor gives you an end result you can't get just in the oven alone.

Hot dogs are a fun addition to any grilling session, but why leave them plain and boring? Wrap those bad buys up in bacon (and even slice 'em open and stuff in cheese if you want!)

They crisp up nicely after cooking on the grill, and again get a great smoke flavor.

I'm having my bacon-wrapped dog with jalapenos, spicy mustard, ketchup, and some homemade baked fries.

Every summer sees a whole lot of kebabs cooked out on the grill, and here's a fun combination we like: sausage, potatoes, mushrooms, onions, and bell peppers.

You can get a lot more adventurous than just the basics though. Here we're also grilling sliced pieces of whole corn on the cob along with marinated extra firm tofu, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, and squash.

After trying out some other grilled tomato meals we decided to just plain grill whole romas - and they turned out great!

Here's another look at some great chicken we grilled one day, brushed with one of our homemade rubs. We've got leg quarters and drumsticks covered with a mixture of garlic powder, onion powder, ghost pepper salt, and southwest seasonings.

As with most of our meat, we started over direct heat to crisp up the skin, then move to indirect heat to keep the chicken moist and tender.

After brushing with some awesome homemade barbecue sauce during grilling we get these beautiful, perfectly done chicken pieces:

Serve 'em up with an oven baked potato and a side salad with as many veggies as you can handle!

Late in the summer we also tried a second crack at the double pork rollup (check out the full original blog right here). Here's our second attempt, which held together much better than the first due to using kitchen twine from the start and not stuffing it quite so full.

Instead of salad, we served this one with seasoned rice cooked in stock for extra flavor, since the pork is already stuffed with a variety of vegetables.

And finally, here's another crack at our awesome pork spareribs (injected and rubbed of course), but this time we changed up the sides a good deal. Here we're having watermelon and rice with garbonzo beans instead of the standard salad and potatoes.

That's it for this year's barbecuing, and the grill has sadly been put away until the weather gets warm again next year. Stay tuned for our upcoming Iceland stop of the Culinary World Tour, more interesting ways to jazz up your pasta night, fun soups, and many more delicious Fall flavors!

Orzo "Everything" Soup with Out Of This World Stock

Over time Six-Seven-Eight has developed several regular "columns," which cover specific types of food or methods of cooking, such as "Interconnecting Meals," "From Ordinary to Extraordinary," "Grilling Season '12," and so on. Today sees the collision of two of those regular entries in our blog series, as this soup we're about to explain in detail is both a look at "Novel Noodles" and "Interconnecting Meals!"

Earlier this month we showed how to make coffee rubbed whole chicken, which ended up getting stretched into several different meals, as well as maple-molasses coffee pork ribs for an all Fall-themed dinner. When those amazingly flavorful meals were finally all gone, we still had the bones remaining - which meant it was time to make an absolutely out of this world soup stock.

To get this stock started, chop up carrots, onions, green onions, and poblano pepper into large pieces. The addition of the poblano is a new twist for our standard stock recipe, and a great choice, as it's not very hot but still packs a lot of flavor.

All the ingredients are cooked in a pan along with hot oil until they start to soften up and release all those wonderful aromas. Feel free to add in any seasonings that strike your fancy and will go well with whatever bones you happen to be using. Garlic powder, pepper, and salt are a good starting combination, but go wild and add spicy ones like crushed red pepper, or add in things like celery salt, oregano, or any other seasoning in the spice rack.

Next add in several cups of water until your pan is nearly full and throw in the bones of whatever meat you've recently finished. Here we've both got the chicken carcass and the bones from the ribs, adding in two very potent flavors and ensuring we completely use everything we buy and get the most bang for our buck at the grocery store.

Bring the stock to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer for several hours, stirringly occasionally. Turn off the heat and allow to cool, then place strain out all the bones and vegetables. Place the remaining liquid stock in a tupperware container and set in the fridge. We recommend letting the flavors mingle in the fridge for a full day before either using for a soup, or freezing to use later. Trust us on this - if the stock is good when it cools, it will be amazing a day later after the flavors have time to develop. Our finished stock, with all those different flavors mingling together, was good enough on its own to simply drink straight as broth!

For our soup we've decided to use a pasta that almost never sees a place in our cabinet: orzo! This is a fun little pasta that's almost more a type of rice, and it plumps up nicely and soaks in liquids, making it great for soup.

To start the soup, we've chopped up fresh spinach and the leftover chicken meat from the whole chicken. You can also see below the leftover pinto beans from when we made bean and rice enchiladas earlier in the week. As always, we recommend getting bagged beans and soaking them yourself instead of buying canned. Not only is the flavor better, but you save money, and they will cause less unpleasant gas if you change out the water frequently. If you aren't sure what to do with a whole bag of fresh spinach, we recommend using the remainder in omelettes or breakfast skillets.

This "everything" soup needs some more veggies, so we're going to use a frozen bagged medley that features carrots, green beans, cauliflower, red bell pepper, and zucchini. You can of course use fresh, but this was actually the cheapest way to get that many vegetables, and they come pre-chopped.

We don't have any vegetables that need to be sauteed first here, so the stock we made previously goes straight into the pan along with all the other ingredients and we bring everything to a boil.

For the orzo however, we do want that to be a bit crispier before it goes into the soup. To start the orzo, melt some butter, and then pour the pasta in and cook for a few minutes.

When the orzo hits this beatiful golden brown color, you are good to go.

The orzo is poured straight into the boiling soup, and then the heat is reduced to simmer.

Here's the soup after simmering a brief time, and all the flavors are now really coming together. It's not quite ready yet, however, as it needs at least an hour (or possibly longer!) to reach full flavor and have the pasta soak up more of the liquid.

This is a finished bowl of delicious "everything" orzo soup. Notice how the orzo has plumped way up? It makes this soup very hearty and less thin tasting. Bake some french bread for dipping and you've got a full meal ready to go, filled with both proteins from the chicken and beans, but also lots of veggies for a well rounded dinner.

A Fall Themed Dinner: Maple Coffee Ribs and Pumpkin Cheesecake

Our frequent movie companion and cosplayer extraordinaire Cristal had a birthday not too long ago, which meant something special needed to be in the works for dinner. With the seasons changing it seemed like a good idea to whip up an all Fall themed dinner that still had a nod to the rib frenzy of our summer grilling season.

During the delicious success of our coffee BBQ sauce experiment, we ended up making more coffee rub than got used at the tail end of the summer months. For a fun Fall twist on the coffee seasonings, the leftover base rub was mixed together with a specialty maple cinnamon ground coffee.

We've had the good fortune to find pork babyback ribs on clearance at one particular grocery store with some frequency, so we haven't ended up having to spend and arm and a leg to get a beautiful piece of meat like this one.

The new Fall-themed coffee rub is sprinkled across the cleaned and trimmed ribs, which are sitting on plastic wrap for easier clean up and storage. We recommend tightly wrapping your ribs and allowing the rub flavors to really work into the meat in the refrigerator for a few hours prior to the actual cooking process.

Since it was too cold out for grilling, the ribs are going to be cooked indoors in the oven this time. This necessitates a few changes in the cooking process. Here the rubbed ribs are set on foil on a large cookie sheet.

An injection can really make a huge difference in the flavor of finished ribs. Some folks like to do a marinade, a rub, or an injection, but not more than one at the same time - and we think that's crazy. There's no reason your meat shouldn't be as flavorful as you want it to be. Remember the root beer BBQ sauce we made a few months back? That base idea was tweaked several times over the summer, including an orange soda variation. For our injection here, we've taken some of that orange BBQ sauce and cooked it down a bit with caramel to add another aspect of Fall to our meal.

After being injected, the ribs start out facing meat side down, bone side up as they first go into the oven.

To get the best flavor and texture, you want to cook ribs "low and slow" style. For the oven instead of the grill, you want to cook at about 225 degrees for several hours. For extra flavor, brush on some extra sauce periodically.

Towards the end of the cooking process the ribs are flipped over and the tin foil comes off for the last half hour or so to get a little crispiness on the edges.

Even cooking with such a low heat the ribs still ended up with a much different texture than when grilled over coals in the backyard. These Fall-themed ribs came out almost like the most delicious pot roast ever, as the meat fell straight off the bone. I didn't even need a knife to cut them apart!

The meal was rounded out by a baked potato (with sour cream, shredded cheddar cheese, and green onions) and dinner rolls.

There's no question this was a filling and immensely satisfying meal, but for a birthday bash we also needed something sweet to round the night off (albeit a few hours later after our tummy's had settled down...) For the dessert we put together a "pumpkin pie" cheesecake. Here' we've taken our base cheesecake recipe and modified it to included canned pumpkin.

After cooking and then cooling, the cheesecake is topped first with "easy caramel." To make easy caramel, simply put an (unopened) can of sweetened condensed milk in the crock pot, and then fill the crock pot with water until the can is submersed. Throw on the lid and cook for about eight hours. When it's done, the sweetened condensed milk inside the can has turned into perfect caramel that requires no effort at all on your part. Simply open the can and spoon the caramel wherever needed.

In addition to caramel, we add a crunchy element by throwing on some various nuts. Pecans and walnuts are good choices.

Normally we would do a graham cracker or Oreo crust, but for to match the pumpkin flavor we instead did a ginger snap cookie crust.

It's finally time to get a slice of heavenly pumpkin cheesecake and dig in!

Coming soon we'll have more on interconnecting meals (including making a truly amazing stock using both chicken and pork bones), more ways to use pasta outside the normal spaghetti and tomato sauce, and a final look back at some of our 2012 Summer grilling.