Pork Patty Melt

I'm a big fan of Serious Eats' hamburger-centric site A Hamburger Today, especially the posts on that site that really get down into the actual process of making a burger. One of their writers, burger genius J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, recently debuted a column called The Burger Lab, where he breaks down the components of various burgers and rebuilds them from scratch. Inspired by Mr. Lopez-Alt's ambitious creations, I wanted to try and make a pork-based burger that riffs off of Umami Burger's Triple-Pork burger, a chorizo-bacon-ground pork affair that I haven't tried, but did sound pretty delicious to me from their menu. So, with the burger-making tips I've picked up from AHT and other sites firmly in mind, I set out to make a Patty Melt using a homemade pork-based patty.

Apple-Cheddar Pie

This past weekend, Jen and I rewatched Waitress. Have you seen Waitress? It's a really great movie. I'm normally not much of a movie rewatcher, but this is one flick I gladly agreed to see again, because in addition to it just being a sweet, fun film, it also provides lots and lots of fodder for my food-loving imagination. The protagonist of the movie, Jenna (played by Keri Russell), is a pie baker for a small diner, and the movie is full of vividly realized pie-making antics. So, you can imagine that after watching it, I really, really wanted to bake something, especially a pie. I've only baked one pie before--a pear-Gruyère affair based on a recipe that was inspired by a pie mentioned in the now-cancelled TV series Pushing Daisies--and that turned out pretty well, but it was a lot of work.