The recipe is very simple.

For the Salad:

• 1 cucumber
• 1 quart strawberries
• 1 large bag spinach
• sliced almonds
• 2 chicken breast

For the dressing

• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil
• 1/3 cut sugar
• 1 tablespoon poppy seeds

Salt and pepper the chicken generously.  Pan sear it on both sides, careful to cook all the way through, but don’t over cook.  Put the chicken aside and let it cool before slicing it for the salad.  Peel and cut the cucumber in half, scrap out the seeds with a spoon and dice.  Slice the strawberries.  Toss the spinach, cucumber and strawberries together.

Toast the almonds, but don’t go in the other room and start playing on Twitter and expect them to behave.  They won’t.  If you get something like this, you’ve done what I did: messed up.

It’s okay if you do, just pick out the bad ones or start over again. Once you get the toasted, but not burned, set them aside.

To prepare the dressing, I use a jar with a cover, toss in all the ingredients, cover the jar tightly (this part is important) and shake to emulsify.  Takes about 30 seconds of shaking.  Pour it over the salad, toss gently, top with your almonds and sliced chicken and enjoy.  Should feed about 4 (or 2 if you’re really hungry).

• 1 (750-ml) bottle Moscato wine
• 2 cups simple syrup
• 2 cinnamon stick
• 2 tablespoons wild flower honey
• 1/4 cup fresh ginger, peeled, and finely chopped
• 1 whole vanilla bean
• 6-8 ripe Anjou pears
• serve over vanilla ice cream or gelato

I picked up this bottle at Trader Joes. You don’t have to use a moscato, any sweet dessert wine will do.

The key to this dish is the whole vanilla bean. Can’t get it? Can’t afford it? Well, maybe I’d skip the poached pears (seriously) and just have the gelato. I honestly can imagine this recipe coming out well if you used vanilla extract.

I mean look at this thing. Seriously.

The directions:

In a saucepan (I used a stock pot), add the wine, cinnamon, honey and ginger. Scrape in the seeds from the vanilla bean and add everything to the pot (beans, seeds and all). Bring it to a simmer, until the honey has melted. Add the pears and simmer for 15-20 minutes, turning occasionally. Once the pears are tender, remove them from the mixture and allow to cool.

Continue to simmer the liquid until it thickens and is reduced by half, about 15-20 minutes. Cool to room temperature. Remove the vanilla bean and cinnamon sticks.

Place each pear on a small serving plate with a scoop of vanilla gelato (I recommend Bella). Drizzle with the honey, ginger and cinnamon syrup. Serve immediately.

The Burger:

• Ground turkey
• salt, pepper
• mustard (I used stone ground)
• cumin (maybe 1/4 teaspoon)
• curry powder (same amt as cumin)

The Topping:

• Roasted Habanero
• Roasted Roma Tomato
• Avocado
• Gruyere Cheese

To roast the pepper and tomato, you could use a comal (if you have one), or do what I did and put it in a glass dish in your oven on broil.  You want to blacken all sides and then carefully remove the seeds and slice.

Caution: you need very little habanero to make this very spicy.  For two burgers I used just one.

I love the intense heat of the habanero.

When the chicken came out it was falling off the bone.

Then I made Gratin Dauphinoise (aka Potatoes au Gratin), pulling the recipe from the Professional Chef.  The recipe called for nutmeg, which was a little surprising, but it totally works.

The recipes in the Professional Chef are meant to be restaurant-sized, so I roughly cut their recipe in 1/5, eyeballing most of the ingredients.  I won’t post the recipe here, simply because it’s a completely standard interpretation.

Then the gravy.  I did all the usual steps.  I took the droppings and cooked them down.  I mixed a little cornstarch into some heavy cream and slowly added to the reduced liquid.  It made this wonderful gravy that had a hint of rosemary, onion and garlic from what I stuffed the bird with.  It was bubbling nicely, I tasted it, turned off the heat, then turned my back on it.

It was so good.  Maybe the best gravy ever.  Then I broke it.

In the time it took for the heat to die down, and while I wasn’t looking, it overheated and reached that very bad point where it starts separating.  When I came back to it, it was grease on top and clumps on the bottom.  I tried to save it, but it was done.

Huge lesson learned: Remove your sauces from heat immediately when they are done!  Overheating can deconstruct the whole shebang.

The upside is that we still had slow roasted chicken (which was moist enough not to need the gravy) and Gratin Dauphinoise.  Perfectly comforting.

• Brown Sugar
• Cayenne Pepper
• Paprika
• Onion Powder
• Garlic Powder
• Fresh Ground Pepper
• Fresh Rosemary
• Dried Thyme
• Course Sea Salt
• Hot Chocolate powder
• Columbian Coffee Grounds

It was great for my $3 steak because the chocolate and coffee, although slight, gave it a smooth deep flavor, which the cayenne added some spice and the other spices (paprika, rosemary especially) adding another level of flavor.  I wouldn’t smoother a fine cut with this, but it did it’s job– tasted so good, it was like a modified carne asada.