Sandwiches/Tacos/Burgers

Connecticut Lobster Rolls

June 3, 2021 by Lindsay 9 Comments

The most delicious warm lobster roll recipe, Connecticut Lobster Rolls! These easy lobster rolls are served WARM and have just six ingredients including tons of melty butter. These are the perfect recipe for all summer long!

Hello and HI, welcome to our summer of all the lobster.

I think in this post-but-still-kinda pandemic era, it's gotten more meaningful to make really fun foods at home. We still maybe aren't traveling or eating out as much, but we still want our favorite restaurant-style foods, right?

RIGHT.

Enter, Connecticut lobster rolls, or the deliciously-named butter lobster roll. SERIOUSLY, friends, how does one even choose a favorite type of lobster roll? There's the New England style, cold with flavors of celery, lemon and mayo, or these warm lobster rolls that are drenched in butter, lemon juice, and served in buttery toasted buns.

Probably both types of lobster rolls is what we need to make this summer count.

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13 Recipes For Memorial Day

May 26, 2021 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Ohhhhhhhh long weekend, I am so excited for you.

We are in a weird busy all the time but standing still because it's kind of still a pandemic place. This time last year there was a decided air of "but are we allowed to do anything," and now it's a little....lighter.

In preparation for whatever you might be doing this weekend, hopefully with a few more folks than last year, here are my absolute favorite recipes for Memorial Day!

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Spinach Artichoke Grilled Cheese

February 6, 2018 by Lindsay 1 Comment

yumyumyum, is all I have to say about that.

So, the fun part of this story is that this was Beck's gateway sandwich, and what a freakin way to go, right? She's still just barely interested in any foods that are mixed, still eats pretty plain things separated by miles of plate space, emphasis on pasta and berries. I'm trying to ease her into the idea of eating whatever I put in front of her, though, with fewer options at each meal. One way I've found that she's much more agreeable to trying ANYTHING new is to have her help me make it. We got a Tripp Trapp a few weeks ago and it's been used mainly as a kitchen stool; she's fully obsessed with being able to see what is happening and test out little bits of things as we cook.

These were a weekday lunch inspiration based on a random bag of frozen artichokes from Trader Joe's and some cute thin-sliced sourdough that I wanted to use. Provolone and garlicky spinach rounded everything out, and local butter crisped everything up. I used pretty small pieces of bread in these (about 5 inches corner-to-corner) because there's a good amount of cheese in these, but you can use any bread and melty white cheese you want!

These grilled cheeses are a teeny bit time consuming because you grill the artichokes and wilt the spinach first, but I did them all in the same skillet to save on dishes and they only take about five minutes apiece. Then it's butter/bread/cheese/grill, and lunch is done in half an hour or so.

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Buttery Ham and Swiss Sliders

January 31, 2018 by Lindsay 6 Comments

One of the best game day appetizers, ham and swiss sliders! Sometimes called Ham Delights, these super easy sandwiches are made on Hawaiian rolls for a sweet + savory combo that is to die for. These are delicious with deli ham, but leftover glazed holiday ham makes them even more special! I make them ahead and stick them in the oven right before serving for hot, gooey, cheesy bites.

This recipe was last updated January 2021.

...aka HAM DELIGHTS.

You know these little love nuggets, right? If you live in the south, I'm thinking yes, but I don't know where else these are a STAPLE for parties, tailgating, and sportsball watching in general. Like this week, there is some kind of game on Sunday night? That might be kind of important.

I feel that it's important to state that I do in fact know that this weekend is the Super Bowl. And here's the next recipe you should ABSOLUTELY make for it.

So these sandwiches, just in case you aren't familiar. It's regular ham and cheese layered in sweet dinner rolls, then doused with a butter + spice mixture, wrapped in foil, and baked to ooey gooey perfection. Easy doesn't begin to cover it; the hardest part of the whole recipe is melting the butter in the microwave and measuring out the spices. The sandwiches can be made well in advance and then baked at the last minute. I like to bake them in batches of 12 at a time so that they're always hot during parties or wherever I'm serving them.

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Salmon Lettuce Wraps

June 19, 2017 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

I made you cake! Savory, salty, crispy seafood cake topped with a tartar sauce that is just.so.good. At restaurants I'm always tempted to order crab cakes but rarely do, and here's why: if I get even the slightest crunch that indicates shell, I don't want to eat anything else at all and become hungry and annoyed and sad. So this solves that. With salmon!

You could totally make these into burgers btw.

But! This totally feels like summer to me, and has two important characteristics that are important to us at the moment. First, they're relatively low carb. There are some breadcrumbs in the cakes, but not many, and we went with lettuce wraps for health and flavor. AND, we used canned salmon here for frugality. I'm actually a big fan of canned fishes; they taste great, are inexpensive, and are great for recipes like this where the fish gets so cooked that a super fresh piece would almost be wasted.

We had these for lunch on a Saturday recently, and it was such a great mid-day meal. But now I'm thinking..brunch. With a runny egg on top? Can eggs go with seafood? Seafood can go with a bloody mary, that's for dang sure.

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Slow Cooker BBQ Chicken

May 11, 2017 by Lindsay 1 Comment

This slow cooker bbq chicken is so easy and delicious! It's one of our favorite recipes for easy weeknight meal prep and can be used with chicken thighs or chicken breasts - use whatever you have! This can be made with the easy homemade barbecue sauce recipe below or your favorite storebought barbecue sauce!

Because summer!

I've probably mentioned here before that Jay's favorite sauce is barbecue. A cross between tang and sweet, but he'll use the dark red bottled stuff in a pinch. I think that stuff is gross (always too sweet, never spicy), but I do like making my own easy homemade bbq sauce, especially in the summer.

This recipe is nothing earth-shattering, but dumping a bunch of stuff in a slow cooker and letting a sauce form while chicken cooks is a killer trick to have at the end of the school year when you're so.close. to the finish line and it's getting warm and no one has any motivation but also you still need to eat dinner, you know?

Weeknight dinner ideas, I'm here for all of them.

So here goes. Stuff gets dumped in with chicken, you go finish a project that your kid forgot about until just this instant, then you eat a BBQ chicken sandwich because you've earned it. Add a beer or 4 and call it a night.

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Slow Cooker Pulled Pork Cuban Sandwiches

October 4, 2016 by Lindsay 1 Comment

I mean, do you need to know more?

This is another recipe that involves slow cooked meat + onions, but don't be fooled - this is tons different than the pull-apart bread mess we made a few weeks ago, promise. And, if it were that similar, would it be such a bad thing?

Jay's a big fan of a Cuban sandwich, but I've never made them at home - there are a lot of components and for some reason we aren't really sandwich-making types of people. Fork food and/or salads with the occasional pizza is more of our jam, for whatever reason. Probably because I prefer to use a fork for food and not get all messy, and bread is best covered in butter soaking up the remnants of said fork food. Which makes no sense.

BUT, we went to the market, as we do, and we grabbed a piece of pork shoulder, and went on and on with ideas for it, and landed on this: local bread, local pork, ham, pickles, cheese, onions. The pork is cooked IN mustard, then everything gets toasted and wrapped in foil so that it gets ooey gooey before you bite into it. It's worth the slow cooker wait time, that's for damn sure.

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Best Ever Veggie Burgers

July 12, 2016 by Lindsay 2 Comments

IT IS FINALLY HERE.

Veggie burgers! Let me explain. In college there were these veggie burgers at our dining halls that were basically a hashbrown on a bun. I'm not a vegetarian, but once I realized that fried grains on bread were so great, I started ordering veggie burgers all the time. On campus they were all the same since Aramark provided all the food. But then I moved on in my life and realized that usually a veggie burger meant a black bean burger, and usually black beans were mushy, and THAT was not my jam.

More hashbrownburgers, please.

Fast forward 10 years, and now I'm out of college (way out) and married to a man who prefers to eat vegetarian but also eats some meat but mainly prefers to eat healthy as much as possible. Which is great, right? So now we kind of do the same thing. We try lots of veggie burgers at lots of restaurants, and far and away our favorites are ones that are chewy and grainy and kind of like rice-textured. Not mushy beans that fall apart.

So I wanted to make a veggie burger. I didn't want it to be fried and I didn't wait it to be straight carbs, and I didn't care if it was vegan. I researched a ton, and this is what I came up with! Roasted veggies AND BEANS, which dries everything out and makes it chewy. Farro for more chew. Egg and ground flaxseed for binder (like a meatball), cheese and garlic for all the flavor in the ever-loving world. Prepare to be obsessed.

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Chicken Club Tacos

June 2, 2016 by Lindsay 2 Comments

Fun food alert!

This is such weekend food I just can't even take it.

I love a taco, I just can't deal. I especially love non-Mexican-flavored tacos, isn't that strange? There's a Mexican food truck in town that sells a Korean-style pork belly taco and I almost die of happiness every time I eat one, not even joking. It's SO good. I don't mind "regular" tacos, obviously, because I'm not a communist, but I prefer my Mexican food to be in some kind of bowl form, like the rice bowls I make at least once a week without fail.

So I made this taco! Which has nice classic chicken club ingredients + avocado + a chipotle sauce, which never hurt anything, I'll tell you that much right now. You don't wanna miss this.

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Open-Faced Scallop Po Boys + Spicy Remoulade

May 12, 2016 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Jay is a huge fan of a po boy. You know, a fried seafood sandwich with some veg and a creamy-yet-spicy sauce. He tries them at lots of restaurants, but we were discussing how bread + mayo + fried doesn't make the most healthy sandwich you've ever had in your life.

We also discussed that we didn't really care.

I really wanted to make a po boy with scallops because I had some in the freezer (been buying the bags from Trader Joe's, love them more than life itself), and an open face sandwich just kind of felt right, you know? You could of course make this on a roll and eat it with your hands, but there's something about scallops that to me deserve utensils. And so, this sandwich that isn't really a sandwich (honestly, open faced just means bread on a plate) was born. You'll flip.

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Easy BBQ Shrimp Tacos + Honey Mustard Apple Slaw

April 20, 2016 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Ok so this was clearly Jay's idea.

Anyone who knows 1. us, 2. Jay, and 3. Jay's food history knows that he a. grew up husky (ha) and b. loves barbecue sauce. Like, loves it. I like it fine, but I always go for a mustardy or vinegary sauce. Jay, on the other hand, likes the ketchup/molasses-based stuff, preferably out of a jar.

Ew. To me, it's way too sweet, and after a bite or two of anything with that kind of sauce on it I'm all.....WHERE IS ANY OTHER KIND OF FOOD GOOD LORD UGH. It's really one of the few foods that I just can't get into in large quantities.

But! There are other ways. Ways to make a red sauce that's sweet but also tangy and smoky, super quick without simmering it all day OR buying a jar of something. And then you put it on tacos with crunchy vinegar slaw which TOTALLY makes up for the ketchup brown sugar base, and you have a taco.

A great taco.

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Smashed Double Cheeseburger

March 30, 2016 by Lindsay 5 Comments

Cue easiest burger ever!

No, but really. Since Jay became a vegetarian-most-of-the-time and I've been pregnant or breastfeeding for evarrrrrrr, we've had some issues with me wanting to eat beef and having no one to share it with. The things I do for marriage, I mean, seriously.

I'm a huge burger fan, and I'm actually not a really big fan of fancy burgers that taste like other things. A chorizo taco burger? Why can't I just have chorizo tacos? Nothing wrong with it, but I'm all about a super plain, classic burger. Regular.

These burgers are fast-food-ish but obviously way better, and because you season them in the skillet you can make one or ten with no extra effort - you throw in the meat, season it right there, smash it down. No mixing, forming patties, resting, nope. Burger in 10 minutes. These are cooked in butter for super crispy edges, and Sharp American is an absolute must. I don't use American cheese ever, but on this burger other cheese just feels out of place.

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Rosemary Walnut Chicken Salad

March 28, 2016 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Great news! I made this 3 times in the last 2 weeks.

No joke, and there are no leftovers. Half of Greenville has tried this ish and I haven't gotten a bad review yet.

So that tells you something, right? It's a chicken salad with no celery but with deeeeelicious flavors of walnuts and fresh rosemary. Not too much mayo. Some onion and garlic powders for flavor. Pan-seared chicken for that brown meat flavor that just can't be replicated. Trust me. You need this ASAP.

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Lamb Pita with Pickled Squash

February 16, 2016 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

I love a good pita. A pita or a wrap, really. The problem is that often wraps or pitas fall apart, and that makes me SO sad. I get why sliced bread is the king of the sandwich outers, but I really love other options.

ESPECIALLY when the innards of a sandwich are so special, like this one. They just beg for a different kind of bread that works with the flavors - pita is totes Middle Eastern imo, as is lamb. A perfect pair! I made these sandwiches a few weeks ago on a Saturday, and as per the usual the pita fell all over the place and we ended up kind of slopping bits of this into our mouths because it was still SO good. So here's what you need to do - get some really good, sturdy pita, and go. to. town. Because lamb patties.

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Grown Up Uncrustables

October 5, 2015 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

So, parts of our state are fully underwater and there is no power and you have to boil water and school and work are on hold.

But for everywhere else, you should totally cure Monday with this.

Remember Uncrustables? I LOVED them. No, they were never once purchased for us in our house because "do you know how overpriced and gross that is for something we already have?" but when I got my hands on one I was seriously in love.

In related news, I like creamy processed peanut butter better than all-natural twice as expensive healthy stuff. Sorry.

So, since we probably all agree that Uncrustables are gross, even though we might love them, why not gross them up a little more with pastry? Let's do that. I have two version here, but this is much more of an idea/method than a recipe - use whatever you'd like for these! PB&J and turkey+swiss are two of my fav "normal" sandwiches, so that's what I made. You do you, though!

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Marinated Grilled Chicken Croissant + Chipotle Mayo

August 17, 2015 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

Monday, go eff yourself.

Amirite?

Jay is having his first day back at work today, and he's READY. He's been working from home for 2 weeks, and the week before that was working at being a bump on a log and not screaming from pain too much. We're beginning week 4 post-op, and he's READY to be out of the house 1. without me and 2. for more than 2 hours at a time.

He's also graduated to using a cane most of the time instead of a walker, which does wonders for his self esteem and sex appeal.

Not that walkers aren't sexy.

Anyway, lunch. With calories and flavor and just YES. These are great for dinner too, of course, and there's just something about a croissant instead of bread, right? These actually came from Starbucks on Saturday in a fit of genius when I knew I wanted to make a marinated chicken sandwich but bread just never fits chicken breasts quite right, you know? But croissants fit perfectly. And so it was written.

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Breakfast Grilled Cheese

July 21, 2015 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

....that you can, like, totally, so literally eat for any meal of the day.

Jay really loves it when people say so and literally all the time. See also: the reality show that featured the company I work for.

But let's not talk about how kids these days are turning the country into crap. They probably aren't, we're just probably old. Probably.

I made this sandwich because it was mid-day and we hadn't eaten and I'm all into breakfast food right now and CHEESE, and then Jay ate it as fast as I've ever seen him eat anything and then he said it was amazing and delicious BUT THEN 4 hours later we went to the movies and I got popcorn and at the counter I said "are you going to eat any?" because I order more if he's going to eat some, duh, and then he said "I don't know, that breakfast was just so fatty and there was nothing healthy on it," kind of while making a shitty face, and I got offended because pregnancy hormones and told him he didn't have to eat it and then he ate half my popcorn anyway.

#marriage #thatwasonesentence
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Spicy Turkey Burgers + Garlic Lemon Mayo

July 2, 2015 by Lindsay 4 Comments

The best easy spicy turkey burgers! These can be cooked in a cast iron skillet or on the grill and are a great meal prep option to serve over salads throughout the week. My smashburgers are a great easy beef hamburger recipe if you'd like to go a traditional route!

Best Healthy Turkey Burger Recipe from mytherapistcooks.com

It's almost here it's almost here!

The long weekend.

I actually don't care what you think about patriotism, and does it seem this year especially that patriotism seems a little...off...somehow? I don't know, maybe I'm just friends with the wrong people on Facebook and they're clouding my vision. Or I'm in a bad mood. Who knows.

This weekend we just need a delicious but healthy burger recipe, though, right?

And you need to make these Spicy Turkey Burgers. Seriously. They aren't crazy fancy, but the garlic lemon mayo is juuuuuust different enough that no one will be able to accuse you of making boring turkey burgers. The key here is the blackening meat seasoning, which are pretty strong and spicy and just GOOD, something else I think is really necessary in a turkey burger because ground turkey otherwise can be kind of flavorless.

Let's burger!

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Tempura Tofu Dogs

June 30, 2015 by Lindsay Leave a Comment

It's officially 4th of July week, which means it's officially almost the first day of July, which means WHERE IS THIS YEAR GOING. I feel old saying that but REALLY time goes by a lot faster the older you get, amirite?

I am.

As a companion to last week's chorizo dogs, I wanted to make yet another meal that can go in a hot dog bun, but for the veg-heads among us. I actually liked these JUST as much as the chorizo dogs, for different reasons, and I think it was because of the sauce/slaw toppings, which are kind of like what you'd find on a bahn mi - slightly spicy, sweet, and tangy flavors that have lots going on but aren't so weird that people won't like them. Kind of Asian Lite. Does that make sense? Let's cook.

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Chorizo Philly Dogs

June 23, 2015 by Lindsay 1 Comment

Ok, it's, like, really hot. REALLY hot.

It's also almost our favorite summer holiday, the 4th of July! I don't know if it's your favorite, but it's fun and happens in the middle of the summer and it just BEGS for a cookout, amirite?

There are tons of burgers out there to make, but I think that hot dogs sometimes get left out of things, save for plain dogs with plain toppings where you only make a few for the picky kids at parties. No one likes those kids. But why not treat dogs like burgers? Sex 'em up, you know what I mean.

I actually despise "regular" hot dogs, which is why these aren't hot dogs at all. My parents really never fed them to us growing up, and even when we were at events where we had the choice, I always went for a burger over a dog. It's just me, and now as an adult I really don't like them. Incidentally, I DO like squishy soft slightly sweet hot dog buns, so if I ever find myself at an event with nothing but hot dogs (it happens, especially in the nonprofit world), I'm happy as a clam to eat chili and onions in a hot dog bun. Gross? Nope.

So HERE is a version of a dog that I love. Super sexy sausage, super squishy bun, super cheesy toppings. Let's do it.

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