Christmas Haul

Nothing from Santa except charcoal, but my wife, MIL and SIL got me some pretty sweet new kitchen gear for Christmas:



I'm about 20 pages into the book and it's not bad. Thumbing through it, there's a good balance of background info, techniques/tricks and recipes.

I tried the grinder attachment out today with some stew beef and made burgers for lunch (just pan-fried them since I didn't feel like messing with the grill). I've never made burgers with fresh ground meat before and the difference was amazing. I didn't add anything except a bit of S&P, so they could have used some kind of binder. But hey, now that I can grind meat whenever, I can experiment all I'd like.

The griddle has only been taken out of the box and checked out; it'll be christened with some pancakes some morning this week.

Quite a haul!

Very nice.

I have that griddle, I tried to use it on my stove and didn't have the best luck getting even heat. I suspect it'll really work out nice in my gasser. Congrats on the gifts

Nice haul, We have that grinder and the sausage set too. Will be playing around with that when it's gets warmer out side, a lot warmer in fact so I won't freeze smoking the sausage.

We have that grinder too. It's a nice accessory, but if you're grinding large amounts of meat its a bit slow. We bought a meat grinder off Amazon for about $80 and use that for all our meat now. Much faster.

Anyway grinding your own meat for burgers is the way to go! Way better flavor than the store bought stuff and safer too. Look at it this way. When grinding your own, you are using cuts that came from just a few animals, tops. And you know exactly what kind of cuts you're using.

With the store bought stuff it comes from large commercial style grinders and the parts used may come from as many as a thousand animals. You also have no way of knowing exactly WHAT parts were used.

Nice! You are gonna LOVE the grinder attachment.
One tip for the grinder. The directions say to double grind. I did only the first time. A single grind on the small plate does the trick!