Smoked (and Grilled) Baby Back Ribs with the Masterbuilt Smoker

July 4th weekend is almost here, but why settle for just burgers on the grill when you can wow your friends and family with succulent smoked baby back ribs? Fire up your Masterbuilt Electric Smoker...it's on!

It's center-of-the-sun hot in Atlanta right now, so you want to keep things easy. We used a store bought bbq sauce. I recommend taking the extra time at the grocery store to find one without high fructose corn syrup. That's harder than you'd think! Then we finished these bad boys on the grill to avoid the extra hour on the smoker and give them a little bit of char. More time for kicking back with a cold beer and some air conditioning.

I've never been a huge ribs fan (hard to look cute while gnawing at a bone!), but these were tender, full of smoky sweet flavor and well worth throwing caution to the wind and covering your face in sauce! Easy peasy recipe after the jump.

Essential Gear: AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves

AYL, which I learned stands for "Accessorize Your Life," was kind enough to send us* a pair of their wildly popular silicone cooking gloves to put through their paces. While silicone cooking gloves have been around for a while, AYL's gloves have a new trick up their sleeve--or up their glove, if you want to get technical. Instead of sticky, sweat-inducing silicone on the inside as well, the AYL gloves have a soft, heat-resistant cotton liner, which not only feels better on your hands but improves your grip as your fingers don't slide around inside the gloves.

I used the AYL gloves while cutting corn kernels off hot cobs and moving racks of baby back ribs from the smoker to the grill, and they were great! Gloves help you retain the dexterity needed to handle knives, tongs, or whatever your cooking weapon of choice, and with free fingers and the gloves' textured surface, I found it easy to keep the corn cobs steady while I carefully freed them of their kernels. And because the gloves are silicone, they don't get saturated when handling wet foods. Cleaning barbeque sauce off was easy with a soapy brush (just take care not to get water inside the glove while cleaning).

For a going rate of $18 on Amazon, the AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves are a no-brainer and a must-have in anyone's kitchen.

Get your set of AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves from Amazon: AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves

*We always strive to provide you with an objective, unbiased review, even when items are provided to us free of charge.

Recipe: In-N-Out Animal Style Cheeseburger

Now that warm weather is finally here, it's time to flee the kitchen for the comforts of outdoor dining. And what's better to eat on your patio than a juicy burger? We  at Adventurous Tastes love a good burger and have tried a variety of recipes over the years (the ultimate cookout menu, lamb & beef burger, grind-your-own brisket burgers). But I think we might retire other recipes because we have found the definitive cheeseburger. It's so good that we've had it at least 3 times in the last month or so, and the Mr. can't even bear the idea of cooking burgers any other way.

This recipe is a copycat of the In-N-Out Double Double Animal Style Burger, courtesy of Buns in My Oven, who in turn based her posting on this thorough experimentation from Serious Eats by J. Kenzi Lopez-Alt . It is in a word, epic. It's nothing fancy, just ground beef, cheese, American cheese, onions and special sauce on a bun. Each bite is a messy, glorious taste sensation. Despite being two patties, I can easily polish off one of these in mere moments. Last time we made them, the Mr. accidentally made the burgers too big, and I still ate it in under 5 minutes. It's just that good.

So if you're an east coaster with nary an In-and-Out in sight, fret no more. You too can enjoy the bliss that is an In-N-Out burger from the comfort of your own home. Never experienced In-N-Out? First off, get yourself to the west coast post-haste. When the Mr. and I head to wine country, we always make a pit stop at In-N-Out right after the airport. They have a not-so-secret menu, and one of the options is Animal Style, which include pickles, extra sauce, grilled onions, and mustard fried onto each hamburger patty. This recipe does a pretty darn good job of replicating the original. You can thank me later.

The Ultimate Cookout Menu

This weekend we threw our first big party in ages - a Labor Day BBQ. Since the weather is finally about to cool down, I think it's actually just the start of Atlanta grilling season. 

Interested in a relatively low on effort, high on taste cookout menu?

Burgers and Sausages
Publix offers a 75/25 mix of ground beef made from steak trimmings in large packs. I went with this because more fat is a good thing in my book. Just add salt and pepper and make sure you don't over handle the meat. Put a little thumb print in the top to make sure they don't get too rounded during grilling. I topped with American cheese because it's the perfect melting cheese.

Ketchup and mustard were of course on offer, but so was special sauce, a homemade variation on thousand island dressing. I just now realized I forgot to put out the iceberg lettuce (darn!), but there were fresh tomatoes on hand, too.

We also picked up frankfurters, bratwurst and kielbasa from Pine Street Market. If you haven't been, you must go - this Avondale Estates butcher shop has awesome locally made products and a super helpful staff. We snagged some sauerkraut from the Hil, Phickles Pickles, and spectacular applewood smoked bacon while we were there, too.

Creamy Cilantro Lime Slaw
I love a good slaw to balance out the richness of the burgers and sausage. I opted for a creamy cilantro lime slaw. It can be made in advance and tastes great. It would also be delish paired with fish tacos.

Semi-Homemade Baked Beans
With some much to prep, I didn't have it in me to try to make the beans totally from scratch. So I went the Sandra Lee route and combined bacon, ketchup, honey, brown sugar and hot sauce with canned baked beans. Cheating, yes, but they turned out so rich and sweet, and made for great beanie weenie leftovers last night when I was too tired to cook dinner.

Spinach and Artichoke Dip
To give everyone something to munch on while the grill was firing up, I whipped up a spinach and artichoke dip and served it with tortilla chips. Everyone loves a good dip, right? I'm not sure this melted quite the way I wanted it to, even after 10 minutes extra cooking, but it was still imminently scarfable, so it turned out aok.

We had to have one healthy option, so we threw in a fruit salad. For the non-meat eaters, I headed inside to cook up a Pesto Grilled Cheese with fresh pesto I made the night before from our herb garden. Tonight the Mr. threw that pesto and some cheese and tomatoes over chicken and pasta and blew my mind. Damn, why don't I eat more pesto?

Peach Lemonade
For a cocktail, I combined peach nectar with fresh lemon juice and a healthy splash of rum, garnished with fresh peach slices. Those boozy peach slices made for a tasty treat after the party, too! Works well as a mocktail for the non-drinkers, too.

For dessert, my sister and brother brought boozy Old Fashioned brownies (with bourbon, cherry and orange) and for the kiddos a Peppermint Patty brownie. They were oh so good, but alas I don't have the recipes. Want to make something similar, here's one option for bourbon brownies.

It certainly wasn't easy getting this all ready, but in the end, with some prep the night before, I was able to serve nearly 20 people by 2 pm without too much craziness. A special big thanks to the Mr., griller extraordinaire and to all my friends who made it such a fun afternoon!

Be sure to follow my cookout board on Pinterest!

Recipe: Chipotle Pork Cheeseburgers

I was looking for something new for dinner besides the beef bonanza that is on heavy rotation for us during grilling season. A visit to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market turned up gorgeous, huge tomatillos, so I decided a pork burger topped with a sweet-tart tomatillo was perfect.

I didn't really know what to expect from a tomatillo. I assumed it would be somewhat akin to a tomato. In fact it's crisp and tart, and to my surprise was something you could arguably eat on its own.  Chipotle is one of my all time favorite ingredients because it's easy to have on hand and goes great with so many dishes. In this case, you just mix some pork, chipotle, garlic and salt, and you have yourself a damn tasty burger.

I like to avoid bread when I can, so I placed the burger on top of a Creamy Cilantro-Lime Slaw instead. The lime, chipotle and tomatillo were a heavenly balance of spicy, smoky, tart, acid and creaminess. What more could you ask for? Even better this whole dish was a cinch to throw together and made for very satisfying eating when served up with some avocado and corn. Yum!

Chipotle Pork Cheeseburgers  

Grinding Your Own Burgers - A Summer Cookout

I've been jonesing to try my handy dandy new Kitchen Aid meat grinder attachment, and now that it's grilling season, I finally had an excuse. Always the obsessive researcher, I scoped out several articles to figure out how to approach it and ultimately relied on Mark Bittman's article and Tyler Florence's recipe for grind your own brisket burgers.

Turns out grinding your own burgers is a bit of manual labor but not really hard at all, and it made for AMAZING burgers. The big perk to grinding your own meat is that you actually know what cuts of high quality meat are going into your burger, you can control fat content, and you can actually cook them to medium rare without fear of imminent ebola-like illness.

The key to grinding meat is to have it and the equipment nice and cold. Put the meat in the freezer for about 30 minutes and the grinding equipment for about 20. The hardest part of the whole process is cutting up the semi-frozen meat into smaller pieces to feed the grinder, so just work up a bit of a sweat before you eat those juicy, fatty burgers! Then grind the meat into a bowl placed over ice. Run it through twice on the coarse setting for a good mix of fat and protein. With just a little salt and pepper, these burgers were beyond juicy and oh so flavorful. Yum! Our guest said they were top 10 burgers of all time for him - now that's a compliment!

The Burger Bar Recipe

I paired the burger with caramelized onions and herbed horseradish mayo from the same burger bar recipe, and a simple salad of heirloom tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil - delish and so easy!