So I didn’t make the Bacon Attack burger I wrote about yesterday. Instead I made a burger of my own creation, combining elements of my old family hamburger recipe (passed down through three generations!) with a modern, bacon-y twist. I began by mixing together the ingredients of a classic “Iggy burger,” which is my mom’s family recipe. There’s onion, soft bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, onion, and a few other special tidbits mixed in with the lean ground beef. Ah, but the Pièce de résistance was the bacon. I took nearly half a pound of bacon (in strips), put it into a food processor, ground it up almost into a paste, and mixed it in with the ground beef. It wasn’t quite a 50/50 burger, but it was at least an 80/20 burger if not 70/30.
The bun was your basic organic Whole Foods burger bun with sesame seeds. Each patty was lightly toasted and slathered with a spicy aioli I made from mayonnaise, Thai chili paste, crushed red pepper, kosher salt, garlic hot sauce, orange juice, and ground cayenne pepper. The burgers were topped with fresh Italian tallegio cheese. They were rather large, but seemed to go over really well.
Nicci made her patented bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, as well as a delicious salad that featured apples, mandarin oranges, candied walnuts and feta cheese. I think the dressing was a champagne vinaigrette.
The most amazing part of the party we attended was actually not the food at all, but the seemingly infinite number of fireworks displays we were able to see from our vantage point in the hills of east Los Angeles. I think it was Kasi’s boyfriend who commented that it looked like Blade Runner out there. From about an hour before sunset until the time we left the party, there was a ceaseless show that lit up the entire sky as far as the eye could see. I’ve included some of the videos. In years past I would see some small neighborhood fireworks displays and I didn’t think much of the legality of it all, or the lack of response from local fire and police departments. But watching the scene unfold across the city tonight proved that there’s literally nothing any law enforcement could do to curtail the insane number of fireworks shows being conducted around Los Angeles. It was both startling and wonderful. I kind of loved it.
