Pioneer Day BBQ

Pioneer Day, which is an official state holiday, is celebrated here on July 24th. The intent is to commemorate the arrival of Brigham Young and the Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. For natives and die-hard members of the dominant faith, it's an important cultural observance. For outlanders like us, it's another day to relax and shoot off some fireworks - which is exactly what we did!

Niece rode on a float and threw candy in the Village parade; I "accidentally" missed that and slept in until all of 7:30 or so. Then it was time to get cookin'!

Pictures from all the food and fun will be coming soon, but let's start with the menu. My intent was make all the dishes with food that was on had in pantries/freezers (these are plural, as I consider Wombat's and Mrs. Igor's pantries/freezers as extensions of my own!). This was mostly accomplished- the "mostly" will be explained below.

I started the morning by making Chocolate Pudding Zucchini Muffins. I got the recipe from Amy's Finer Things. Obviously I used zucchini from our garden (of which we have COPIOUS amounts). These muffins are INCREDIBLE!!! The fact that they have zucchini and whole wheat flour in them only adds to the wonderfulness. I ate a couple for breakfast, and both Wombat and Nephew in particular enjoyed them as BBQ-appetizers. Wombat took home a Ziploc with 5 or 6 muffins for later enjoyment; I individually bagged and froze the rest for breakfast-on-the-go/kid-snax. Truly an excellent recipe, and a good way to use the massive quantities of zucchini we have piling up.

The main event of the BBQ was London Broil, expertly grilled by GolfDad. Mrs. Igor and I had each purchased some fabulously-sale-priced London Broil during the recent Village Market produce extravaganza and we had both cut them into smaller portions for individual family use. We decided that three of these smaller pieces would suffice. I contributed two, which I marinated in a soy-ginger sauce; Mr. Igor seasoned their contribution liberally with Monterey Steak Seasoning.

Soy-Ginger Marinade

• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/4 dark brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons ground mustard
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder

Mix the above together throughly in a Ziploc bag, then add the meat you want to marinade. The original recipe can be found HERE, on the "Taste of Home" website.

Our salad needs were fulfilled by "Macaroni Salad for a Crowd," which you will find HERE on the "5 Dollar Dinners" website. I SOOOOOO should have cut this recipe in half... we'll be eating the left-overs for DAYS! I substituted two 12-oz packages of "Wacky Mac" vegetable pasta for the elbow macaroni, which made the salad quite colorful.

With our London Broil and pasta salad we had potato chips and Bush's baked beans - the BEST canned baked bean available. While I have many wonderful baked bean recipes, I needed some simple sides like chips and canned beans to make life easier today.

I had INTENDED to serve a "Pineapple Crisp Cake" as part of the dessert (along with homemade berry sorbet), a recipe which came from the Pioneer Woman's cool new Tasty Kitchen website. DarlingMan thought this sounded dandy - I think he liked the concept of a cake baked with lemon-lime pop. I'm not going to tell you much more, though, because this was a DISASTER. I don't know if I did something wrong or what, but really, there were only four ingredients - couldn't have been that hard, and I do have a few skills at my disposal. However, flop it did! I'm glad I did this early in the day so that I could change gears quickly.

I like the combination of berries and lemon, so I switched to a "luscious lemon cake" recipe my mom sent me eons ago - she got it from a newspaper article. I don't even have it in an electronic version, just an old printed page with the original email on it. However, fear not, because it's almost identical to this recipe for "Extreme Lemon Cake" on Tasty Kitchen. The "mostly"-from-the-pantry from above comes into play here, as while I did have all the ingredients for my lemon cake except an actual lemon - needed for zest (which I could have lived without, if necessary) - I was nervous about having quite enough "RealLemon" juice, and also decided that I was running too low on canola oil. So I did end up making a quick trip to newWalmart (grateful for it being on my corner, yes) for a lemon, another bottle RealLemon, and back-up canola oil. The lemon cake turned out FANTASTICALLY!

The berry sorbet was also a hit. I'm pleased about this, because I have just started experimenting with homemade ice cream/sorbet. I've made three batches of vanilla ice cream, two of which were great and one which came out oddly lumpy. I tried a watermelon sorbet that I gave to Wombat and GolfGuy; don't know what the end result of that was. Right now we are borrowing GolfGuy's CuisineArt ice cream maker; DarlingMan wants the KitchenAid mixer attachment (insulated sleeve) for making ice cream. I think we'll just keep borrowing until GolfGuy wants his back and then make a decision on what to buy for ourselves.

Anyway, the berry sorbet recipe is HERE . I modified it slightly by using 3 3/4 cup frozen mixed berries (strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries), which I let thaw fairly well before pureeing. I also skipped the optional liqueur, since Framboise is not something we usually have sitting around at Casa Palomar. You have to start this sorbet EARLY, as your sugar syrup must cool completely after cooking before you can put it together with the berry puree - and then THAT mixture must cool another hour before putting it into the ice cream freezer. I'm just warnin' ya! I did not have a proper sieve to put my berry puree through, so the sorbet was a little seedy, but nonetheless, it was throughly enjoyed by ALL and complemented the lemon cake quite nicely.

Following dinner was fireworks fun... except the part where Igor tried to set my front yard on fire (more than once), and the part where the alarm on the Rav went off from exceedingly loud firecrackers (more than once), and the part where I burned my fingers on a sparkler (only once, fortunately). I used my Canon Rebel digital SLR on night portrait mode and got some VERY cool pictures. I'll put a few on here tomorrow, and a bunch on Facebook as well. If you live in the neighborhood, come on by to see all the new scorch marks we contributed to the street and our driveway!

And that was Pioneer Day.