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In the search for fun, easy and healthy summer recipes, I came across Greek turkey burgers from Iowa Girl Eats. I’ve been wanting to try these for a while — and, bonus — you can make a bunch of patties ahead of time and freeze them for later use.

In the mix for turkey burgers (IGE’s original recipe):

• 1lb 99% fat-free, lean turkey breast
• ~3/4 package frozen spinach, thawed and excess water squeezed out
• ~1/4 cup feta cheese
• ~8 sundried tomatoes, hydrated and chopped
• 1/4 cup red onion, minced
• salt, pepper, dried oregano & dried thyme
• to this we added 2 cloves of garlic

We also made coleslaw to go with. I used this recipe from Real Simple, but used red cabbage instead of regular cabbage. We added extra green onions and skimped on the raisins.

Patty action — and did I mention that we found a Fonzie tumbler at a local antique shop?  A-mazing! It’s our most coveted possession. And now Mark has a glass to use when I use my Care Bear glasses.

These need to cook at a lower heat to make sure the turkey gets done and not burnt on the outside and undone in the middle.

Mark doing his best Fonzie impression.

And the finished product — with piña coladas.  Awesome! We now make these turkey burgers about once a week.

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I love to cook and so does my beau and I’d like to think we’re pretty good at it. But every once in a while there is a major flop.

Fortunately, we’re not to blame on this one. The recipe we used STINKS!

A long time ago I’d asked the wide world of twitter for their opinions on a good Pad Thai recipe. I LOVE pad Thai. And I’ve made it before, but not from scratch — from a box.

Tweeple directed me to this Real Simple Pad Thai recipe. I was convinced that this would be amazing for a couple of reasons — one, because I trust my twitter peeps and several of them highly recommended this recipe. And two, because the recipe was from Real Simple and I’ve never had a bad experience with anything that came from them.

Weeellllll I may have had a bad experience now. The recipe was AMAZING. Except the sauce. There was too much fish sauce in it and the ENTIRE pot of pad Thai was ruined — tasted like ROTTEN FISH. My whole apartment smelled! I had to take the garbage out just to get rid of the smell.

So lesson learned? If you’re going to use this recipe, cut the fish sauce in HALF if not less. Or buy a pre-made jar of Pad Thai sauce.

Regardless, it still looked delicious, so here’s some fabulous photos.

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I got a brilliant idea for Mark’s birthday cake from Real Simple.  Of course, I had to modify the recipe, but the main idea is based on this recipe.

I asked Mark what kind of cake he wanted, and we talked a little about ice cream cakes and Better than Sex cake (for those of you who don’t know what that is, Google it!).  But I remembered flagging a page in Real Simple a couple months back with a way to make vanilla ice cream not so boring by adding layers of peanut butter cups and pretzels. I also remembered that Mark’s been bugging me to try Chubby Hubby by Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and I think that pretzels in ice cream sounds gross.

So, I decided to create an ice cream cake of my own.

I used a pyrex bread pan and lined the bottom with a half inch of vanilla ice cream. The next layer was peanut butter pretzel sandwiches, then an inch of ice cream, then crumbled peanut butter cups, then more ice cream, a layer of chocolate/peanut butter ganache and more pretzels.

It was GLORIOUS. It’s not technically his birthday until tomorrow, but since we knew we were going to be out of town this weekend, we decided to cut into it a bit early …

Look at that giant hunk of chocolate at the top. om. nom. NOM.

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