Weekend cooking, GrillFail edition

This week's Saturday cooking day happened on Sunday, since we had Mariners tickets Saturday evening. And it was far from a culinary triumph. Let's just say I haven't mastered the art of the grill yet.

(No pictures until I replace my stolen Mac and can easily synch them from my phone again.)

I decided it was time I tried something other than steaks or boneless chicken and settled on turkey burgers. Mark Bittman had a column on grilling a couple years back, and one of his suggestions was to add flavor to turkey burgers by mixing in cooked, crumbled bacon.

That sounded tasty. While my bacon crisped, I did a google search to figure out how long to cook the burgers (burgers not being something I do often enough to have a gut feel, especially with not-beef where it's riskier to go rare). One recipe I found suggested adding various ingredients for flavor and moisture, notably mayo, mustard, and worcestershire sauce. "Why not?" I thought. "More moisture and flavor is a good thing, right?"

Well, yeah, except when they're so moist they fall into pieces, as I discovered halfway through the cooking process when I attempted to flip them. Normally I give up and order pizza at this point, but last night I decided to salvage instead. I brought the sloppy burgers inside and made...turkey-bacon sloppy joes. Which weren't half bad, really. All that flavoring and moisture that made my burgers fall apart created a reasonably tasty sandwich filling.

Undaunted, I tried grilling marshmallows for s'mores by suspending them on the same contraption we use to make kebabs. Disaster was narrowly averted when I checked them after 5 minutes and found them about to droop off the skewers. I managed to rescue them, but they were just gooey and warm, not hot enough to melt the chocolate, so they didn't taste like proper s'mores. I think to make it work you'd have to stand over the grill rotating like you do when roasting marshmallows over a campfire, and for that I'd want a far longer skewer.