Lumpia {Filipino Food Month}

I really should not be writing this post right now. I’m neck-deep in Easter prep since I’m hosting this year, but there was no way that I could have a Filipino Food Month on this blog and not share my favorite Filipino dish.

Lumpia is a Filipino egg roll. Unlike Chinese egg rolls, lumpia are made with spring roll wrappers and have more vegetables in the interior. These are “regular” lumpia, if you will, but there’s another type you’ll also find often in the Philippines– Lumpia Shanghai– which are a bit more similar to Chinese egg rolls.

I certainly don’t want to alienate any of my readers, but I personally think that Filipino lumpia is the best kind of egg roll that ever was. Period.

Cheeseburger Pie

Hey guys.

I uploaded this recipe to Tasty Kitchen yesterday. I don’t have a step-by-step for you this time, but it’s a really simple recipe so I bet you don’t need it.

This recipe has been in our family for quite some time. I always thought it was one of my Grandma’s recipes, but I checked through my scanned copies of her recipes and didn’t find it. I found another recipe for cheeseburger pie, but not this one.

In any case, it’s one my immediate family made when I was growing up (before my mom developed her tomato allergy) and it’s one of my favorites. It meets my 3 criteria for a good weeknight meal: fast, easy, and tasty.

The original recipe calls for a biscuit baking mix. I’ve used that often, but I don’t have any on hand so I mixed up a quick biscuit dough from scratch for the shell. It honestly took almost no extra time to do, and this way I know exactly what is in it. But if you’d like to go the easier route, use 1 cup of biscuit baking mix for the shell, plus 2 tablespoons to mix in with the meat as a little bit of a binding agent.

This dish has old school charm and I love its simplicity. The tomatoes retain a lot of their freshness since it only bakes for half an hour, and they compliment the savory beef, onion, and Worcestershire sauce filling.

Check out the recipe here:

Dilled Meatballs

Hi, friends.

I haven’t shared a main dish in a while, so I thought I’d sneak a post in today before my awesome friend Becka comes to visit me from Sweden. I’m guessing we’ll be busy doing awesome things around town for the next week or so, so this might be the only post I get in this week.

This is a recipe I did not create myself. My family has been making this since I was in high school, at least. It came from a cookbook we had, but I have no clue which one. And I’m guessing with the multiple moves between then & now, my parents don’t even have it any more. In case you do, mom & dad, you wanna send the title my way so I can give credit where it’s due?

*Update: My mom tells me this comes from the Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook. Sweet!*

Technically, I’ve adapted this recipe slightly. I cut down the meat a little and this time I used fresh dill because I had some on hand. So. Meat, check. Creamy sauce, check. Delicious & slightly unusual flavor from dill, check. Looks like a winner! Let’s get started.

Wild Rice Burgers

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. My life is kind of hectic sometimes. Or most of the time. So whenever you see a post of food I’ve made, it’s food I’ve made for my family. I don’t have time to make meals just for this blog, so most of the stuff you see is what I’ve made for dinner on a particular night.

While this works for me most of the time, winter in Minnesota is not the ideal time for taking dinner photos. Why is that? Oh, right, because it gets dark about 4:30 pm these days. And we don’t eat that early. So it makes for challenging photo sessions, to say the least. It’s sort of comical, actually.

Anyhow. Tonight I made totally amazing burgers. I’m not a huge burger girl, really, but at the Minnesota State Fair every year I have a wild rice burger. To be clear, it’s not like a vegetarian burger that’s just made from rice. It’s a beef burger with wild rice in it. It’s pretty darn tasty. And since I ended up with some extra wild rice after Christmas, I thought I’d try my hand at burger making.

Barbecued Meatloaf

I was kind of a weird kid.

I used to make tape recordings of myself all the time. It makes for good blackmail fodder for my parents.

In addition to the tape-recording obsession, I also liked things that kids weren’t supposed to like.

Like broccoli.

And meatloaf.

In fact, I liked my mom’s meatloaf so much that it was actually my requested birthday dinner pretty much every year.