Copycat Eureka Burger Watermelon Quinoa Salad

A symphony of sweet and tangy summer flavors 

Although summer is nearing an end, I am still craving summer salads during these hot days. Everything from green to Greek to pasta salad. Watermelon salad is one of my favorites. I often see recipes using watermelon, feta cheese, and mint or watermelon and tomatoes, but I truly fell in love when I first tasted it made with quinoa at a local chain restaurant called Eureka Burger. If you have ever had the opportunity to taste Eureka Burger’s Watermelon Salad when watermelon is in season, you know why I craved it all summer long. The tangy lemon vinaigrette, onions, and peppers balance perfectly with the sweet tomatoes, juicy watermelon slices, and silky balsamic glaze. Quinoa makes the perfect canvas for this artisan combination.

I love quinoa because it feels like a grain – and I love grains – but I am not still hungry after I eat a cup of it

like I am with rice or orzo. It is so healthy for you – low in fat but high in protein, potassium and vitamins. It has earned its name of Super Food. This watermelon quinoa salad recipe satisfies all my needs. It is technically a salad, it is full of healthy stuff, the protein is built right in with the quinoa, and the watermelon in it kicks it up into full-summer mode.

The first time I made my knockoff Eureka Burger Watermelon Salad, I just purchased a tub of their lemon vinaigrette and the recipe was just about spot on. But their vinaigrette does not last and if I am going to make the trip out to buy it I might as well buy the salad. So I perused about 50 different lemon vinaigrette recipes online and in my cookbooks and finally settled on one that sounded right. Then I promptly forget where I found it and so I tried another. Then another. What I learned is that this salad is pretty flexible and just about any lemon vinaigrette will work. In fact, you can pretty much add, delete, and reinvent this salad based on your needs and taste buds. Just consider this recipe as a starting point.

Copycat Eureka Burger Watermelon Quinoa Salad

Approx. 2-3 servings

Ingredients

1 cup quinoa

½ cup arugula

¼ cup kale, chopped (optional)

1 medium tomato, chopped

½ large bell pepper, chopped

1/4 cup cucumber, chopped

¼ onion, diced

½ cup feta, crumbled

¼ cup toasted walnuts (optional)*

Lemon vinaigrette, recipe to follow

Watermelon, sliced

Balsamic glaze, recipe to follow

Directions:

Prepare 1 cup quinoa according to package directions. Make sure to rinse thoroughly before cooking. I prefer to make my quinoa with low-sodium chicken or vegetable stock instead of water. Once quinoa is cooked, transfer to a bowl and let cool.

Mix lemon vinaigrette into cooled quinoa, to taste, until quinoa is lightly coated and flavorful. Mix arugula, chopped kale, tomato, pepper, and cucumber, and diced onion into quinoa and dressing. At this point, you may want to add additional vinaigrette to coat your veggies if you do not have enough. (I used almost but not quite all of the dressing from the recipe below).

Gently stir in feta cheese and toasted walnuts.

Top salad with slices of watermelon. My Eureka burger does watermelon spears, I throw in cubes or chunks, you could also use a melon baller. I used ½ of a baby watermelon, or about 6-8 spears, but how much you use is up to your taste buds.

Swirl balsamic glaze on top of watermelon.

* To toast your own walnuts, heat walnuts in a hot, dry pan and cook, stirring frequently, until they start to brown and smell toasted. Watch carefully, they can burn quickly.

Look at the size of those lemons!

Lemon Vinaigrette

Ingredients

2 tablespoons lemon juice (about 1/2 to 1 lemon, juiced)

1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Pinch ground black pepper

1/4 cup olive oil

Directions:

Whisk lemon juice, mustard, salt, and black pepper together. Whisk in olive oil until it emulsifies. You can whisk by hand, use a food processor, or use an immersion blender.

For a sweeter dressing, blend in honey to taste.

Balsamic Glaze

1 cup balsamic vinegar

¼ cup brown sugar

Mix balsamic vinegar with brown sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer until glaze is reduced by half. The glaze is ready when it coats the back of a spoon. Try not to overcook it or it becomes rock hard when cooled. Let cool and refrigerate until used.

This should make enough glaze for several watermelon salads and can be stored in the refrigerator until ready for use. Plenty of supermarkets also sell good balsamic glazes, so feel free to skip this step if you have one you like.

When A Cookie Is Not Just A Cookie: Homemade Fig "Newtons"

Exactly one year ago, I crashed into adulthood when my husband, conspiring with my parents, found us a house we could not afford, that was somewhat of a fixer-upper. Three roll-off trash bins full of five tons of rat-infested ivy later, we realized we had a rather large yard. In this yard, we discovered what I like to call our mini-orchard: 2 apricot trees, 4 mission fig trees, 1 unknown fig variety, 1 avocado tree, 1 apple tree, 1 unproductive pear tree, 1 possible persimmon tree, a thorny mess of blackberries, and one elderberry bush. We have since added a peach tree, pomegranate tree, strawberries, and a small garden. Yes, we’re just about as crazy as a mad man in a blue box.

This unexpected fruit boon has really affected how and what I have been cooking lately. Our apricot season in spring and early summer was my first introduction to canning and dehydrating in an oven (recipes to come). As soon as we were sick of apricots –and so were our neighbors— the season ended and it was time for figs. While I am still canning and dehydrating our figs, my favorite recipe so far is for homemade “Fig Newtons.”

The moment someone uttered “Newton,” everyone was clamoring for the fruit and cake cookies. So I scoured the Internet for recipes and was happy to find most website and blogs were in general agreement. The recipe is actually pretty simple and doesn't take much prep time. The original recipe I used can be found here, but after making it several times, I have my own recommendations. 

Homemade Fig Newtons

Peel and halve for smooth filling

For the filling:

2 heaping cups peeled, halved figs* (we use black Mission figs)

1 cinnamon stick

1 cup water

1 heaping cup sugar**

For the dough:

1 stick butter

1/3 cup sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons orange juice (I use fresh squeezed)

1 1/2 cups flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

Set oven to 350 degrees. 

For the filling:

For fresh figs, remove the stems, slice in half and peel. Measure about 2 heaping cups of figs and add to a medium sized pot (I prefer my dutch oven). Add cinnamon stick, 1 cup water, and 1 heaping cup sugar.** 

Boil mixture for 45 minutes. Drain, if necessary, and cool. Puree figs in food processor or hand blender until a thick paste forms.

For the dough:

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. I use an electric stand mixer, but you can simply mix by hand. Add egg, vanilla, and orange juice and mix. Once you add the orange juice, the ingredients may seem to separate. This is fine.

In a separate bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, and salt. Add these dry ingredient to the wet ingredients and mix until dough forms.

Prepare a floured surface and roll out your dough until it is a rectangle of about 8”x 12” to 8”x 14”. How thin you want your dough is your preference, but thinner is not necessarily better with these cookies, as they can fall apart prior to baking. Too thick, and you won’t have enough room to spread out your fig filling.

Once you roll out your dough rectangle, cut it in half length wise. You should now have two long, 4-inch wide rectangles of dough.

Spread fig paste onto half of each rectangle, lengthwise, leaving room along the edge. Fold dough over the fig paste in half, lengthwise to cover fig filling, and pinch edges to seal your cookies. You should now have two “logs” of dough filled with fig.

Transfer longs onto a greased baking sheet. (I like to scoot my baking sheet up to the cookie long on the floured surface and flip the cookie over onto the sheet.”

Bake 25 - 35 minutes at 350 degrees until crust begins to brown along the edges.

Slice logs into about 1-inch sized segments and cool. I like to slice before the cookies have fully cooled, as it can be more difficult to cut them as the crust hardens.

Here is my first messy fig cookie "log"

My favorite way to eat these cookies is as soon as they have cooled enough from the oven. This way, the filling is warm and the dough has a little crunch. Once the cookies cool completely, they tend to soften into a more cake-like texture.

Usually when I make these cookies, I like to double the recipe with 4 heaping cups of fresh, peeled figs. This way, you end up with 4 logs to slice as cookies. However, you end up with approximately 4 dozen cookies (depending on how thickly you slice them), which may be too much for a person without 5 fig trees. If you do double the recipe, increase the cooking time. We like about 40-45 min, or until the crust begins to brown

*Substitution: Since it is currently fig season, I recommend using fresh figs if you can find them. I have not substituted dried figs yet, since I have more figs than one person, her family, friends, and neighbors can eat, but you can see directions for using dried figs on the original recipe.

**While the original recipe calls for 2 cups sugar, the general consensus is this is far too sweet.

*** For Chocolate Lovers: While there are not that many recipes using chocolate and figs, the flavor combo is actually pretty tasty. For a fun update to these cookies, you can sprinkle chocolate chips in with your fig filling. It isn't a traditional fig cookie, but it is delicious.

Bad Beans Starts Cooking Good Food

I am not a professional chef or baker, nor am I a food photographer. But I have been cooking and baking a lot lately. Mostly thanks to Pinterest and the never ending supply of pretty food pictures it offers me. Fancying myself an amateur iPhone photographer of food now (emphasis on amateur), I’ve also been subjecting my Instagram followers to blurry photos of my steaming accomplishments.

While I’ve had many a #recipefail, most of it ends up quite tasty – a far cry from fish fingers and custard.  Or “stuff with bits in it.” Since I am by profession a writer, and by hobby a cook, I finally calculated happy primes and realized the obvious next step in the sequence was to blog about cooking.

Although I am clearly a Doctor Who fan (for those of you who get the sprinkling of references) this is not a Doctor Who Food Blog or even a blog about British (or Scottish) cuisine. Instead, I have been focusing my recipes on 1) what I like to eat, and 2) what recipes catch my eye, and 3) what is available in my yard and garden, with more than just a little help from my farmer’s market and local grocery stores.

Most of what I try to make is at least semi-healthy. In my opinion, beans aren’t actually bad and apples aren’t rubbish. But you won’t find a recipe for cauliflower mashed potatoes here and I do think that chocolate has restorative powers. If you have a question about a recipe, or would like to see me try a recipe and #failorsucceed (Pinterest is still my nemesis), please feel free to post a comment. I love trying new recipes, I love writing, and I hope that you enjoy this food (and garden) blog. I think it’s going to be fantastic!