GrubGirl.

A new cookbook has come out from the chef behind our very own Fleur de Lys, who also owns the Burger Bar in the Mandalay Bay Casino in Las Vegas. The burgers at the Burger Bar aren’t made from your ordinary frozen flat beef patties, they’re gourmet burger concoctions. And now with Burger Bar: Build Your Own Ultimate Burgers, Hubert Keller shares some of those recipes with you.

The key things I look for in a cookbook are:

• Photos: These help me get an idea of what the end products’s supposed to look like. This book’s photos don’t disappoint. You may wonder how exciting various photos of burgers can appear. He’s got rather creative options, like the Burger and Fries, where the julienned potato strips are actually fried around the whole beef patty — it’s enough to make my mouth water just writing about it.
• Practical recipes: Any cookbook can provide good food porn pictures, but I like being able to make these recipes as part of my normal life – getting home from work, tired, hungry, and wanting to prepare a meal fairly quickly. (Or, in this case, late to a barbecue, wanting to test out a recipe, and not wanting to spend a lot of time prepping ingredients.) The book does not disappoint – I tried his Blackjack Burger recipe, and if I can make it a hit, you can make it a hit, too.
• Cooking tips: How can I make some progress from newbie to recipe-meister? By understanding some context around the food that I’m making. Herb’s got some excellent patty-making and seasoning tips, and thankfully he takes into consideration people with backyard barbecues, as well as those that only have an AEK stovetop option (a cast-iron grill is a must).

I took the first recipe in his book, for the Black Jack Burger and was able to turn that into a hit at my friend Gina’s barbecue.

Thanks go to the folks at Chow.com for posting a recipe and a video for Irma Zigas’ California-style brisket. By California-style, we mean she uses some pre-packaged ingredients, which I don’t mind when I’m pressed for time but still want some great tasting brisket!

The other joy I have in posting this is that I’ve had the recent opportunity to meet Irma and dine on her famous brisket. I’m telling you, it’s good stuff.

Chow thankfully has written the basic ingredients for the brisket that you’ll need, along with the rest of the recipe:

Over on YouTube there’s a series of cooking videos hosted by a 93-year old grandmother, who makes recipes she learned while growing up during the Great Depression.

This one seems tasty — Poorman’s Meal — which is sort of like hash browns and sausage.

She takes 3-4 brown potatoes, peels them, then cubes them. Slices up an onion. Sautes it in the pan with some (well, a lot of) oil until brown, then adds in 4 sliced up hot dogs. (You could easily substitute yuppier sausage here if hot dog contents gross you out.)

Over at the “everything you wanted to know about paninis but were afraid to ask” site, Panini Happy, is an informative article on how to eat paninis while on a budget. Actually there are two great articles for those of you with that champagne taste and beer budget:

1) 5 Money-Saving Tips offers some great advice on how to cut down your grocery bill by doing something as simple as buying your meat and cheese slices from the deli counter. Doubtful? Panini Happy’s investigative blogger has done the math already for you and shown that the pre-packed stuff is more expensive (because you’re paying for the packaging which is apparently worth the extra time you’ll save from not having to stand in line at the counter).