We couldn’t celebrate Memorial Day without some good old-fashioned burgers.

Steakburgers, to be exact.

I’ve been informed that there IS a slight difference between hamburgers and steakburgers. Steakburgers have actual steak in them. Hamburgers do not.

And being a steak lover, I MUST have steakburgers.

Here are the burgers just before the addition of some pretty tame flavoring:  salt, pepper and my mother-in-law’s mystery seasoning.

Then we pulled out two steakburgers to ruin, er, season for my husband. He likes tons of Tabasco Worcestershire.

And so it was done.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how they turned out, PLUS the other delectable item we cooked. Can you guess what that is?

My eternal love affair with all things beef continues . . .

The weather around here is heating up (thank goodness!) and so is our electric smoker. We broke it out this weekend to smoke up a wonderful beef brisket.

If you love beef, I’m telling ya, you’d love this brisket.

We just put a garlic, salt and pepper rub on the brisket before putting it in the smoker at 200 degrees F for 10 hours. Ours was about 13 lbs. so it was pretty big.

We then put some hickory wood chips and a couple of charcoal briquettes in the wood box, closed the door and voila!

We use a SmokinTex model 1400 cuz it’s so easy. And we like easy.

We actually did it overnight. So, as we slept, our brisket was smoking. What a delight to wake up the next morning to the smell of a smoked brisket!

We wrapped it in foil and let it sit in the oven (we didn’t turn it on) until we were ready to heat it up and serve it. About 45 minutes before we were ready to eat we heated it at 250 degrees in the oven. Just to warm it up.

Oh. Yum. 

We whipped up some mashed potatoes, had a salad, poured some BBQ sauce over it and we were set!

But that’s not all. Tomorrow I’ll show you what else we made . . .

This is a fantastic article in the Boston Herald with tips for the absolute, most perfect steak this Memorial Day.

Chef Jay Murray, of Grill 23 in Boston, lets us in on his little secrets to creating tasty, tasty steaks. And since he claims to have overseen the preparation of “millions” of steaks, I’m going to listen up. He must know what he’s doing.

Oh, and he even gives us his recipe for chimichurri. Thanks, Jay!

Check it out here and test out his techniques yourself this weekend!

Photo courtesy of Patrick Whittemore/The Boston Herald.