Changing Seasons

In a last ditch effort to salvage what was left of summer, I wiped away the rainwater from the grill and fired it up. A couple weeks prior, I had dusted off my Himalayan salt block to grill some vegetables. In the process of washing/scrubbing veggie guts off of the block afterwards, the block suffered an unfortunate accident while and was split in twain. How strange it is that a block of salt would erode when exposed to liquid...

Fortunately, the split was clean enough so that I could still grill up a pile of Philly steak meat for some steak tacos...

...and some of those healthy vegetables too I guess...

I trust you won't tell those Philadelphians what I was doing to their cheesesteak meat. I was lacking any sort of Cheese-Whiz or similar manufactured cheese product for a traditional cheesesteak, but I did have plenty of masa to squish out some homemade corn tortillas and make some killer steak tacos with roasted corn and bell pepper salsa:

In a previous post, I had mentioned the Emma Torte in all its chocolaty glory. At the time, I made a patriotic version of the frozen summer dessert, but this time, I went with the tried and true original recipe:

Much more monochromatic, but probably more delicious as I wasn't screwing around with that white chocolate shenanigans. The torte was a birthday request from Mary's mom, and I was happy to oblige. I think the Emma Torte is close to passing up my pies in popularity and dessert requests for family gathering, which is quite the feat (I might add at the risk of blowing out my rotator cuff as I pat myself on the back) as my pies rank up as "really awesomely fantastic" on a scale from 1-to-Fantastic.

--Isaac.
@baconvpie