Happy National Hamburger Month! In honor of this made-up celebration of all things burger, let's get to the meat of the matter. When the weather is nice -- usually sunny, but let's be honest about where we live and include mildly foggy -- it's time to grill. And although you can get fancy on your Weber, nothing is easier or more satisfying to cook outside than an all-beef burger (unless of course you're vegetarian, in which case this post isn't for you). Plus after a winter of braises and stews, nothing inaugurates summer like a perfectly grilled burger sitting on a fluffy bun.

But not all hamburgers are made equally. There is an enormous difference between handmade burgers and the patties you find in a grocery store freezer section, which are really nothing short of inferior-grade beef hockey pucks. Plus making truly fine burgers takes only about five to ten minutes longer than preparing the frozen variety (depending on if you grind your own meat), and the time spent is well worth it. And if you're still not convinced, you can read this great piece in the New York Times called Anatomy of a Burger which details the process meat corporations go through to produce their ground meat. Just saying...

Please note that this article has nothing to do with turkey, lamb or pork burgers, and there are no discussions on toppings or condiments. No, our attention here is solely on beef patties: how to make, season and cook them. That's all. So with that in mind, let's now focus on how making a great burger is really a fairly plain and simple endeavor. Here are 10 helpful tips to keep in mind:

10 Tips for Making Great Hamburgers

1. Purchase the best meat possible. Burgers are really all about the meat, so don't skimp. Buy the best quality beef you can find. I'm not taking about filet mignon here. Rather I mean the quality of the overall beef instead of the cut. No shock to anyone who knows me, I prefer grass-fed organic beef, preferably raised locally. Environmental and health reasons aside, grass-fed beef has a more intense meaty flavor than corn-fed commercially produced meat and can stand up to the condiments you'll add later. Yes there is a price difference, but we're talking about ground beef here so instead of paying $3.99 a pound you may pay $6.99 or $7.99 a pound, which will feed a family of four. Not a bad price.

2. If you have a meat grinder then by all means take it out of the storage closet. Use a mix of sirloin and chuck. If you don't have one then be sure to purchase high-quality ground meat from the type of place where the butchers actually grind the meat on the premises and know which cuts are used.

3. Use meat that has about 15 - 20% fat (that's 80 - 85% lean on the label). Fat equals flavor in a burger. It also prevents the meat from drying out on the grill. If you want a leaner meal, then you probably shouldn't be eating a hamburger.

4. Don't include extraneous ingredients. Avoid eggs, bread crumbs and anything else that will detract from the beef flavor. These ingredients are for meatloaf, which is a fine dish but isn't a burger.

5. Keep the seasonings simple so the taste of the beef shines through. I use only salt, pepper, Worcestershire Sauce and a little onion or shallot. You can also add some chopped herbs, Dijon mustard or onion powder. And if your meat seems a little dry, add in about 1 Tbsp heavy cream for a pound of meat to add richness.

6. Don't over handle the meat as doing so toughens the burger. The meat doesn't need to be compressed into a patty for it to hold together.

7. Shape thin patties. When you cook meat, it contracts in on itself, so thickly-shaped burgers end up resembling meatballs. It's better to include two thin patties on your sandwich then one chunky burger that is unevenly cooked. You should also make your burgers a little wider than your bun as the patty will shrink in size when you cook it.

8. Press a little dimple into the center of the burger to keep it from bulging out when you cook it. As mentioned earlier, meat shrinks when it cooks and so the center has a tendency to swell in the middle. Indenting will counteract this.

9. Grill with the cover on at medium-high heat. Do not overcook. We usually barbecue our burgers for about three minutes per side for medium-rare meat and four to five minutes per side for burgers that are cooked through for the kids.

10. Don't press on your burgers while grilling them. I really can't stress this enough. If you press on your patties with a spatula you are pushing all the juices out and you're going to end up with dry burgers.

That's it. Easy right? Now if only we can convince Mother Nature to give us a sunny summer.

Remember how good slices of roast beef smothered with gravy tasted when you were a kid? If you're like me, you haven't eaten this meal in years, and maybe even decades. Other than a holiday standing rib roast, most people now forgo the once archetypal Sunday supper of roast beef, including me. Eating copious amounts of beef is no longer fashionable, with the good reason that it's simply not healthy for you. But when I was confronted with an eye of round roast recently, I just couldn't help myself. Nutrition and food fads took a back seat for the night: I had to make a traditional roast beef with gravy.

So what was I doing with an eye of round roast in the first place? Well a few months ago I bought an 1/8 of a grass-fed Sonoma cow. A friend called to say that someone had backed out at the last moment of their share, and when pressed to find someone who would buy into a cow at the last second, she thought of me (which makes sense if you know me). So I now have a freezer full of various cuts of beef -- from soup bones and ground chuck to short ribs and eye of round.

Remembering that my mother always used the eye of round for her roast beef, I started to reminisce about my childhood dinners. The idea of beef with gravy and potatoes sounded too good to pass up and so I started searching for a recipe. After digging out numerous cookbooks (including my mega The Essential New York Times Cookbook and some cumulative family meals cookbooks) and searching online, I was surprised to find that there are hardly any current recipes for roast beef. I hear America's Test Kitchen has a great slow-bake method, but I don't have that book. And so I did what I should have done in the first place; I called my mom. Her recipe was simple: salt and pepper the roast and then bake at 325 for 20 minutes per pound. That's it.

Easy enough, but I was fearful that the roast would be dry, so I updated the directions a bit, cooking the meat as I do a chicken: in an enamel cast-iron Dutch oven with the lid on and then raising the temperature and uncovering for 10-15 minutes so the outside browns nicely.

The dinner couldn't have been a bigger hit with my family. My kids devoured their first helping and then had seconds while raving about the gravy. The meat was tender and juicy inside but with a nice crust on the outside, and there was plenty of jus to make a large batch of gravy. Plus there were leftovers for sandwiches the next day.

Now I'm not going to be making roast beef on a regular basis, but I am looking forwarding to revisiting this comforting childhood favorite in another month or two.

Updated Classic Roast Beef

Makes: Enough for 4-6 people

Ingredients:
1 2 1/2 - 3 pound eye of round beef roast
Salt
Freshly cracked ground pepper
1/2 tsp your favorite dried herb (I used thyme)

Beef Gravy
Dripping from the roast beef
3/4 - 1 cup beef stock or broth
2 Tbsp flour (plus more if needed
1 Tbsp butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Sprinkle salt, pepper and herbs on your roast and set in a baking pan (I used a large enamel cast-iron Dutch oven, but you can also use a regular pan and then cover the roast tightly with foil).

3. Cook roast for 20 - 25 minutes covered. Turn up heat to 400 degrees, uncover the roast and then set it back in the oven. Bake for 15 more minutes to brown.

4. Check temperature (you want your roast to be 145 degrees in the center if you like it medium rare or 140 degrees if you like it rare in the middle. I'm not providing temperatures for medium - well done because then the rest of the roast will be too dried out) and then remove the roast from the oven when ready.

5. Set roast on a board or plate to rest (tenting with foil) while you make your gravy.

6. Set roasting pan on the stove top. If the drippings have a lot of fat in them, drain all but about 1 Tbsp fat out. If you don’t have much fat, add 2 Tbsp butter instead of one in the next step.

7. Heat pan to medium and incorporate the butter into your pan drippings while you add in the flour to create a roux. Add in your beef stock or broth and stir until the gravy is smooth. If it’s too watery, mix about 1 tsp flour into 1/8 cup of broth or stock to create a slurry and then add to the gravy. Add salt and pepper to taste.

8. After your roast has rested for 5-7 minutes, cut it into slices and serve topped with gravy.

Where's the beef? These days, as numerous workshops at the recent EcoFarm Conference revealed, it's on the farm—right alongside the sheep, the chickens, the ducks, and the goats.

From a farming perspective, biodiversity used to mean replacing typical fenceline-to-fenceline monocropping (which you can still still see down in the Central Valley: huge tracts of dirt planted with nothing but straight lines of strawberries or lettuce) with a more photogenic mix of pollinator-feeding flowers, orchards, hedgerows, and assorted vegetables in colorful profusion, all working in sync to make the farm a happier habitat for beneficial bugs, predators, and people.

Now, however, more and more small farms (and vineyards) are getting livestock into the mix. Whether they're providing milk, eggs, meat, or labor, animals and poultry are taking their place again alongside the tractor and the compost pile as integral parts of the contemporary, sustainable organic farm.

The 2011 conference had a much more concentrated interest in horns and hoofs than in years past. At least half a dozen workshops focused on animal issues, ranging from "Ecosystem Services in Livestock Production" and "Cattle and Carbon: Rangeland Conservation & Climate Protection" to "Healthy Herds, Healthy Markets: Raising Heritage Breed Livestock and Poultry" and "Building a Local Meat Supply Chain."

Putting the proof onto the plate was Marin Sun Farms, our own local grass-fed meat company, whose in-kind sponsorship of the conference put excellent local chicken, bacon, and lamb onto the menu of Asilomar's dining room throughout the conference (which made, for the omnivores among us, a welcome alternative to the usual beans, kale, and quinoa).

Why have animals on a farm? Well, as one of the owners of Full Belly Farm pointed out, a productive, diversely-planted organic farm produces a lot of surplus food. Restaurants, retailers, CSA and farmers' market customers all want the good stuff. They'll pay for it, but it has to look and taste the best. And if you're not bathing your produce in pesticides to keep it the boring, munching, scarring bugs at bay, well, you're going to end up culling a whole lot of not-so-pretty, overripe or undersized stuff along the way.

Some of it feeds your family and your workers. Some of it can feed your compost. But if you want to turn oversize zucchini and beat-up tomatoes into usable, high-quality protein (not to mention plenty of fertilizer), well, nothing beats feeding it to pigs, goats, or chickens.

Backyard goats and chickens enjoying some sweet and crunchy discards from Star Route Farm

It's all part of the closed-loop system advocated by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian polymath who mixed biology and soil science with folk wisdom and time-tested peasant farming practices, codifying it into what we now call biodynamics. Stripped of its more arcane spiritual elements, it's more or less the same down-to-earth, interconnected system advocated by Joel Salatin, the nattily dressed farmer/author of Virginia's Polyface Farm, who gave an impassioned speech last month in Point Reyes Station. Drawing from his latest book, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer, Salatin turned the hay-lined Toby's Feed Barn into a tent revival for smart pasturing practices and mixed-use farms. Real pork, he insisted, wasn't a "white meat;" instead, if the pig's been raised right, rooting around, living out its full pig-attude, its meat should be iron-rich and consequently rosy pink.

Joel Salatin. Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Even wineries are getting in on the act: at Robert Sinskey, in Napa, part of the vineyards' biodynamic practice involves grazing down the weeds with sweet-faced Romney sheep, whose wool is sold alongside the wine in the tasting room.

But, as much as we might hope to be going back to a more natural practice with grass-fed meat and pastured eggs, few consumers are ready to think of steak and omelets as exclusively seasonal products, dictated by water, daylight, and temperatures just as much as asparagus or raspberries. If you have backyard chickens, you know that laying slows down dramatically as the days get shorter. Grass-fed cows have to be managed according to the ecosystems of their particular pastures.

Rearing animals on grass takes time, and as talk with numerous small farmers and ranchers at the conference proved, no one small farm or ranch can provide a year-round supply of freshly slaughtered meat. The answer? Co-ops and partnerships. As the workshop "Are CSAs Sustainable?" proved, a single farm limited by acreage, climate, and resources can't always produce enough variety to keep customers coming back for a box year-round. Your cool, moist, ocean-fogged farm might produce spectacular greens and kales—but what happens in July, when "greens fatigue" sets in and your members are longing for peaches and tomatoes? You can preach the virtues of chard; scrape up another loan, lease another parcel of land and increase your payroll; or partner with an inland neighbor already dripping in stone fruit and create a box that shares the wealth.

Niman Ranch does this on a large scale; Marin Sun Farms, Straus Family Creamery, and North Coast Meats on a smaller one. Partnering with other ranches helps produce a steady supply, while selling meat through a CSA, like the one described by Tyler Dawley of Barbarosa Ranchers in Red Bluff, insures not only a pre-sold market for the animals, but a chance to familiarize customers with cuts beyond the usual chops and tenderloins.

Cooperatives can also help with the biggest snag in the local-meat supply chain: getting access to a small-scale slaughterhouse, then finding a way through governmental wrapping and packing regulations scaled for the likes of Tyson Foods.

As State Director Dr. Glenda Humiston of USDA Rural Development pointed out, one of the top requests her office gets from rural communities (right after broadband) is access to small-scale slaughterhouses, particularly mobile ones that can move from community to community. Throughout the workshops, farmers with pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle on their land got up to beg for solutions, giving details of sudden shut-downs at nearby slaughterhouses (some affiliated with local ag-training universities) or wrapping/packing facilities.

No one, even the most carnivorous among us, likes to think too hard about how their main course went from animal to ingredient. But with meat moving out of the supermarket and into the farmers' market, thoughtful consumers have more and more chances to find out how their dinner lived, and to put their food dollars towards supporting land-healthy, humane practices.

For more background on the challenges of creating a local meat supply chain, read the report Where's the Local Beef? by Food and Water Watch.

In college I was always broke and ate very little meat. Ironically, I spent my freshman and sophomore years working at a prime rib restaurant called, of all things, The Gentleman's Choice. As I couldn't actually afford the beef dishes we served, I usually ate a free house salad and bread while escaping the cigarette smoke in the kitchen during my breaks. Since serving slabs of prime rib at The Gentleman's Choice, I have eaten at a prime rib house only twice. This is partially due to the fact that I try to eat only grass-fed beef, and there's nary a prime rib house that does that, and also because steakhouses aren't my cup of tea.

My first prime rib experience after waitressing at the Gentleman's Choice was about ten years ago in Santa Cruz. While visiting with my family, my Dad insisted we all eat at the Hindquarter -- yes that is really the name -- because, according to Dad, "Nothing else looks good." I rebelled by ordering fish, which was dry and tasteless. The next occasion was last weekend when I was visiting our friends Mark and Margaret in San Diego and they wanted to use a gift certificate they had won for Red Tracton's in Del Mar, a 60-year old landmark from the days when Hollywood icons like Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante came to watch the ponies.

As soon as I entered the building and walked up to the hostess stand next to the bar, I was thrown back to my days serving at The Gentleman's Choice. The décor was dark, the room smelled like beef and butter, and there were old white retirees everywhere drinking cocktails. The only thing missing were the wafts of cigarette smoke, which I am sure would have been there had it been legal.

Under normal circumstances, I try to purchase and eat only grass-fed beef. But what do you do when you're faced with a social situation that is in disagreement with your general food philosophy? Do you walk out and say, "Sorry," or do you stay mum and participate? I suppose the answer to this question depends on how vehemently opposed you are to what's being served. A vegetarian in my situation most likely would have walked out (and rightly so), but as I eat meat, this seemed a bit extreme. So as I was handed the menu, I thought "when in Rome," and put my personal beef ideology in a little mental box in the back of my head. This seemed the best thing to do, particularly as I had learned a very important ordering rule years ago.

While driving cross country a year after graduating from college with my dearest childhood friend Margaret and her husband Mark, we stopped in Monahan, Texas for lunch. Margaret's black curly hair and her husband's dangling cross earring stuck out in the little diner just as the ten-gallon hats on the male diners would have on Haight Street. As Mark ordered his hamburger, Margaret and I decided on turkey sandwiches. While Mark devoured his juicy all-American meat patty, Margaret and I picked the grayish turkey with a big black vein down the middle from between our sliced bread. Mark looked up and said, "We're in Texas. Just get the burger." Words to live by.

It's easy to be a food snob in a steak house. There is no magic behind the dishes; no culinary expertise; and no tantalizing use of fresh ingredients. There are just large slabs of Grade-A beef (industrial food complex beef at that), lots of butter, and mayonnaise-based salad dressings. But I had learned my lesson in Texas and so realized I should just embrace the situation.

The gift certificate covered the price of two full prime cuts. Just one of those babies could feed a family of eight easily, although Mark and my husband handily finished most of their dinners plus a good portion of the chocolate cake afterward. I opted for the huge iceberg lettuce chunk with blue cheese and a much smaller steak. Did I enjoy my dinner? Not really, and I actually felt a little sick afterward. But did I hate the experience? No, and here's why.

It's simply more fun to eat up and drink your wine, than complain or walk out, especially when someone else is using their gift certificate. The Red Tracton's (or any Gentleman's Choice equivalent) is not my restaurant of choice, but we there for the great company, not the food. I can pretty much guarantee you that I won't be eating in another prime rib house anytime soon, but sometimes it's good to be reminded of your past. And sometimes, when in Rome, it just makes sense to get the prime rib.