Our burgers start out with ground (minced) beef, which I then form into patties, generally of around 1/4 pound (that's about the size that a pattie would be on a McDonald's Quarter Pounder). Sometimes, if we are running short on time or are making a lot of burgers, we'll get beef that has already been formed into patties.
The next step on my list is to season them. I sprinkle on some salt, black pepper and garlic powder and rub some olive oil into them so that they don't stick to the grill. Then it's time to heat some meat!
Normally I would just put ketchup (tomato sauce) and mustard on my burger, but on Friday I felt like something different. I took some spicy chipotle barbecue sauce that we had gotten for free with a coupon from Whole Foods a couple of weeks ago and mixed it with some mayonnaise and smeared that on one of the buns. If you tried the sauce on it's own it had a pleasant but slightly strong back of the throat heat to it. When it was mixed with everything else on the burger though I couldn't taste it. The solution was to add more of it, which did the trick and added a new flavor layer to the awesomeness. After eating our burgers Liz was full, but I was just getting started. BURGER TIME!!!
Here are some shots of me with my second burger. First I show the burger in it's component form. There is a bun, a pattie, some onion, pineapple and the chipotle bbq mayo in a bowl in the background.
I spooned some chipotle mayo onto the bottom bun.
Weird looking Russell then pointed out, "There's enough chipotle mayo on here that the meat slides around! That's how you can tell you've got enough on the bottom."
After adding the pineapple and onion, I spooned more sauce onto the top pattie. Construction complete!
Oh yeah! Ooze, sauce, ooze!
More weird facial expressions as I do the fake out first bite...
...before sinking the teeth in!
The chipotle bbq mayo was a revelation, the greatest innovation in my burger-making since, um, sliced buns. All these successes, or lack of failures, in burger-making are slowly inching me towards being able to legitimately wear the mask/crown that Liz bestowed on me a couple of years ago and be like someone I idolize so much:
I WILL BE BURGER KING!!!
The real King is awesome.
Friday night Tiff arrived at about 9:30 or so, by which stage we were part way through watching Hot Tub Time Machine. It was good, but I enjoyed Pineapple Express more. There was some really funny stuff in that.
Friday night and into Saturday morning was filled with strange dreams. In the one I remember I worked for a cable company, and we made cables of all types, from the wires that go into network cabling to the large cables that they use on suspension bridges. The company kept getting calls for cable orders really early in the morning, and so I suggested to my boss that we should start adding a surcharge to any order placed before 6am on a Saturday morning. What seemed like seconds later, but time is hard to judge when you are asleep so it could have been minutes, hours or even days later, the alarm went off. It was 5:15 and time to take Tiff to the airport for a flight to Georgia. Out of the house by 6:10, at the airport by 6:55, and back at Audubon for an early morning walk by 7:50. The walk was good - there was no-one around, and all we could hear were the birds (saw very few of them, though) and the distant running of chainsaws. While we were walking we talked about how it wasn't so bad to be up this early in the morning, because you could get so much more done, walking was quiet and not hot and there was no-one around. We resolved to work towards becoming morning people. A problem with getting up that early is that you are hungry for lunch at 9AM, so when we got home from our walk we made some scrambled eggs, and, Liz's idea, put chipotle barbecue mayo on them with onions. They were good.
The rest of the day we primed a frame we are repainting, ran errands for people, visited Liz's grandmother, washed the Prius and then talked to my family. Both of us were pretty tired, so we heated up some leftover soup for dinner then sat around for half an hour to digest before hitting the hay before 9:30. Perhaps a drawback of the morning person approach.
Following our resolution to work towards being morning people we got up at 10 this morning, the plan today being to hit up the grocery stores we go to to get out weekly shopping done. On our list is ground beef, but this time, the chipotle bbq mayo, onion and beef are getting a new friend; the most noble of meat products. That's right, folks,
BACON BURGERS ARE ON THE MENU!
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