Looking Back: Burgers

My blog may be horribly neglected, but fortunately I've still be cooking and taking pictures when I remember or have time. For this post, I'm going to go way back to the August issue of Cooking Light which featured several different tempting-sounding gourmet burgers. I've already reviewed the Italian Meatball Burgers, but we've also tried the Saté Burgers and the Southwestern Turkey Cheddar Burgers with Grilled Onions.

I don't have pictures of Saté Burgers, but they were quite good. This is a turkey and pork burger that combines the elements of a typical sate with ingredients such as peanuts, lime, cilantro and fish sauce. The result is an exotic, moist, flavorful burger. The recipe suggests skipping the bun and serving them with rice. We decided to be burger traditionalists and decided to serve them on hamburger buns but were put off by the fact that there was no sauce - it seemed like they would be a bit boring and bland just slapped on a dry bun. We decided to try them with bottled Teriyaki sauce and that worked pretty well, but I think perhaps CL knew what they were talking about when they suggested the rice.

Southwestern Turkey-Cheddar Burgers with Grilled Onion

The next burger we tried was the Southwestern turkey burger. This burger is a bit more straightforward, combining turkey with a few Tex-Mex spices and a bit of wheat germ. The burgers are topped off with grilled onions, cheddar cheese and a spicy Chipotle-Poblano ketchup that really takes this burger up a notch. Our only complaint with this burger is that it perhaps had a bit too much onion in the burger itself - this seemed unnecessary with the grilled onion topping.

As a side note, each of these recipes makes 6 burgers. We didn't want to end up with 2 leftover burgers, so instead of reducing the recipe to make 4, we upped the recipes to make 8 and froze the leftovers for a later meal. In fact, I think we still have some of the Southwestern burgers left, waiting for a cold day this winter when we want to bring a little summer indoors.

Only one burger left to try from that issue - the Korean Barbecue Burgers. Yum - I love Korean barbecue - called bulgogi and/or galbi - so we will definitely give these burgers a try and I'm pretty sure we won't be able to wait until summer......

On this day in..........
2006: Sweet Rolls on Sunday
2005: Would you cook if you couldn't taste anything?