Pam's Sublime Turkey Burgers

Sometimes you just have a good idea and have to implement it. The inspiration for this recipe came from the fresh mint growing in our garden. I have used mint before in turkey burgers, and remembered that I also have drizzled said burgers with lemon juice. I took this idea to the next level by making my own mayonnaise using lemon-infused olive oil.

For two burgers I used:

1/2 lb. ground turkey
a few dashes each of salt and pepper
about a dozen fresh mint leaves, minced
a few shakes of crumbled feta cheese

Patties were hand formed and cooked on the stovetop.

For the mayonnaise I used

1 uber-fresh local egg gifted by a friend
1 dollop of lemon-infused olive oil
1 dollop of basil-infused olive oil
a few shakes each of salt and pepper

The ingredients were put in the blender and mixed until emulsified. The result was a bit heavy on the olive oil taste, so I added some more salt until there was a better balance. 

Burgers were placed on sesame buns and topped with the mayonnaise.

We enjoyed this on the back deck with some white wine and potato chips. Bats and birds helped to create an ideal atmosphere. The evening was complete when we got to watch the best back-yard lightning-bug show so far this season.

Turkey Burger Flavor Symphony

Simple Suppers

I am not quite sure how this book leapt from the shelf into my hands recently. As readers of this space know, we already have plenty of cookbooks, and the whole point of this blog is to tackle some of the thousands of untapped treasures already on our shelves. Besides, we are not afraid of complicated recipes.

We are, however, only two diners most of the time, with our child now a grown-up a thousand miles from home. And some evenings, we are not prepared to go full-crêpe just for dinner. So pick it up I did, and we were very pleased with the first result, entitled Turkey Burger Sliders with Spicy Lime Mayonnaise.

I use the word "entitled" to signify the author's intent to create sliders, even though I simply made regular-sized burgers. Either way, this is a delicious variation on turkey burgers, with three parts: the burger, the toppings, and the mayo.

The burger itself includes grated ginger, garlic, salt and pepper. I used a lot of ginger, which added a very nice note to the symphony of flavors here. The mayo included fresh lime juice and sriracha sauce. I used the proportions called for, and ended up with mayo that was both too thin and way too abundant. I could have made a soup with it. Next time I will just add a dash of lime and bit of sriracha to a much smaller dollop of mayo than the 1/2 cup in the recipe.

Finally -- the toppings are brilliant. I used a potato peeler to make very thin slices of cucumber, which went on top of the burger, along with a small pile of cilantro leaves. I think this is the first time I have ever used cilantro without chopping it -- just cut a big handful of it away from the stalks. The recipe calls for chopped red onion as well, but sliced up some scallions we had on hand.

This went very well with a fresh fruit salad Pam made, using an infused blackberry ginger vinegar from our friends at Lebherz and a chilled Sauvignon Blanc.

Note: Laura Arnold includes plenty of vegetarian and seafood meals in this thin volume -- stay tuned to see which of these we try.

Not-ordinary Turkey Burgers

A few years ago, we discovered that mixing in a shredded apple greatly improves the texture of turkey burgers, which can often be a bit dry and crumbly. So I was intrigued by the recipe for Turkey & Spinach Burgers in our Big Green Egg Cookbook. I was even more intrigued by the inclusion of a tomato-based pesto.

Lazy blogger alert: I went to a bit of trouble to photograph the ingredients lists, rather than type them. The basic list is:

I followed this pretty carefully, except that I used one bag of spinach, which might have been 10 ounces, and one pound of ground turkey. I've never seen white and dark ground turkey sold separately. I don't measure salt and pepper, but I'm pretty sure I used a lot less salt than called for. I mixed these, along with the garlic, in a bowl and then formed them into four patties.

I started by lighting the grill, because that takes a while, and then I wilted the spinach. To do this, I rinsed it and then placed it in a large pan over medium-high heat on the stovetop. Stirring occasionally, the full pot of spinach was quickly reduced to something like a cupful. I used "regular" spinach; next time I will use baby spinach so that it is more leafy and lest stemmish.
I blended the mayo and mustard in a small serving bowl, as this is a topping for the table.

I then started the pesto. so that it would be ready before I began grilling.

The recipe calls for draining the tomatoes, reserving 1/4 cup of oil, and then adding back another 1/4 of oil. I simply used the whole jar (8.5 ounces) and added oil until it looked right. The recipe calls for using a food processor, which we do not have. In such cases, we always use knives or our blender; in this case, the blender did not work very well. Next time I will chop and mix these ingredients in a bowl before smoothing them in a blender.

I cooked the burgers on a cooking stone -- rather than directly on the grill, because I always end up with 1/3 of the burger stuck in the grill. The stone works great -- I just need to be sure it is quite hot when I am ready to put something on it. In this case, of course, it was the patties. I think I grilled them at 450-500 for about 8 minutes on one side, 4 on the other, then another minute or so with swiss cheese on top. I seem to have gotten the doneness right, which for me remains mostly a matter of luck.

I took set the burgers aside on a plate and then brushed the pesto onto each half of the wheat buns (I used large kaiser rolls -- highly recommended for this messy meal), set them on the grill, and closed the egg.

I then went inside to finish up my mac-and-cheese comfort-food side dish. This led to my only real error -- for buns directly on the grill, two minutes was much too much, and they were a bit charred by the time I retrieved them.

The end result, though: absolutely delicious turkey burgers with several vegetable groups well represented!





NOTE: The cookbook is essential for Big Green Egg owners who want to get the most interesting results from their grills; some of its best recipes can also be found on the recipe section of the manufacturer's web site.

Burgers with avocado and tomato salsa

This is an adaptation of a recipe from our Big Green Egg Cookbook (and web site) We made a few adjustments, mostly because we forgot some ingredients.

This was a collaboration meal. Pam made the salsa and James made and grilled the burgers. 

Our first challenge was finding an avocado. We looked for a long time in the produce section of our grocery store before we found the perhaps two dozen that were there. About half of those were hard as rocks, the other half felt like mush. We selected the least squishy among the mushy bin.

Once we had the avocado Pam chopped it, along with a fresh tomato from our local farmer's market, half an onion, and three slices of crisp bacon. To this mix she added a dollop of mayonnaise, juice from half a lemon, a bit of pepper and garlic salt. Pam also added some chopped fresh cilantro even though the recipe didn't call for it because, really, what is salsa without cilantro?! Once everything was thoroughly mixed, she covered it and placed in the refrigerator to chill.

James, meanwhile, fired up the Big Green Egg (from which we got the recipe), inserting the cast-iron grill recommended for such uses. He used ground turkey that was on hand, mixing it with some Trader Joe's garlic seasoning and a little olive oil that happened to be in the mixing bowl. Something to bind the burgers together would have been helpful. Despite getting the grill to reasonably high heat and spraying it with cooking spray, the burgers sagged in the gaps, and had to be extracted, more than flipped, when they were done. Some delicious charred scraps were snapped up by the chef; others fell into the coals.

The overall result, though, was delicious, and we agree with the #BigGreenEgg web site that this is a perfect burger recipe!

First Longer Day

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON
Image: Dreams Time

Followers of this blog will know that we often choose our foods to mark special days, including those marking the changes of seasons. And between the latkes of Hanukkah (this year they were even better than the "best ever latkes" of 2012, greatly assisted by our home-made mead) and the lobster of Christmas Eve, we turned once again to Jamie Wood's The Wicca Cookbook.

During the shortest day of the year, we were still enjoying food from the day before, so we actually waited until the day after the longest night to celebrate solstice. This seems more fitting, actually, as it is the first in a string of 182 days of increasing light.

When I made cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving this year, a friend had actually given me two bags of the precious berries, directly from her work at Ocean Spray, so the Chakra Cranberry Sauce recipe (pp. 180-181) was an obvious choice. I heated one cup of water in an indispensable cast-iron saucepan, and added one cup of organic granulated sugar. When it was boiling and the sugar dissolved, I removed the berries from the freezer and poured them in. I added one orange (pureed with our immersion blender), a diced apple and a diced pear. To this I added a cup of raisins (the recipe calls for any dried fruit) and a cup of chopped pecans. I omitted the 1/2 teaspoon of salt the recipe calls for, but did include plenty of ground cinnamon and freshly-shaved nutmeg. I simmered covered for the  recommended 30 minutes, but kept it going afterward, as it was a bit too liquidish. The trade-off here is that it did not have time to cool very much. I recommend making this at least a few hours ahead if you want it to set up right, but it was delicious warm, served with a slotted spoon.

Our main course was stuffed turkey burgers (p. 188), which were similar to one of our staple dinners. In this case, to a pound (or so) of lean ground turkey, I added breadcrumbs, a tablespoon (or so) of dried thyme and the juice of half a lemon. I then made two very thin patties for each serving, forming a kind of pocket that I filled with a small amount of cheese. The recipe calls for bleu cheese, but nobody in our house eats that, so I used two cheeses we always have on hand -- aged Vermont cheddar for Paloma and me, and feta crumbles for Pam. I pressed the edges of each double patty together and put them on a plate in the fridge for a couple hours before cooking them up on our griddle.

I had been unable to find fresh thyme -- the recipe calls for 1/2 cup -- and our front-yard crop is way out of season; This was so delicious that I look forward to trying this again in the late spring, perhaps on Beltane.

The "perfect pairing" for this was to have been Glüwein (mulled wine - p. 194), but I completely forgot. As it was, we were quite satisfied to pair this meal with water, and will make the wine on some frostier day. We will compare Wood's recipe with the TasteFood version.

As always, Thank the Farmers!

Image: Ocean Spray Cooperative

One Pound of Ground Turkey - Four Meals

On Monday night this week James and I made spaghetti with our favorite no-recipe sauce which we developed over years of trial and error. We begin by mincing and sautéing a clove of garlic and a small onion in a sauce pan, then add 1/2 pound of ground turkey until it is browned. Next a can of tomato sauce, a can of tomato paste, and healthy doses of dried basil, oregano, and parsley (we never measure these) and a bay leaf. This heats while we cook the spaghetti, and we end up with a thick, flavorful sauce. Of course we top our spaghetti and sauce with fresh shredded parmesan cheese. We had purchased a pound of ground turkey, and since we only used half of it on Monday, on Tuesday we made thick, juicy turkey burgers. Combining favorite bits of different turkey burger recipes we like we mixed the ground turkey in with a shredded granny smith apple, and a bit of horseradish sauce. Once the burgers were formed we cooked them on our indispensable cast-iron griddle, and added cheddar cheese slices and bar-b-que sauce. We made homemade french fries to go along side. We had some leftover sauce, so on Wednesday we added a can of drained and rinsed kidney beans to it, and some chili powder, and had sloppy joes. And, even after this meal, there was still about half a cup of the sauce and kidney bean mix, so for lunch on Thursday we heated it up, and put it on top of some corn chips, added some shredded cheddar, and voila! Nachos!

All Pesto All the Time

Earlier this week I made spaghetti with my favorite ground-turkey/tomato sauce. Since I did not use all of the ground turkey that I thawed in the sauce, I had just enough left to make two turkey burgers last night. I usually like to put some kind of fruit (apples and/or cranberries) in my turkey burgers, but we were out of both, so I went looking online for some other ideas. I wound up adapting a recipe I found at allrecipes.com to use some of the pesto sauce I cleverly froze this summer (made with the basil from my garden, and garlic from my CSA). I had just under 1/2 pound of turkey to which I added a small handful of breadcrumbs, about 1/4 cup of crumbled feta cheese, a small minced garlic clove, and about a tablespoon of pesto sauce. I formed two patties and cooked on the stovetop until they were no longer pink inside. I also cooked a small serving of spaghetti and mixed it with the most of the rest of the pesto sauce, leaving just enough sauce to drizzle on of top each of the burgers. The burgers were eaten on buns, with a side serving of pasta with pesto. This was a delicious and satisfying meal, made complete with a bottle of our homemade chardonnay.

Better than Oprah

Turkey and apple are not a traditional pairing, but they are a perfect together. I rarely order omelets in restaurants, for example, but enjoyed a scrumptious turkey-apple-bacon-brie omelet just last week at Duesenbergs in Catonsville. (The coffee was horrific, though!)

As Pam wrote back in February, shredded apple brings a lot of flavor to a turkey burger and greatly improves the texture. My effort yesterday was a further modification of the modified Oprah recipe that Pam made so marvelously in the winter. Starting with a half pound of ground turkey, I added some sliced, local scallion tops, herbed bread crumbs, and half a shredded granny smith apple. I simply mixed these ingredients together and formed the patties. I then heated a little canola oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, added the patties, and covered so they would fry and steam at the same time.

After flipping the burgers, I topped each with a generous spoonful of Trappist mango pepper jelly from the monks in Spencer, Massachusetts. I then lowered the heat and we read together for a while so that the burgers would cook through and the jelly would turn to a nice glaze. We put them on soft, multi-grain buns. We knew these would be good, but were not prepared to be overwhelmed by the savory, hot sweetness and amazing texture of these burgers.

We decided that our friend Anna -- who brought us the jelly -- is now responsible for keeping us supplied permanently. Or we might just order it by the case!

These burgers worked perfectly, by the way with one of August's (or near-August's) great pleasures: Pam's fruit salad, with peaches, bloobs, the rest of that apple, and a banana -- tossed with mint from our garden and our Pam's "secret weapon" for fruit salad: margarita mix. Some home-brewed pale ale completed this memorable meal.

Oprah's favorite Turkey Burgers

Reader's of last year's "Celebrating the States" blog know that I read Living Oprah by Robyn Okrant for my Illinois book. Okrant followed all of Oprah's advice for one year, and prepared some of her favorite recipes, including the Mar-a-Lago Turkey burger. I recall that Okrant said that she spent about $50 on some special  ingredients, including some hard-to-find Major Grey's Chutney, in order to make these. She did rave about them though, saying both she and her husband loved them. I decided to try making them, but I used the fruit chutney that was already in my cabinet. I imagine Okrant probaly also had to buy the Chipotle Tabasco sauce that the recipe calls for, but that is already a staple in my house (henceforth known as a "staple on Maple" because we live on Maple avenue, plus, it rhymes).So although we had to buy a Granny Smith apple, and celery for this, we didn't spend anything like $50. I followed the instructions to saute the apple, onion, and celery, and then mix all the other ingredients together and let it meld together for two hours.This really allowed the flavors to come through, and the fruit chutney topping gave this just the right amount of sweetness. The celery and onion also gave it some crunch providing all that texture I like. I think turkey burgers are best when they are prepared with something that has fruit in it. The turkey burgers I made from Jane Brody's recipe while good, didn't have the sweet flavor. One thing Brody said though, is that you can't think of turkey burgers as hamburgers, and she is right. If you want a good ol' hamburger, prepare it your favorite way and enjoy, but don't try to prepare a turkey burger the same way. You will probably be disappointed.

Recipes - Week 2

I wound up making two new recipes today. When I realized that it was the 92nd anniversary of the Great Boston Molasses Flood I decided to make some molasses muffins and chose Apple Streusel Walnut muffins from the Crosby Molasses Company website. I like things with a lot of texture and the combination of apples, nuts, and molasses gave this a good mix of flavor and texture - moist, yet chunky. James, Paloma and I all liked these, and they only took about 20 minutes to mix and 20 minutes to bake. They went well with coffee and with milk.

Earlier this week we experienced a power outage, so I had thawed some ground turkey figuring that, since we have a gas stove, I would be able to cook turkey burgers on the stove top. I intended to invite some friends who have an electric stove to come over so we could all have a hot meal, but the power came on well before dinnertime, and my friends invited us back to their house for lasagna, which had been the plan in the first place. So, I still had the thawed turkey and was running out of week, and decided to see if I could find a new turkey burger recipe. Jane Brody's Good Food Book to the rescue. This cookbook is an old favorite, and we are on our second copy of it, having worn out the first. Brody's turkey burgers call for bread crumbs, chopped onion, ketchup, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, paprika, Tabasco sauce and black pepper. She suggests eating them on pita bread  with lettuce and tomato. I made the following changes to her recipe:

         When I squeezed our almost-empty ketchup bottle the plastic cracked, so I threw it away and
          substituted barbeque sauce
          We did not  have soy sauce so I put in extra Worcestershire sauce instead
          I used a plain old hamburger bun rather than pita bread

These were juicy and tender, and had a lot of flavors. They were especially good with the sweet potato fries I served with them. James and I both liked them. (Vegetarian Paloma did not join us.) I think, though, that I will stick with my old favorites for turkey burgers in the future: cheddar cheese with barbeque sauce, or the Apple Turkey Burgers I made last summer in honor of Arkansas Day.