Burger Dinner @ Home

After this burger post, I will have a break from posting more burgers. I still have lots of photos of burgers from burgers from Singapore and also overseas. If you have the Lonely Planet Queensland guide, they have an entry about the best burger in Brisbane. It was a tiny shop, far away in the suburbs. Sis, Momo and I travelled more than an hour to go try it, and yes it was worth the trip. The burge was superb! We are sometimes so crazy while on holiday.

We will still be eating them though, we love burgers! I will refrain from posting more burgers until I have the urge to burger bomb my blog again.

A few weeks ago, as usual, we were at home working on our laptops. We usually have either Asian Food Channel or Food Network Asia providing the background noise when we work. For that particular day, we were subliminally influenced to have burgers! On both channels that we kept swapping, it was all about burgers, burgers and more burgers! Since we saw the programs making it, we decided we would make some too! We invited a few people over for dinner that night too!

My sis did most of the work. I did most of the eating. She prepared the patty, cut up everything. When there's a lady busy in the kitchen, it's best to leave her alone. The golden rule is that there can only be one person in charge in the kitchen.




A very healthy looking burger that we made. The vegetables used had more nutrition too. We had baby spinach instead of lettuce. Carrots and crunchy water chestnuts were also added into the patty as well.




If you are veggies hater and prefer more meat, no problem!
Use two meat patties instead! This is also the no carbo version! Great for losing weight!




Another version of the carbo-less burger. Tomato slices used instead of bread.
The combination is up to your imagination!

We had baked potatoes and corn as sides for those who wants more carbo that is not made from white flour.  ;-)





Since sis has done everything else, I was in charge of cooking.

I got a scolding for making the patties too small. Always remember to ask the person in charge first before being "kay-kiang" and start cooking. Use the weighing scale too, if she specifies she wants a 40, 60 or 80 gram patty!

The good that came from the mistake is that we had lots and lots of patties and we could have different variations!
 We got our minced meat from Culina at Fairprice Finest as that's the supermarket nearest to our place. The recipe sis used was originally from The Biggest Loser cookbook. It had lots of herbs and spices in it. For the meat patty, we did not add any flour into it.  If you don't have any flour in the patty, the meat loosens when you cook it. So how? You know when you cook at home, you do try to finish up stuff you have at home. I told sis, add in the almond powder that we have extra from making macarons some time ago. Hey, it turned out nice!

It has been a long time since my Scanpan grill griddle pan saw the light of day. Aren't the patties beautiful? When cooking patties, please don't keep pressing them. If you do, all the juice from the burger comes out and the patty will taste dry.

Be a little patient, let it cook slowly and gently press them to get the grill marks. I did not use any oil, because the instruction was please keep it healthy.  

(It's weird huh, we try to eat healthy at home, but when we are out, we order the most unhealthy stuff! haha)




We thought of making our own buns, we had all the ingredients at home, but we got lazy and went to buy gardenia buns instead.

We love gherkins in our burgers. There are two kinds of gherkins for sale in the supermarket. I prefer the sweet gherkins so I got the bottle above. But....  the ladies who came for dinner said I got the wrong one. They prefer the tart gherkins. Oh well....




The best tasting cheese we think are the ones by President.  It does taste better! They are a bit more expensive though. We used organic baby spinach instead of lettuce. It tastes so much better and is also more nutritious.




We had sides like steamed corn and baked potatoes as sides as well.
If you noticed in the supermarket nowadays, they sell colourful of potatoes all in a bag now. We bought a pack to make wedges!




Wash the potatoes cut them in wedges and throw in the spices you like. I had some high quality olive oil in it (I used the same brand used by the famous Ferran haha), spanish smoked paprika and dash of dried parsley with some kosher salt. Bake them for 20 minutes and that's it! Simple.

Note: We read recently that if you want super crispy potatoes when baking, soak them in water first. You might also read that cooking starch rich food in high temperature is not good for health. It produces something called acrylamide. Well, this research says that when you soak your potatoes in water before cooking, it reduces it. So, soak your potatoes before cooking! Pardon me if you get confused, just my geek-ness.

We are no burgers expert. We are just experimenting. ;-)

Bon Appétit