Burgers

For Memorial Day, we had burgers for dinner. First, though, we made fried plantain because we've always wanted to try it. And we live in Elizabeth, NJ, whose grocery stores stock ample supplies of both green and yellow plantains, not to mention dozens of other Hispanic ingredients (yucca and various other roots, dried fish, something called Mojo sauce...).

We sliced and deep fried a yellow plantain, and sprinkled salt on top. It was ok. The taste was kind of bland, with a hint of banana. I thought plantains weren't supposed to taste like banana even though they look like bananas, but this one did. We tried dipping them in hot sauce, but that didn't do much. Apparently we got the sweet kind, so maybe next time we'll try the green kind, or something.

On to the burgers. I finely diced an onion and mixed it into 20 oz of ground beef (80% lean) with salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika. I would have preferred to buy chuck steaks and ground the meat myself but please, people, we're on a budget, ok?

I weighed out the burgers into four 5 oz patties (I'm not OCD, I just have a kitchen scale and love using it). Then I cooked them on a hot CIS for a couple minutes on each side. I tried testing the internal temp with my probe thermometer, but it was only registering about 120, and I was looking for 150-160. But looking at my burgers I thought that they were close to done, and I knew if I left them on for much longer they would be dry and burnt. So I took them off and we ate them. They weren't so pink inside but that might have been because of the seasoning. We're still not sure if they were cooked all the way, but we're here still so I guess it turned out ok.

Next time, I will make them wider and thinner. Oh, also - we made corn on the cob. Apparently sweet corn is in season, somewhere. I thought corn season wasn't till July/August but I guess not. And at our Shoprite, each ear is 17 cents. Doesn't get better than that.