The Classic Hamburger: one chicken-eating wife’s story of tackling and conquering this favourite summer beef dish

      I married a hamburger lover. I was a girl who, til then, avoided red meat at nearly all cost, not becos of any ethical or health quandary, but becos I really hadn’t eaten a lot of it in my life and I really didn’t like it much. When I said “I do,” I really wasn’t thinking about mastering the art of cooking beef. Or moose. But that’s one of the things I’ve done. My husband likes to bug me about eating chicken, so I know he understands the sacrifice I’ve made. (And, to be fair, he knows how to eat a delish chicken recipe and be happy.) But I will be honest: I still sometimes make hamburgers and let Brent eat them all, making my meal, instead, of the sides I serve with them. On the other hand, I have actually learned to enjoy hamburgers, roasts, and other classic beef dishes. And I have also, slowly and through much trial and error,  learned to cook them in a way that we both enjoy. Don’t ask me to make a perfect roast beef though. The only roast recipe I’ve really mastered involves a slow cooker and eating it over tortillas. But that’s a story for another day. Today’s story is about: 

The Classic Hamburger

I don’t remember the first time I made hamburgers after I got married, I just know they failed and I determined to find another recipe. I don’t remember the second time either, but those failed too, and again I decided I had to find another recipe. And recipe after recipe I did. Some with more eggs, some fewer; some with panko crumbs, some with cracker crumbs, some with Parmesan, some with no crumbs. Every time they fell apart into miserable little chunks while I was cooking them or cooked up into mile high mountains that weren’t conducive to sticking Inside a homemade bun. I was about to give up; I even asked BTT what I should be doing differently and I think his answer was, “ask my mom.”  I don’t think I actually ever did that but I have helped her mix them up a few times since then and asked her for tips as we worked. The one thing she told me that shocked me was: leave out the onion. So I stopped putting chopped onion in my hamburgers. As I observed her, she also mixed everything together very well, much longer and more thoroughly than I would have done. And she kept it simple. Eggs, salt + pepper, oatmeal. And she never measured. A woman after my own heart. I won’t say that my hamburgers have been perfect ever since, but after learning those few things I have been able to improve them. So. Here’s the recipe I use:

The Classic Hamburger:

2lb ground meat: beef or moose (our meat of choice), or a mixture of beef and pork or chicken 

1-2 TABLESPOONS ground pepper. 

1/2-1 TABLESPOON salt 

2 eggs 

2-4 fistfuls of oatmeal 

Mix well. Really well. Form into palm sized patties, or to fit your bun size. Keep in mind that, depending on what kind of meat you are using, they may shrivel slightly while cooking. 

Grill, broil or fry and serve with buns, between a few slices of lettuce, or, BTT’s favourite, between two thick slabs of jalapeño jack cheese. 

A few notes: 

 *once I’m done mixing all the ingredients I smell the mixture; if I can’t smell the pepper I add more, continuing to add until I can see the flecks of black in the red meat and the scent of pepper rises above the smell of raw meat.  This is actually something I leaned from my father in law: when cooking red meat (especially the wild meat we use most) the more pepper, the more delicious the end result. 

*the oatmeal: I know a fist Is a really lame unit of measurement becos all our hands are different sizes. What I do is slip my clean hand into my oatmeal bin, scoop up a handful, then dump it into the bowl. To me, the amount is transient. Some people like lots of it in their burgers; some don’t. Sometimes if I’m making burgers for more than just us I add more oatmeal to make the meat go further. Yes, I really am that cheap. The most important thing is that, once you’re done combining it all, your meat mixture is slightly sticky but not at all runny.

*these are fantastic to keep in the freezer. Ideally I make a large amount at once and then pull them out to either grill or else fry in my grill pan as needed.  I love the fact that if we have nothing in the fridge for lunch BTT or I can easily pull these out and fry them up quickly before he leaves for work. I like to throw them, together with a little water, into a cast iron pan under high heat and cover them for a couple minutes to thaw. Then I remove the lid and fry until each side is slightly browned. I can even do this half asleep. 

*my young brothers-in-law tell me that they always brush bbq sauce on while grilling these burgers to take the flavour over the top. I’ve never done it but that’s probably why it tastes so good when they do the grilling. 

*BTT’s favourite burger topping:

1/2 hour before you’re ready to eat slice up a pile of onions and sauté with lots of butter and a sprinkle of salt on lowest heat. I also Include sliced mushrooms and/or green or red peppers if I have them on hand to add another layer of deliciousness. Serve on top of or beside burgers. 

*My favourite burger topping:

fresh jalapeños  or Pickled jalapeños  or fried jalapeños or, better yet, all the jalapeños 

*and one last way to bring your burgers to over-the-top delish: create a mixture of chives, cream cheese, shredded cheese (cheddar/mozza), and salt/pepper (add seasoning salt/red pepper flakes if you like) then form your hamburger patties around a spoonful of this. This process can be a little tricky but it is a fun project if you have a little extra time and you want a little extra deliciousness in your burger. What I do is flatten a sphere of the hamburger mixture in my palm and then place a small amount of cream cheese mixture in the middle of that. Roll the hamburger around the cream cheese to create a filled hamburger then gently flatten the finished burger to uniform thickness. 

 

Three

Years. And tonight the tears fall cos I suddenly feel a visceral pain tighten around my heart. Hot tears fall for these 3 long years worth of You we’ve missed. Three years of little girl hugs, of little girl laughs, of being able to comfort and love you every day. 3 years is so long. But also it feels like yesterday that I hugged you goodbye and left with tears in my eyes. 

Some say a picture is worth 1000 words. But I’d trade the few precious pictures I have of you for 1000 words exchanged with you. I wish I had a do over of the 5 years I knew you. Not becos I regret a single moment of loving You, but becos I would give almost anything to still have You. 

Three. Years. And when a friend and I commiserate about losing a Sister, or, in my case, Two, both our eyes glisten with tears and our voices kinda choke to a stop as we still try to adapt to our lives sans Sisters.  

Nostalgic, Very

My husband and I stopped at Dairy Queen the other day. You know, the Queen of all fast food restaurants that we systematically avoid at almost all cost, the one with mediocre burgers, mediocre fries, the famous home of Orange Julius, that place. Like I said, we are mostly fast food snobs and will rather pack a lunch than eat at A&W or similar. But this day we stopped at Dairy Queen. 

For ice cream. I ordered a cookie dough blizzard. I know that a commercially mass produced ice-cream with hopefully salmonella-free chunks of plastic-tasting beigeness is actually not that appetizing. But to me it was delicious. I almost always order that same thing if I go to DQ for ice cream, which is, I have to admit, pretty rare. And as we drove down the road silently enjoying our ice-cream I realized why I like this ice-cream. This is the ice-cream of my childhood. Those familiar flavours on my tongue invoke the emotions of my childhood, ones that, at the time, I was not actively aware of or able to articulate. Things like inattention to the worries and responsibilities of adulthood and  visceral joy as yet unadulterated by the sorrows of the world. Things like a deep delight over a simple shared cookie dough blizzard. 

When we were kids my dad used to take us for ice cream as a treat. When we were really little we’d order one blizzard for every 2 or 3 kids and then spend the next 15 minutes arguing good naturedly (as I remember it; contact my mom and dad to confirm) about who was taking more bites and complaining that we weren’t getting enough chunks of cookie dough. 

For some reason it’s small routine moments that bring back memories from my childhood and, with each of those memories, comes a flood of the emotions that went along with the scene . Here’s a few more that I’ve been thinking of lately. 

My 10yo brother in law asked me the other day to tell him about the creepiest thing I had ever heard. Without even thinking, I told him that an elephant trumpeting into the twilight  had to be close to the top of that list. But there’s another thing I’ve been thinking of since then that was also creepy. Or maybe creepy isn’t the word, but, at the time, it sent shivers of fear to my very core. It was the strangest night of my teenaged life when I awoke to the sound of a newborn baby in our kitchen and got up to see my mom pacing the floor with a heartbroken baby boy who had been born hours earlier and immediately left motherless. The moment I heard that cry, before I even stumbled out of my bedroom to investigate the cause, I knew something horrible had happened.  To this day, the cry of an occasional newborn will elicit the memory of what was perhaps the first time I experienced emotions in such intensity: fear, the key emotion, with confusion and awe and heartbreak close behind. 

A certain smoke smell on the air in fall transports me to stolen moments behind the garden shed, covertly stuffing dry leaves into  the coals from Bambi Mavuto’s morning tea fire, trying to coax it back to life for some mud and water baking project. Without my mom seeing me. And when I remember this, I momentarily feel like I did then: sly and carefree and blistered from my carelessness with fire. 

Sometimes the musky sweet smell of a certain essential oil drags me back to sultry African nights when the air in our yard was heavy with the smell of the queen of the night bushes, and my mind echoes with sleepy goodnights of leaving supper guests and the extreme joy of just being a kid growing up in Africa.

 Each of these small awakenings of my senses is so intense it can almost carry me away from reality for a second. And sometimes I let it. Cos it’s kind of nice to remember.