So now I feel like I’m on a roll (no pun intended). SORT OF. Easing into Metirement and because today is Sunday, here comes another recipe. Plenty of time to write! On Sundays I do all my grocery shopping for the week and plan out all my dinners ahead of time. Then I create a shopping list around the menu. I have been doing this since my children were little and I have found that cooking ahead of time all at once on a Sunday gives me more time during the week to actually enjoy cooking.
So while the intent of this blog is to talk about MEtirement and, hopefully, how it affects more than just me, my lifelong interest in cooking is also fun to share.
TURKEY BURGERS!!!
How to avoid DRY and TASTELESS TURKEY BURGERS
Today is Sunday. Grocery shopping day, as I said. So as I sit down to make my shopping list I think about how I am going to make turkey burger moist and flavorful since, honestly, ground turkey tastes pretty bland until you season it. Sundays have always been the day I prep as many meals as I can. I do all my shopping, chopping and cooking of side dishes so that only the main course has to be prepared each night. It was very important to me that my children sit down to a home cooked meal every night and with a full-time job, the only way that could happen is if I took the time to plan ahead.
Sunday is PREP DAY
As part of this plan-ahead philosophy of cooking, one of the things that I like to do is to peel and chop lots of garlic cloves in advance and keep them in a closed plastic or glass container in the fridge. As you will see as you follow this blog, I use a lot of garlic (not when I bake though so don’t stop reading!). I hate peeling garlic. During my working days I discovered garlic in a jar in the refrigerated produce section of the supermarket. I also discovered garlic cloves individually wrapped in groups of five or six whole cloves but found these go moldy way too fast including, before I could even get them home from the grocery store (just kidding). And then I discovered nice, firm, peeled garlic cloves from Spice World (http://spiceworldinc.com) and was delighted to only have to put them in my small food processor, (love this one from Cuisinart which I have owned for maybe a thousand years without a problem: Cuisinart mini-food processor grind them all up and keep them in the refrigerator. They keep almost in definitely like this but “indefinitely” in my house isn’t very long when it comes to garlic. You might ask why I don’t just buy the chopped garlic in a jar. I do not like the texture (a bit slimy) nor the taste (misses a beat) of the real thing. So Spice World or any other peeled, whole garlic cloves it is.
GREEK INGREDIENTS FROM THE OLIVE BAR MAKE THINGS EASY PEASY
But I digress. Now back to my turkey burgers. As I sat doing my shopping list this morning I thought of Kalamata olives and feta cheese but realized that those would be a bit dry added to a turkey burger and I was looking for more moisture than those provide. So I got to thinking about the olive bar at my local Kroger supermarket and, putting aside how expensive everything is when itter gets weighed at the checkout counter (always sticker shock), I realized that the olive mixture with the olives, feta, olive oil and all those colorful yummy spices (PINK peppercorns for goodness sake!) would be perfect for otherwise dry, boring turkey burgers.
So there you have it. I pulse up the olive mixture (not puréed but no big chunks either) in the mini processor, chop some Italian flat parsley by hand, add one egg to bind it and gently fold all of that in to a pound of 99% fat free, hormone free, steroid free ground turkey breast. I like Honeysuckle White but any brand free from all those hormones etc will do. You must be very gentle in this mixing process or your burgers will be hockey pucks when you grill them. Last thing I do is to grind some pepper into the bowl. I only use Trader Joe’s rainbow peppercorn mix because for whatever reason it has the best overall flavor without having an intense black pepper taste. I can’t explain why I have always hated the taste of pure black pepper no matter how much I spend on it nor how many expensive pepper grinders I buy I find the Trader Joe’s brand to be extremely flavorful yet mild. Once everything is together in the bowl I take about a teaspoon of the turkey mixture put it in a small ramekin and microwave it for 30 seconds. Once cooled I taste it to see if additional seasonings are necessary.
I like to put the mixture in the fridge overnight to let the flavors get acquainted with each other. If you are in a hurry (in other words, not MEtired) an hour to chill the mixture would be fine. Then to the grill.
For the “bun”, I prefer Flat Outs, a figure-8-shaped pita bread for my turkey burgers because they are solid enough to stay intact even with the tomato slice in them. As you can see in the recipe below I put the turkey burger on the Flat Out right before I take it off the grill. I grill the whole shebang with the turkey burger in between which gives the bread a bit of crispness and melds the juices of the burger with the bread.
I serve my turkey burgers with nice thick tomato slices and a yogurt dill cucumber sauce which I also make ahead of time because it keeps in the refrigerator for up to a week. I prefer to serve the sauce on the side for dipping rather than putting it on the burger because it will just make everything slide all over the place.
DONE WITH COOKING TALK. NOW BACK TO LIFE
Thanks Apple for the little microphone!
So this is my blog day 4. Between day 1 and day 2 I discovered that little microphone on my iPhone. Thank you Apple for giving me the tool I needed to jump start my creativity. Figuring out how to dictate my thoughts has been a real confidence booster. It makes me more spontaneous in my “writing” and I do not lose my train of thought as easily (always an issue I find as I get older). Does anyone else realize from time to time that if they get interrupted they can’t remember what they were going to say or write? Certainly I don’t feel as resilient in the memory area as I used to. Scary. A wake- up call to do as much as you can while you can. More about this in the coming days. My mother’s insidious memory loss at a young age. My fear every single day that I will become her. Stay tuned. And please let me know what you think of my blog so far. I want to write things that people want to read. But please don’t slay me because I want this project to be rewarding and last a long time into the future. Constructive comments most welcome. Snarky high school “mean girls” or “mean boys” not welcome! Thanks for stopping by.
My Big Fat Greek Turkey Burger with Dill Yogurt Sauce
A very flavorful turkey burger thanks to the addition of delicacies from the olive bar
Ingredients
Turkey Burgers
- 1 pound ground turkey
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1/3 c. Italian parsley leaves no stems!
- 1 t. dried oregano rubbed between your fingers to release the oils and flavor
- 1 egg
- 8 ounces mixed pitted olives and feta cheese from your supermarket olive bar
- 1/2 t. freshly ground black pepper
- 1 T. olive oil for brushing the flatbreads
- 1 ripe tomato thickly sliced
- 1 avocado sliced
Cucumber, Dill and Yogurt Sauce
- 1 English cucumber sliced
- 1/3 c. fresh dill fronds no stems
- 1/3 c. Greek yoghurt full or no fat
- 3 T. reduced fat sour cream preferably Breakstone for flavor and thickness
- salt and pepper to taste
- 1 container Sabra Hummus any flavor but I like the black olive
Instructions
Turkey Burgers
-
Put ground turkey in a medium sized bowl.
-
Chop the garlic cloves first in the dry bowl of a mini food processor and add the parsley. Chop until mixed. Add the oregano and the egg and mix.
-
Pulse the mixed olives and feta cheese along with the egg mixture. Short pulses are best as you do not want to purée the mixture.
-
With a rubber spatula, gently (please be gentle!) mix the olive mixture with the turkey and add a few grindings of pepper.
-
Take a teaspoon of the raw mixture and put it in a ramekin. Microwave for 20 seconds and let cool. Taste for seasonings and adjust if necessary. Once the mixture is seasoned as you like it, put the raw turkey mixture in the refrigerator covered overnight.
Cucumber, Dill and Yogurt sauce
-
Make sauce. Wash and cut the cucumber into medium slices that will fit into the mini food processor. I put 1/3 of them at a time into the processor, chop them finely, and dump them into a medium sized strainer so they can wait there for their other friends to join them. Chop the next two groups of cucumber slices the same way and let them rest in the strainer over a bowl. Salt the cucumbers very lightly (no more than 1/2 tsp) and mix the chopped mixture together to allow the juices to drain for 15 minutes.
-
Press the cucumbers with a spoon to get the juices out and mix them with the rest of the sauce ingredients. Refrigerate overnight for best flavor blending but if you don't have time to do so, that's fine also. (Not judging here!)
-
The next day, preheat a gas grill to to medium high. Form the turkey burgers into 4 patties each the side and shape of one half of your Flat Out and brush the patties on both sides with olive oil.
-
Brush the FlatOuts with the olive oil and set aside.
-
Once the grill is hot, grill the burgers for 5 minutes on a side. Don't move them for the first 5 minutes. If you move them, they will stick. You want them to cook on one side just enough so that a spatula will easily slide under them. You want them to be cooked all the way through. Never press them down with a spatula since all that does is release all their juices and you will have dry dry dry burgers.
-
Grill the FlatOuts, oil side down for about a minute on a side. Watch them very carefully as they will burn very quickly.
-
When the burgers are done, put them each on a FlatOut on the grill and let them sit for a minute. Remove from heat.
-
Spread hummus on one side of the bread and add a slice of tomato and some avocado. Cut each burger in half for easy dipping into the cucumber sauce.