First Day Back

And I'm already hungry!

For a fast, cheap lunch I made vegetarian spaghetti "carbonara". Of course carbonara is usually made with bacon or pancetta, but I substituted chopped crimini mushrooms and butter and topped the mess off with a nice piece garlicbutter fried tofu. When some of the moisture is squished out of firm tofu (by wrapping it in a towel and putting something heavy on it for a while), I think it's nice fried-- it tastes a lot like scrambled eggs to me. It's pretty bland in this application since only the outside ever touched anything flavored, but it's kind of an interesting pairing with the actual egg that makes up the "sauce" of the carbonara. The garnish on top is a little Chinese broccoli, which despite looking like lettuce, smells and tastes exactly like its namesake. Weird.

Tonight for dinner I'm thinking of baking some lotus root "fries" (should be interesting, at least) to go along with a couple of big cheese burgers for me and the boy. Sometimes you just want something meaty and bad for you, you know?

Well, unfortunately the lotus root chips turned out terrible-- I don't know if it was the temperamental school stove that led to them being unevenly cooked or the fact that they looked a little bruised, perhaps, but they were not worth eating. In the foreground of this picture you see some quick radish pickles I made in the morning. They were pretty vinegary and salty, good except they had a little more kick than I would have liked. I think I'll be able to tweak the recipe enough to make them perfect.

The burgers though, oh man. So good. I forgot to bring back my mustard and relish from home when I went back to school, and since I'm usually the kind of person who almost puts more condiments on my burger than actual meat, I wanted to make sure the burger would taste good enough with just cheese and ketchup. Normally I thought the difference between a hamburger and meatloaf was that a meatloaf, like a meatball, had other things mixed into the meat, whereas a hamburger was plain ground beef. Boy was I wrong!

The trick to a really great burger is to lighten them up by cutting the meat with egg, crumbs, onion, garlic, and all the other things you'd expect to be in a loaf-- just enough to hold the meat together a little more smoothly, but not so much that you're eating a crumburger. Just mix it all up, separate into patties, and let the patties sit for a few minutes so the crumbs soak up all the juices. I split about a pound of ground beef into two uneven balls and between them added half an onion, one clove of garlic, a little less than a single beaten egg and enough plain bread crumbs to make it not soggy. More of the onions went into the smaller pile and more of the garlic (and some chopped Chinese broccoli leaves) into the smaller-- the former made two plump burger patties and the latter ten lovely meatballs for later. With just a little American cheese and ketchup, the burgers were perfect. If the meatballs are even half as good, I think they'll finally be able to stand up to my mom's :).