Lovely daughter coming home for a visit gave me the inspiration to try to find some gluten free and egg free burgers (combination of allergies round here). Google brought instant success:
there is one on Jamie Oliver's site. This one is for beefburgers and we have to be dairy free as well (big combination of allergies round here), so I substituted lamb mince for beef mince.
I thought I'd try producing home made chips, shallow fried, as well, so googled again and found there is a massive debate about how best to make chips. Kitchen knives at dawn. There's also a lively debate about whether it is possible to shallow fry chips decently. From the look of the various methods offered, it seemed OK so I did.
The mince and the bacon came from Turners
The onion and the salad from Lew (very glad he's stepped into the breach with Marko's gone)
Burger buns from Jack and Jills
Everything else from Tesco - I give myself about 6 out of 10 for buying local on this one.
Here's the recipe for the burgers:
500 gm mince
1 onion, diced
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
4 rashers smoked bacon, trimmed of fat and diced
1 tbsp cornflour
2 tbsp dried Italian herbs
Pepper and salt
1 tbsp olive oil + extra for frying
1 tsp butter
Burger buns
Method
“Add oil and butter to medium size pot over medium heat. Add onion and bacon and fry until soft. Add Dijon mustard, and fry for 2 more minutes. Remove mix from pot and place in a small bowl to allow to cool.
“Add almost cool mixture to the beef mince in a large bowl. Combine using hands. Add herbs and salt and pepper to taste. Combine with hands. Add cornflour and combine with hands again.
“Shape mix into patties and flatten slightly with hands. At this stage, you can pop them in the fridge on a plate covered with cling film until you are ready to cook them or if you want to cook them at a later date, these uncooked patties can be frozen.
“Heat small amount of oil in frying pan and add patties, flattening slightly. Fry until underneath is brown and a bit crispy. Turn and cook the other side until cooked through.”
This worked very nicely. The bacon was quite dominant, so I think I'll try two rashers instead of four next time.
For the chips I followed an amalgam of suggestions from the web, which basically involve boiling the chips till nearly done, then frying. There's a lot of debate about choosing the right kind of potatoes. I didn't know what kind I had – they were just white, in a string bag. We use a steamer, so I cut the chips into proper sized chunks (none of this French fry stick rubbish), then steamed them for about 20 minutes till some were going crumbly and the rest were just hard. Then I put enough oil in the frying pan to cover the bottom comfortably and heated it up to a good temperature. (I used plain vegetable oil, not olive oil. I think olive oil would give it an interesting flavour though so might try that next time.) I patted the chips dry in a couple of paper towels. That was a bit awkward as the potatoes had plenty of starch on them and they began to stick, but as far as I know nobody ate any paper. Then I threw them all in the frying pan and kept them moving till they were crisp and properly fried on the outside. That worked pretty well – needed more oil halfway through.
Added a basic salad to get some green stuff in.
Altogether, it was a considerable success.
