Recipe and picture from
Ambitious Kitchen.
With LeGreg and my mom out of town, I decided to cook dinner for my dad and myself for my cheat meal this weekend. I love cooking my cheat meals, but it rarely happens because of events or previous engagements or whatever. When I cook them, they tend to be a lot healthier than when we eat out somewhere.
The menu for the night was these burgers and
quinoa almond berry salad.
Let me tell you a wee little story about these effing burgers.
When making a recipe for the first time, I always try to stick directly to it. It's generally for the best, as improvising is NOT my strong point in the kitchen. I don't really know what my strong point
is, but that's neither here nor there.
The recipe called for lean ground turkey. I've made turkey meatballs a few times and know that lean turkey meat usually falls apart and dries out due to the lack of fat in it, so I usually get meat with a little more fat in it.
BUT THE RECIPE CALLED FOR LEAN, YOU GUYS. So lean, I got, from Trader Joe's.
I opened the package of meat and was pretty grossed out. It was like paste. Meat paste. It had zero texture that ground meat should have. GROSS. There was no way in hell that these burgers wouldn't fall through a grill, so I opted to broil them in the oven. The recipe calls for 6 mins on each side.
You know how when you try to roast marshmallows on a flame from a burner on the stove and it's not the same as over a real fire and the marshmallow tends to be black and white, with parts either burnt or raw? Yeah. That's what this looked like. There was also this creepy liquid that was all over the cookie sheet that I had them on. Ick. And the second side, after I flipped them? Burnt in like 2 mins. Cool.
Oh, and before all this? I made the sauce. The sauce calls for peach jam. I bought peach conserve at the farmer's market (organic and one billion dollars, natch). Not the same. Damn it. Conserve is basically cooked down peaches. Tasty, but not very sweet. This sauce needed the sweet. It also called for hot sauce and I got a little siracha happy and made it way spicy. Oops. FAILS ALL AROUND.
So I served up the burgers and salad to my dad, warning him that the burgers were likely a complete failure, but there was plenty of salad! Yay?
The burgers, while effing HIDEOUS looking, actually tasted pretty good, and the sauce tasted completely different on them than it did on it's own. It was much sweeter and they complimented each other very well.
I wasn't going to blog this recipe, because of all my issues with it (read my notes at the bottom before attempting), but it ended up pretty good in the end. I think I'll try to make it again, with a couple tweaks. Anything worth remaking gets blogged!
(copy and pasting recipes makes for some weird text and background crap that I'm not nearly smart enough to fix)
(LOL at this pic. Mine looked nothing like it)
Goat Cheese Stuffed Turkey Burgers with Tangy Peach BBQ Sauce
For turkey burgers:
1 pound lean ground turkey
1 egg
1/3 cup onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon ketchup
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper, plus more
2 oz goat cheese, divided into 4 equal squares
4 whole wheat (or low calorie) buns
For peach bbq sauce
olive oil
1/4 of a red onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoon ketchup
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce
1 cup peach preserves
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon molasses
2 tablespoons brown sugar or honey
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1/2-1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon salt
a few dashes of hot sauce
freshly ground pepper
Directions
To make peach bbq sauce:
- Heat a splash of olive oil in a medium sauce pan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another minutes. Reduce heat to low and add tomato paste (...there's no tomato paste mentioned in the ingredients soo....It says ketchup, so that's what I used. I don't know) and cumin; combining with the onion and garlic.
- Add the tomato sauce and all remaining ingredients. Stir until combined and heated through. Taste and adjust salt, pepper, or other seasonings as you see fit. Transfer to a blender or use an immersion blender to blend until smooth. Add more water, a tablespoon or two at a time, if you prefer a thinner sauce. Set aside until burgers are ready. (my sauce was very tomato sauce-y, and didn't look much like a bbq sauce. I had to add extra apricot jam, brown sugar AND syrup to make up for my spice overload and bad peach conserve choice. Eesh!)
To make burgers:
- Combine turkey, onion, minced garlic, ketchup, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and black pepper (and egg, I'm guessing?) in large bowl. Divide turkey into equal sized rounds. Make 2 equal sized patties out of each round so you have 8 patties total. Sprinkle 4 of the patties with fresh ground black pepper and top with goat cheese; top with remaining patties, working the turkey around the edges to seal burgers closed. Season with salt and a few grinds of pepper. Grill or broil until cooked through, about 6 minutes per side.
- Once burgers are cooked, place in bun and add peach bbq sauce on top. (we skipped the buns. Just because.)
Notes (hers, not mine)
- This recipe makes 4 burgers, but you could make smaller burgers. Just divide meat into 10 patties, and top with goat cheese.
- The peach bbq sauce is adapted from The Kitchn’s Tangy and Sweet BBQ Sauce.
- If you choose to bake the burgers, preheat oven to 400 degrees F and bake for 18-20 minutes or until no longer pink.
- You can omit bbq sauce and top with condiment of your choice. Another option is to use store bought bbq sauce and/or top with grilled peaches.
