Hello readers, I’m Adam, your usual author’s husband, chiming in with a guest post. Jamie has these Simply Delicious recipes hung on our kitchen cabinets like a restaurant rail full of orders. There were some easy level recipes that I thought I could cook while Jamie was busy trying to finish her backlog of blog entries. 9-15: Peppercorn Beef Burgers are my first such attempt at preparing a recipe and photographing the process. I have to say that I had a lot of fun (I lit the sauce on fire!?) and you’ll see a few more guest posts from me coming up.
I’ve made more than a few burgers in my day, but the sauce on these patties did elevate the dish to a higher level.
Most of the ingredients were stuff we have around in our kitchen. We didn’t have brandy, but the Grand Marnier I borrowed from my in-laws’ liquor cabinet worked well in a pinch. I didn’t use ground pepper, but whole peppercorns. I also forgot to put the bread crumbs in this shot, and consequently, forgot to put the bread crumbs in the burgers.
Ingredients. My first thought after looking at this shot is that I didn’t face the sour cream label toward camera as I was setting up my shot. I’m the lactose-intolerant one in the house, so lactose free milk and sour cream are used in this recipe.
This beef definitely didn’t look appetizing, but it tasted alright after I added all the ingredients.
Chopped onion didn’t make me cry for once. The pepper did make me sneeze a lot. Jamie sneezes anytime she even looks at the pepper.
Mixing up some beef broth to add some more beefy flavor to the burgers.
Added the eggs, onion, sour cream, milk, onion, and chopped peppercorns into the beef. I used sour cream and milk to substitute for the cream called for in the recipe. I totally forgot the breadcrumbs, but it didn’t affect the final product all that much. The recipe called for so little bread crumbs that it was alright to just omit them.
The burger patties cooking in some melted butter on my precariously placed electric griddle. I love cooking on that thing.
Melting some butter in the skillet to start the sauce.
Added some peppercorns into the melted butter. The recipe called for green peppercorns only, but we only had mostly black peppercorns. I unscrewed the top of the pepper mill to pull out some green peppercorns we had in the mix inside. Jamie had never unscrewed the mill that way, even when she added new peppercorns inside! I had a good laugh about that and screwed the top back on.
Pouring the Grand Marnier into the pan of sizzling, popping peppercorns. The smell was very aromatic and made me sneeze many times at this stage. This liquor is the fuel for the ?FLAMBE!? portion of the recipe. The pepper mill I was referring to earlier can be seen in the shot below, half full of peppercorns because I just used most of the green ones in the jar.
?FLAMBE!? This flare up lasted approximately a fraction of a second. I hoped the flames would be higher.
I added milk and sour cream again to substitute for the cream needed, along with a dash of soy sauce. I let this come to a boil.
My cooked burgers awaiting their sauce. I don’t usually cook my burgers in butter. With all the onions in the burgers, these were almost like a White Castle patty.
The burgers go back in the oven for 10 minutes with the sauce on them and come out greasy, pepper-y, and delicious.
I served the patties on some rice. This was a relatively simple and fantastic meal with a fun theatrical component. ?FLAMBE!?
GRADE: B
