The idea was simple, make a turkey burger, top it with caramelized onions and apples mixed with reduced balsamic vinegar and topped with fresh arugula and toasted almonds. All in all, I thought I had an idea that surpassed the original recipe which called for just incorporating the caramelized onions and apples (no balsamic) into the burgers themselves, and then topping them like regular burgers.
Don’t laugh, the bread tasted fine.
Well, I gave it a shot, and to my dismay, I discovered only after the burgers were on the grill that I did not have any hamburger buns. So I had to put them on some nice whole wheat bread instead. So yeah, they may look a but odd, but I can still judge the result of my experiment.
Again, I was not thrilled with my results. The burgers were not greatly improved by having bread-soaked milk added to them (as I thought they might be when I first read the recipe). I did “juice up” the flavor of the burgers a little by making sure I seasoned it appropriately with salt and pepper, and I love the taste of a touch of Dijon mustard in my turkey burgers as well. But all in all, the topping just didn’t make me want to get up and shout. The sweetness of the topping did nothing especially grand with the otherwise uninteresting burgers. They were good, but I have a better turkey burger recipe.
And so that you all don’t walk away feeling ripped off, here it is:
Turkey Burgers with Mint/Yogurt Sauce
(adapted from a recipe in Cooking Pleasures Magazine - June/July 2005)
Makes 2 burgers
Burgers:
2 cloves garlic - minced
1 green onion - minced
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp fresh thyme
salt and pepper to taste
8 oz ground turkey
Mix all ingredients for burger, except turkey, in a bowl. Add turkey to combine - but only just combine. Don’t over mix. Form into patties and cook through thoroughly.
Sauce:
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 clove garlic - minced
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp fresh mint - chiffonade
salt and pepper to taste
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until burgers are done.
To serve, of course you will want to have hamburger buns (not wheat bread if you can avoid it) and top with fresh lettuce and a few slices of fresh cucumber.
I have never had a better turkey burger than this, so I am sure this is the one I will be going back to now. But hey, it was worth a shot!
This will teach my wife to go out of town and leave me alone for two weeks…
Some of my longer-term readers will remember the article I wrote on chef’s tattoos, and how I was interested in getting one myself after my boss had used a lunch break one day for the purpose of inking his forearm. Well, allow me to fill you in on all that has happened behind the scenes since then.
I went to my local tattoo parlor and showed them my original tattoo idea which had all of the modern cuts of pork listed on it, but I wanted the base of the design to be the old-style pig. They told me that this idea wouldn’t actually work, since there was so much writing and so many fine lines. The tattoo would bleed with time, and in a year or two would look like crap. My only choices for this tattoo were either to make it large enough to spread across my whole back, or to go back to the drawing board. I chose the drawing board.
Taking into account the fabulous the suggestions on my previous post from Swan and Ed, I thought about the hilarious Simpson’s scene wherein Homer asks Lisa about her newly-announced vegetarianism:
The sketch I put together in Photoshop.
Taking that clip into consideration, I now had a refined tattoo idea. I still wanted to stick with the old-time butcher-block print of the pig, but now I figured I would work in the phrase “A Wonderful, Magical Animal” into the mix - since that is how I feel about pigs given the wonderful cuts of meat we collect from them. And to fix the problem of crowding the pig with all the cuts, I would only highlight the cuts Homer mentioned - which happen to be three of the best cuts from the pig anyway. A chef’s tattoo AND a Simpson’s reference to boot! My return to the drawing board had resulted in pure gold, and I was ready to go forward with the project.
All I needed now was to make sure I had the money to pay for the honor of permanently scarring myself. I assumed something like this would cost around $300. So once I achieved salary status at Rustico, I knew I had a steady enough job locked in, so I might as well go for it. It was just a matter of waiting for the wife to go away long enough for me to do something stupid. (Usually five or ten minutes is plenty of time for me to get into trouble, but this would take a little more time…)
With the birth of my new niece, and my wife out of town for two weeks, I had my window of opportunity. I called my good friend Boutros from Nookie Cookie to accompany me along - since she said she really wanted to see me in pain - and she acted as photographer for the ordeal.
After about an hour wait, my artist arrived on the scene, and it was somewhat comforting to see that she was a serious veteran of the tattoo chair herself. I would dare say that there was a greater percentage of her epidermis that had been colored in than not. She turned my sketch into a drawing, and said it would only cost $250 (I was saving money already!) so into the chair I went.
No sooner had I sat down, and right before the needle made its first mark - as if on cue - my phone rang. I apologized and went to turn it off, but noticed it was a call from my mom. As if she sensed a tremor in the force, she called me at the exact moment I was about to start feeling pain. I half expected the voice mail message she left to be along the lines of, “I don’t know why I called, I just suddenly had the urge to see if you were OK…” (She was just calling to say “Hi” as it turned out later.)
For the uninitiated, the pain of a tattoo needle feels pretty much the same as slowly cutting yourself with a razor blade. Non-stop for a half hour. There’s no denying that it kinda sucks, but on the other hand, the pain is hardly “unbearable.” I think the following photo montage will sum up how it went for me in the chair:
The needle goes in, and the work begins. I am glad I could not see this as it happened, or I probably would have freaked, as I am not a fan of needles.
Though I couldn’t see the needle, I could definately feel it as it made my whole shoulder blade vibrate.
The finished product.
So now that I have a tattoo, I join the ranks of, well, all other chefs it seems, as I don’t really know any chefs who aren’t inked in some way or another. This is just another rite of passage that I have gone through on my way to becomming a chef.
I think the next step is to get beaten up by one’s wife, which I fully expect when she returns on Saturday.
In general, Sundays are rough days for me anyway. I have to open the restaurant, but also set up the sauté and pantry stations, and then work them through lunch. So in essence, Sunday mornings have me doing the work of two people normally. I don’t mind the extra work – it’s what helps keep a restaurant profitable, gives my line cooks their much needed time off, and also helps to make me better at working in kitchens. If I can handle it when it is rough, I can surely take care of anything when it is slow.
This is about how sick he better have been, or he’s really going to be dead!
But yesterday was a step even further down this path - one I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle. My phone rang at 7AM; it was Javier, the guy who works the grill station at lunch on Sundays. He sounded terrible, and of course was calling in sick. There was nothing I could do to force him to come in, but I instantly knew my day was going to be a mess since this meant I would be two people down on the line. I was going to have to perform the work of three people in the all-too-brief morning hours to get the restaurant cracking. I jumped in my car and raced to the restaurant to give myself as much lead time as possible to make sure all the stations were set up.
It was about this time I was happy that I had chosen not to go to the party some of the people in the restaurant had thrown the night before. The “theme” of this party was to get together after the restaurant closed and drink a lot of beer. But as the morning guy, I usually have to be in bed right about the time when the night crew is getting off work and gearing up for such parties. I had decided to sleep instead of stay out late, and I now knew I had made the right choice.
“OK, so the tomatoes go here, and the cucumbers there… and wait, which one of these things is kohlrabi?…”
(photo from My Bountiful Life)
Adding to the challenge of being a man down for the day, the set-up for the stations were unfamiliar to me thanks to our recently launched summer menu. This was the first time I was setting up these stations since this menu was introduced. This meant I was not 100% sure what all the ingredients I needed on the line were. I had a pretty good idea of what to do though, so I jumped right in to prepping sauces and heating soups at my sous chef station, filling in all the salad ingredients into the pantry station, cooking pasta and portioning fish for the sauté station and building a fire with charcoal and wood in the grill station. There were times I was working on so many things at once, I was shocked that I wasn’t burning everything I tried to cook.
That’s not to say I didn’t burn anything mind you. One half sheet of filberts and one pot of Cheddar Ale soup shuffled off this mortal coil due to my over-exuberance in trying to cook too much at once. But still - given how much else I was working on and prepped for service, the losses to the restaurant could have been much worse.
The first servers started to arrive around 10:30 to begin setting up the front of the house. From the looks on their faces and the enormous bags under their eyes, it had been one hell of a party the night before. Again I thanked the lucky stars I had chosen sleep over beer. (Did this mean I was getting old?…)
The other sous chefs finally rolled in around 11 (I’d already been cooking for 3.5 hours at this point) and I explained to them that I would need one of them to help me man the grill through lunch. They of course agreed to help out as working the pantry, sauté and grill stations alone is too much for almost anyone to handle. But all the same, they had their own prep work for dinner that had to get done, so I knew working the lunch line would hardly be their A-1 priority. In light of that, this basically meant I would have to work these stations on my own as much as possible, and only call them in when there was too much to handle.
For the record, I make awesome frittatas.
Example: An order for a salad and a frittata comes in, so I can handle that since it is all on the sauté/pantry station. Then an order for two burgers comes in - no problem, just throw them on the grill, and let them sit for a while. Back on the sauté line an order for a rockfish comes in - no problem again, I could get that started while finishing off the frittata and dressing the salad. Back over to the grill to flip the burgers and see how they are coming, and an order for two pizzas arrives. The pizza guy - Erik - is actually at work today, so I can ignore that. A quick follow up to that order has two more salads - now things were getting dicey as I have to finish a fish and the burgers while making the salads. I drop a large handful of fries into the deep fryer, throw buns onto the grill to toast them, pull the fish out of the oven to finish it off, plate the salads, pull out the fries, plate the burgers, and just as I am thinking I have it under control the order printers suddenly go ballistic.
Two chicken salads, one melon salad, three burgers, one tuna gyro, one frittata, two grilled cheese and some pizzas.
“Andrew! Help!”
It is perhaps not especially dignified to call out for help in a professional kitchen. But at the same time, it is even worse to fall into the weeds to the point where the quality and/or timeliness of the food’s preparation suffers. There’s only so much one human can do - and this was more than I could handle. It’s not as much about admitting weakness as much as it is recognizing one’s own limitations. I’m not going to let the customers have a bad lunch for the sake of protecting my machismo.
And so it went through the day. Andrew would come bail me out on the grill when things got hopping, but otherwise I was running 2/3 of the line myself. It was a long 3.5 hours for sure. When it wrapped up, I suddenly realized just how tired I was. But with lunch over, the dinner crew was now filing in the door. I was relieved of my post and could carry on with my other managerial duties. For the first time in this very long day, my job was returning to normal.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I was half-expecting Chef and Javier and everyone to show up suddenly and say something like, “Congratulations! You passed the test! Way to go, that was a rough batch of work, but you pulled it off! Good job!” But of course that never happened.
This wasn’t a test. This was just life. Life in the kitchen. On the good days, it’s hard. On the bad days, it’s almost impossible. But if you’re lucky, somewhere along the line, you realize that every day, it’s incredible fun.
As I drove home, I knew that tonight would once again be a night where I would be choosing sleep over beer. And again, it would be the right choice.
Perhaps some of you have actually heard of my restaurant in the news as of late. It is amazing how a little story has blossomed into something so big.
When I came on board at Rustico, Frank (the executive chef) told me that one of the main focuses of the restaurant was to find unique ways to combine beer and food. Well, it seems he has done that, and the result is a story that has brought every major network to our restaurant in the past few days.
Our chef - Frank Morales - with a collection of his hopsicle creations. (AP Photo)
The “Hopsicles” as he calls them are basically beer popsicles (there is a little bit of cooking involved, it’s not just beer on a stick) and while this is a neat idea (and a tasty one as well!) who would have guessed this invention would have garnered so much attention?
We use fruit flavored beers and combine them with fruit (no way am I giving out any recipes here - sorry!) to create a neat way to beat the summer heat for adults. The problem is, this creation is possibly illegal since beer is supposed to be served in its original container, or immediately after it is poured. In short, the paper-pushers of the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) don’t get that this is not just frozen beer, but rather a recipe for a food item - a popsicle - that contains beer. We have every faith though that this misunderstanding on their part will be cleared up soon enough.
Ahhh… would that it were just this easy.
But the controversy that this has created has inadvertently drawn widespread attention to our restaurant. How surprised were we today to see Frank on Fox News today - and he has more interviews pending! (Ugh, I can’t believe I just gave a link to Fox News…) Funny side note about the video - the “customer” he serves the hopsicle to over and over again in the video is actually one of our managers at the restaurant. We got a kick out of that…
Anyway, with all the press about the hopsicles, needless to say, the people were beating us down to try them this evening. The only problem - we hadn’t made them simply because we weren’t sure if we were allowed to sell them yet. Even if it is much ado about nothing, we have to make sure we are on the right side of the law, but the masses are already clamoring to try these things.
I can only hope we have them ready to go soon. The crowds are getting restless. I just hope they are enjoying our new summer menu that we happened to launch today. (As if we weren’t crazed enough as is…)
My first niece: Myriam Catherine Hoehn What a cutie!
I’m now an uncle! My lovely wife’s sister just recently gave birth to a lovely little girl, and thus I am now an uncle. But I haven’t met my niece yet though as she (and her parents) live in Albuquerque, NM - and that is where my wife is for the next two weeks. Alas I couldn’t get away to meet the little sweetie, seeing as how you all know I only just started a new job. So I’m stuck here alone to work on the house and enjoy another bachelor week. (Or in this case - two…)
