Teamwork disaster?

So I’m here with my so far expertise taste tester Virendra and his culinary buddy Carmen who is a SPC alum. Tonight we are working together to make turkey burgers. Now I’m not quite sure how much of a disaster this is going to be considering that Virendra knows how to cook and Carmen is enrolling in the HCC culinary program. I’m the least experienced :-(. Oh well, gotta start somewhere!

So here we are and we started with the sauce. Yes, a sauce. I’ve never heard of making a sauce for hamburgers that you mix with the burger mix but then again, a lot of people are surprised at my concoctions. The sauce included:
Cinnamon water
Parsely flakes
Garlic
Black pepper
Ketchup
Virendra’s aunt’s special recipe for Pepper sauce
Paprika
Grapeseed oil
Soul seasoning *don’t ask what that is because we don’t know either*

Then, we mixed the beef with the sauce, added red pepper flakes, grated oranges, put grape seed oil in a baking pan, placed cut up onions in the pan, and shaped the burgers and put them in the pan. We put the pan in a bistro oven and broiled it, letting it cook for 520-525~ degrees 6-8 min on each side. Carmen even cut up oranges and placed them on a plate in a culinary form.

Sooo this disaster ended up really being a disaster lol. It seems that when we cooked the burger on the stove in a pan with grapeseed oil, it creates a lot of smoke. When I pressed down on the burger to make sure it was cooking through, a bunch of smoke came out and the fire alarm went off. Now we changed the oil to vegetable oil spray. Now the apartment got really smokey again and the alarm went off so now we’re thinking it’s the onions.

Overall, it was a smokey mess but the product ended up being good.

 

 

Cooking Disaster #2: Meatloaf

The goal for this week’s dish was to make a meatloaf. Not just any meatloaf ; my mom’s meatloaf. At first, I was going to try and see if I could make meatloaf just like my mom’s without any direction; just from scratch. Then I thought, why not make the meatloaf with info from my mom on how to make it and see if I can get it right then. My mom told me she uses breadcrumbs , ketchup , salt, pepper, onion,and green peppers. I was surprised , because all of the recipes I saw for meatloaf included eggs and brown sugar. Good thing I called my mom to ask her for her recipe because I would have been completely off and wrong.

For my ingredients, I used everything my mom said she used and fresh cut up garlic.I mixed it all up, shaped it, and put in the oven at 350 for a hour.

When I took the meatloaf out, I had to let it sit, just like the lasagna, to let it firm up. As far as taste testers go, I decided that I should be the taste tester this week for this dish. This is mainly because who else knows my mom’s meatloaf better than I ?

Overall, I succeeded! Lol it taste just like my mom’s but it could have been firmer. I couldn’t really taste the garlic though which is weird because I thought I put too much in it. Then I remembered that I didn’t add any salt or pepper. As far as the firmness goes, maybe I should have let it sit a little longer. Even so, I let it sit for a half hour like my mom said to. I wonder if it’ll get firmer with time. Hmm, that’s a thought…