Archive for June 20th, 2009

Stepfather displays the gourmet hamburger we'd all been waiting for.

Last weekend, we were invited to my mother’s house for hamburgers cooked by my stepfather, David. Now an invitation to go over there for dinner is not to be taken lightly, particularly when the barbecue is out.

Some in this family love to eat lamb and steaks cooked on a grill, but I personally prefer something simple — hamburgers and hotdogs. Perhaps I ate too many of these when I was a kid, and now it’s too late to aclimate myself to more rich fare, but the fact is of meat dishes, the hamburger is probably my favorite.

As the burgers were brought to the table, each in a bakery-produced bun and each covered with a slice of melting cheddar, everyone commented in anticipation.

“Now these aren’t just any hamburgers,” my mother said. “These are the $20 hamburgers. They have everything in them. He got the recipe off the web.”

The hamburgers were fragrant with herbs and spices, crisp on the outside, tender inside, with a zinging hotsauce afterbite. Really, they were the best hamburgers I’d had for a while, and I rushed home to find the so-called “$20 hamburgers” on the web.

When I typed in “$20 hamburgers” instead of a recipe I was referred to a promotion by the Michigan Whitecaps minor league baseball team, who were offering a 1.666 lb 6 slice of cheese monster burger with a bottom  layer of chili for $20 as a promotion. This was not the answer. It was the kind of excess you’d expect from people who like to sit around in stands drinking beer. But finally I was able to find the recipe by asking for which specific website it came from, which was AllRecipes.com. So, here’s the link to the $20 hamburger.

It is billed at “A hamburger so good you’d pay $20 for it.” Were the ones we ate worth $20? Possibly. At the very least I, the cheapest of the cheap, would be willing to shell out $20 for the ingredients to make 6 of them.

On the other hand, I’d have no interest eating one of those monsters the Michigan Whitecaps were selling. Or paying $20 for any food available inside a stadium.

Special tips on cooking these burgers? David said that he wasn’t too careful about the ingredient amounts, you can modify them to your liking. You could even add or subtract something from the list if you wanted. I think he also said he added horseradish. One good thing about hamburgers is the infinite potential variety.

Dinner, from my standpoint, just don’t get much better than this. Especially when it’s cooked by someone else.