Lamb Burgers

Week One, Friday

Today would be my first big meal since I got the CSA food. I finally got to the market to buy some extra ingredients for a salad. I bought grape tomatoes, a red bell pepper, and julienned carrots to go along with the lettuce. I meant to put some onion in it too, but I forgot.

Even without the salad, I've been enjoying having lettuce around. I've only bought bagged spring mix or baby spinach before. It's nice to have a crisp piece of lettuce in a sandwich. On Thursday, I brought my usual turkey sandwich to work. On Friday, I cut up a leftover chicken thigh from Wednesday's dinner, and had a sliced, roasted chicken sandwich for lunch.

My favorite local salad is the field greens salad at Schlafly Bottleworks. It's the salad dressing I really love, a vanilla vinaigrette. It's sweet and doesn't taste vinegar-y at all. I found a recipe on-line for that type of dressing. I'm going seriously into Food Network overdoing it territory here - making my own salad dressing.

The small bottle here, the vanilla extract, cost over twice as much as the larger bottle, white wine vinegar. I've never bought either of these items before.

I had to add extra oil and sugar to this recipe. It wasn't bad, but it didn't taste at all like I was expecting. I don't have a storage container for it.

The leftover dressing is currently still sitting in the mixing bowl, with saran wrap over it, in the fridge. Do I need to buy a bottle for it? The Food Network never shows leftover storage. Maybe I should toss it and stick to the pre-made stuff.

I don't normally make multi-course meals. I'm usually standing in the kitchen cooking right up until it's done, and everything comes out at once. I didn't know how to time it. So we decided to eat the salad before I started cooking the rest of dinner.



Most of the meats we'll be getting from Fair Shares will be ground. For this first week, we got a pound of ground lamb. I've never cooked lamb before, but I thought the easiest thing would be to make burgers. Lamb burger hamburgers. I made the burgers 5 ounces each, so we'd have some leftover meat for later on in the week. We used the goat mozzarella, lettuce, and the remaining two rolls. (For the salad, I used the spring mix lettuce and fancy olive oil.)

Weighing the raw ground lamb.

I cut up a potato and made skillet french fries as a side dish. I added salt, pepper, garlic, and some bread crumbs to the lamb. It cooked for five minutes on the Foreman grill. Toasted the rolls. Added some lettuce and onions. (Also a tomato for Roy and ketchup for me.) The rolls ended up being rather thick to act as a hamburger roll. I ate it all, but Roy took off the top half and ate it as an open face sandwich.




I love the raw onions slice with burgers. I could tell the lamb tasted different than a beef burger, but it still fit. I didn't notice the cheese much at all. It had a mild taste. I don't normally get cheese on burgers out, but I had this cheese and I wanted to try it.