So, while I am perfectly capable of making delicious vegetarian lasagna, or sloppy joes, or omelets, I am apparently a total disaster when it comes to making turkey burgers on a GEORGE FOREMAN GRILL.
Yesterday, I was kind of getting tired of the monotony of my diet, which mostly stems from my extremely limited cooking repertoire, because as mentioned previously, I am not much of a cook. Really. I think before this week, I cooked maybe 10 times this year. Total. But I figured, what the hell, everything's been turning out so well, and how can I mess up turkey burgers, really?
But I couldn't find my instructions to the George Foreman, so I called my mom and asked her how long I needed to cook the turkey burgers for.
"I don't know, about five minutes on either side. So 10 minutes total, okay? Be sure to cook them REALLY thoroughly," she warned because she totally doesn't trust that I won't give myself food poisoning. And I agreed with alacrity because I have a horror of uncooked meat that stems from this really scary movie that we watched in sixth grade science about a crazy dude named Fester who tries to get kids to eat foods that have been "in the danger zone!" (Annie, ScienceMama, tell me you remember this film.)
So I pulled out the George Foreman, and right here is where I admit that I also do not really like my George Foreman grill. And I know, I know, that saying that means that when I go home there will be millions of Foreman enthusiasts at my door lining up to beat me with Foreman sized sticks, but I've tried, people. I just don't like it. I don't like that you can't see the meat while it grills, and I don't like that it's so small and that it's hard to clean, and I don't like the weird little fat tray under the grill.
But it had been a long time since I last tried my Foreman, and I figured, well it's THERE, and everyone says that it makes cooking so easy, and I've been successfully managing to cook all week, so maybe I'm not the cooking idiot I once was. So I put my turkey burgers on the Foreman, and checked the clock. And then five minutes in, I opened up the grill, and this was my first indicator that maybe my mom was wrong about how long it takes to cook turkey on a Foreman grill, because the burgers looked about done, and also, why would I need to flip them since there's that double grill? But, my mom said ten minutes, and she's MY MOM. I trusted her. So I flipped them over, and closed the Foreman again.
But now I was kind of suspicious, so I ran to my computer to check and see if I could find instructions online, but I couldn't find them anywhere, and then I remembered exactly where the instructions were, so I quickly pulled them out and saw that according to the instructions turkey burgers are supposed to cook for FIVE TO SEVEN minutes.
But it was too late, it had already been ten minutes, so I hastily unplugged the Foreman and put the burgers on a plate. And I was starving, so I just poured a ton of ketchup and mustard on my burger to mask the slightly burnt taste, and took a big bite and my bite was COLD and I freaked out and had a mini panic attack and I could swear in my head that Fester's evil eyes were gleaming at me.
And then I realized that the cold was not from the burger, but from the bun, which ... okay, I had run out of hamburger buns, so I had pulled an English muffin from the freezer to use. Only it turns out that you should not put English muffins in the freezer because they turn into hockey pucks, and were impossible to separate, so when I finally managed to separate them, 3/4 of the muffin was on one side and 1/4was on the other, but the whole thing had been such a fiasco, and I was hungry, so I just threw it in the toaster like that, and well, the 3/4 of a muffin? It was still a little cold.
In the end I didn't die of food poisoning which is the most important thing anyway. And I learnt some very important things in the process, such as, "Don't put
English muffins in the freezer," and "In addition to being hard to clean, Foreman grills are also freakishly fast in cooking meat."
So there you are. I guess it would have been too much to have expected a week to go by without some sort of Arduous cooking fiasco.
1 year ago
6 comments:
what a funny story!
My mom used to freeze bread and then it was disgusting. I think it was a combination of 1. crappy white bread 2. thinking of it as the 'emergency loaf' so it was in the freezer way too long and 3. it was defrosted way too fast.
Now I freeze bread all the time, but it's more substantial wheat and I don't leave it in the freezer for more than a month or so. You have to take it out of the freezer and let it thaw completely before you can eat it. It's probably the same with english muffins. Maybe next time you should microwave a mufin just enough to get it apart and then toast the two halves. But you probably already figured that out for yourself. sorry.
This is really funny! I, too, have a horror of raw meat.
Bean-mom, I'm glad I'm not the only one!
If it makes you feel any better, I once made something very similar in effect to teargas when I burnt chili peppers trying to make Kung Pao Chicken. I, my husband (then boyfriend), and a friend of mine who was visiting us had to open all the windows and doors and evacuate until the apartment had aired out. That was over a decade ago and I still haven't worked up the courage to try that recipe again....
Its a better attempt than my first one making a bullseye egg. I thought the liquid yolk had to dry on top before I could eat it, so I waited and waited (without covering the pan) and wound up with an egg that had a black bottom - I was also cooking with a high flame.
I watched Gordon Ramsay on youtube and he suggested the bouncy test for beef to test its "cookiness" (my word). If it bounces its medium, and if it doesn't its well done...not sure if I'm right in remembering it or if it would work on turkey burgers.
It is interesting what strong emotions cooking causes!
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