Royale with Cheese

You know when you were a child and your mum would say, “if you’re not well enough to go to school, you’re not well enough to got to the party/have chocolate/bounce on the bed”? Well, I figured that it must work the other way round too. I have been going into work despite feeling unwell, so I decided to treat myself with a cheeseburger. So, using the really nice mince from the farm shop, I made these babies for our dinner.

Ingredients (makes 2) 

• 250g good quality mince
• 1/2 onion
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon mixed herbs
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• great big grind of black pepper
• breadcrumbs to bring it to a dry-ish consistency
  

How to make it

Squidge around, make into burgers and put in the fridge on cling film to firm up. These make two quarter pounder-sized burgers.

People go wrong with home made burgers in two ways: 1) they don’t season them enough (which is easy enough to fix) 2) they fall apart because they are either too wet or too dry. The strength of these burgers is a magic ingredient from the local asian supermarket: panko breadcrumbs. They are exceedingly fine (so don’t ruin the consistency of the burger) and very very dry indeed. I’m sure there must be a suitable substitute in the shape of blitzed-up ritz crackers, but I’ll stick with these until I’m forced to experiment. Add as many breadcrumbs as needed to bring the burgers to a dryish consistency (a couple of handfuls usually does it).

I then simply grilled the burgers, added cheese, mushrooms fried with a squirt of 1-cal sunflower oil (frantic damage limitation… hehe) and stuffed them into an oven bottom muffin.

I’m now sat in bed with a cup of hot chocolate. If you’re gonna be bad, do it right.