Turkey Burgers

Recipes and I are sometimes friends. I say sometimes because I can tend to be a little editorial with the recipes that I'm using, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. I have common sense about it. I don't omit or modify any recipes I'm baking with because we all know that that can devolve into disaster waaaay too quickly. But when it comes to just creating a dinner, I pretty much just do what I want and let the recipe serve as a general guideline. When cooking for Tony, this is kind of a necessity because there are so many things that he just doesn't like.

In my recent search for recipes to keep our kitchen interesting, I've been looking at methods just as much as I have recipes. If it's something that I can take a general idea of and modify to my own tastes or purposes, I give it a try just based on that method. It was using this technique that I created last night's turkey burgers. They consisted of the following ingredients:

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1/2 a medium-sized onion, chopped
• approx. 1/4 cup basil, chopped
• 1 egg
• Italian breadcrumbs, added until correct texture achieved
• garlic powder
• salt and pepper

I just kind of threw the ingredients together in a bowl, mixed until it was the texture I wanted, and the formed them into patties. 

I wish that I had a grill and could have grilled these. Since I didn't, I just made due with pan frying them in a little bit of olive oil. They were still good this way, but I feel like they might have been better if I could have even just thrown them on George Foreman grill or something. Alas, we do not have one (Generous benefactor round two?). I feel like despite this shortcoming, they turned out really great.

They had a really wonderful texture. They stayed moist and didn't dry out, even despite the pan frying. The flavor of the basil paired really well with the turkey, and it came through really strongly even with all of the other flavors happening there. It surprised Tony, and he almost didn't recognize it in there because it was so unexpected that he couldn't place it. The only thing I would do differently is to use a food chopper to get the onion chopped a little more finely. It added spectacular flavor that we definitely wouldn't want to lose, but the pieces were still a little big (as you can see in the picture of the burger patties) so it detracted a little bit from the texture. 

This was the first time we've experimented with mixing and pattying out own turkey burgers, but it's an experience I think we'll be repeating. The results were positive. It's a healthier alternative to eating processed burgers from a chain or even using ground beef which can be a lot more fatty. Since it was relatively inexpensive to produce, we will be adding this to our dinner rotation.