Burger Fail

I decided to eat supper, so I cooked some meatballs. The problem is, they were not supposed to be meatballs. They were supposed to be hamburgers.

They were “largish” meatballs, to be sure, and they were slightly flattened. But whatever you call them, they were far closer to meatballs than burger patties.

I’ve blogged about my cooking prowess (or lack thereof) before. There is almost no kind of food or recipe that can resist my screwing it up. But burgers are so simple to cook that it’s very dismaying to screw them up. It’s like failing at the task of making water boil.

The burger patties shrunk significantly in the horizontal direction and swelled significantly in the vertical direction. How do hamburger patties know up-down from side-to-side? They must, because I’ve never seen a burger patty swell in diameter while becoming thinner and thinner. Those patties know what they’re doing.

As I cooked the beef patties, I splashed them with liquid smoke. Each time I turned the patties over, I splashed on more liquid smoke. Finally I turned off the heat and put one of the little brown golf ball size meatballs on my plate. (It was far too small for a hamburger bun, and besides, I apparently forgot to buy buns when I bought the ground beef.) I cut off a small piece of burger and tasted it. It didn’t have any smoke flavor at all. Also, after 20 minutes of frying over medium heat, the meat was still raw on the inside. In case you think my stovetop is miscalibrated and medium heat is really low heat, then let me add that hundreds of droplets of grease were spattered across all surfaces within 3 feet of the frying pan: the stovetop, the countertop, the floor, the wall, me.

Mopping the kitchen floor and painting the walls is too high a price to pay for a hamburger. In the future, I’ll stick with Mickey D.