New cooking toys

Sometime before Christmas, Tom came home and said he'd got me a present from work.
Now for those of you that don't know, he works at an agricultural store (mostly in the hardware department), but it does also have a garden centre and large homeware section, so the variety of stock is pretty large.  Normally whenever he says he's got something from work it's something practical, but very thoughtful nonetheless. Most recently it was hot water bottles as our bedroom is pretty cold when you first get into bed (+50 man points for that Thomas!), and he's always picking me up things for the car like de-icer and anti-fog spray for the windows. See, thoughtful and practical. I'm a lucky lady in more ways than one :)

But, anyway when Tom announced before Christmas that he'd got me a little present from work, I really didn't know what to expect. I certainly wasn't expecting something as practical and cool as what it turned out to be .... a Burger Making Kit!

Normally I'm wary of buying kitchen gadgets as I don't earn much right now, plus we don't have a huge amount of storage space in our kitchen, and I can see it being the kind of thing that men roll their eyes at. So whilst I might inwardly crave that bright neon pink silicon pastry brush from the Speciality Cook Shop in town for the odd occasion that I might have to brush pastry, out loud I'll make some 'Dragon's Den' style comment on how the world has gone gadget-crazy, over-engineering problems, and that no one really uses any of this junk anyway.

So I was pleasantly surprised that Tom had thought to bring me a kitchen gadget home from work. Of course, there's the underlining implication that he'd like me to cook him burgers, but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. I like cooking for people, especially people who like everything I cook (more reasons why my boyfriend is awesome). I've been meaning to give it a go for a while, and since I had a day off today, and since I'd be given Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food book by Tom's Mum I thought I'd have a crack at his recipe for a 'Cracking Good Burger'.


Boy is it a lot of fun! I was a bit wary of Jamie's recipe as it involves quite a bit of mustard and I don't really like mustard at all, but I'm trying not to be so picky, and just follow the recipes exactly as they were intended. Well it turned out I had the wrong kind of mustard anyway. Good job I checked online as apparently English Mustard is considerably stronger than Dijon (what the original recipe called for), so I decided to only put in 1 heaped teaspoon of the Coleman's instead of two of Dijon and hope for the best.

The kit itself is a tool to help you make the patties rather than making the mixture - you've got to get your hands dirty for that! :) but still it's pretty impressive in its simplicity. You add a wax disc to the bottom half of the contraption, spoon your meat mixture on top, add another wax disc to the inside of the lid, pop it on, turn it over, push down, and out pops a perfect burger patty in no time at all. They even have those little griddle lines on them!

Meat goes in...

 

Burger comes out!

I made a whole plate of 8 burger patties in about 5 minutes - genius!

The end result.... yummy homemade burgers in next to no time. 

 

They look a bit crispy on the outside, but trust me they were yummy..

 Nom, nom, nom...

And if you don't think you can eat 8 burgers in one sitting, then you can just stack them on a plate in the fridge and keep them for next time, the wax discs will stop the patties from sticking together. Not that that's likely to be an issue with one hungry man in the house :)

Ta ta for now! 

xx