Monday, July 25, 2011

I don't like caraway!!

"What a waste of time!" is a little late getting up this week. I'm going to think about just go ahead and move it to Mondays.  I have a hard time getting to the computer on the weekends to do anything blog worthy when all I can think about it is FUN!

The week is all about working hard (or hardly working) so here I am on a bright and shiny Monday, ready to blog....here goes... (also linking up with Delicious Dishes this week)

What a waste of time!

Not only was this recipe a waste of time, it was a waste of ingredients! Everybody hated it. Only 3 out of 5 people actually finished their burgers and only because Picky Pants was thinking dessert and The Hubs and I felt guilty about wasting food.
Truth: I like to grab any old cookbook from the library and try a recipe out of it, call it adventurous or stupid, it's always a gamble! And I like living on the edge.
This waste of a recipe comes to us from Sublime Smoke: Bold New Flavors Inspired by the Old Art of Barbecue by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison. If you have a smoker or like the smoky flavor...I still wouldn't recommend it.
The recipe we choose was Sunday Burgers and, yes, we did actually make it on a Sunday not intentionally though.  We don't have a smoker and I really didn't think about that when I grabbed this off the shelf but we made do with smoke flavoring.
This recipe calls for 10 ingredients, which was waaaay to much. So you take your burgers and make enough for two a piece and you mix it with Worchestire, salt and pepper. Then you make a dry rub which called for caraway seeds, salt, pepper and onion powder, set that aside. Finally, you make a filling- yes, these are stuffed burgers- which calls for butter, mushrooms, steak sauce, swiss cheese (we used Monterey Jack), horseradish and more caraway seeds.
Take the filling and divide it up among half the burgers then take the other burgers and put it on top, pinching the sides together. Then rub it with the dry rub. (oh we added the smoke flavor to the burger mix). So then you're supposed to smoke it at 225 degrees for one hour. The Hubs baked them at 250 for a little over an hour.

ingredients for the stuffing mix

hamburger flavoring

hamburgers with stuffing - looking good but I was wrong, so so wrong

hamburger with 'nother hamburger, prerubbed
a bit fuzzy, sorry. but you see the cheese melt out...mmmm..looking good, right?
Pulled them out and they looked alright. Took a bite and they didn't taste alright. :(
Too many flavors vying for attention, the stuffing was heavy and I have realized that I am not a fan of caraway.  It was just too much, I mean we flavored the meat, then flavored the stuffing then flavored the dry rub. And the stuffing definitely didn't need the caraway seeds, especially when the rub already had it in it, the caraway ended up carrying away all the other flavors and left a nasty taste on my tongue.
Bad caraway, bad!!
Never again will I make this or any other recipe out of this book. Pretty much all the recipes called for a butt-load of ingreds, I think sometimes too many just mucks up the works.  I did notice that a previous reader had bookmarked Sea Bass Charmoula. Did they make it? Did they like it??
Anything waste your time this week, last week, last year? Still angry about it? Please vent...and leave your link up below:




relax,
paulina

p.s.
the best part of the meal
Picky Pants shuckin'

1 comment:

Laeli said...

YIKES that is a huge amount of caraway! Uck. I like the stuff but still..that'd put me off too.

Nothing bugging me..no wait, my doctor calling me in to tell me something stupid pissed me off and was a waste of my time. OH! And the way he looked me up and down with a smirk as I defended myself against his weight hatred made me want to smash his face but other than that..I'm good!