Crunchy Turkey Burger

Burgers go well with gherkins, which is all well and good if you have any. I didn't but I did have a cucumber and some vinegar. Thinly slice the cucumber with a mandolin, and soak in vinegar with some sugar, garlic and dill. You should probably leave this overnight or something, I managed to wait about an hour and a half.

 Another standard is some kind of sauce. I went for grated carrot, ginger, tomato puree, tomato ketchup and hot chilli sauce mixed together. This doesn't really need to be left.

 Next I made the burgers themselves. I had some left over soya mince, which looks a little like bread crumbs. Therefore I tried to use it as such. I took some turkey fry steak, coated in beaten egg then covered in the soya mince with a little paprika and turmeric (mainly for colour).

Shallow frying these things worked pretty well, in fact I'd go as far as saying they ended up looking a lot better than I'd ever hoped they might. 

Now it was just general assembly, bread, cucumber, turkey, grated carrot, bread.

 The end result is a little like what you see below.

Review
By using the soaked cucumbers and grated carrots I added some little of the required moisture, but to be honest it needed a little more. Real gherkins and and some kind of carrot salsa would have been better then the grated carrot mixture I used. The turkey burgers with soya mince coating worked very well, I'll be using this instead of bread crumbs again.


Bonus:
Choco-coffee-Quark-cheese-cake

Not really experimental so just gets an entry as a bonus feature. Melt some butter, mix it with some crumbled digestive biscuits and you have a base. I make sure I crumble some extra biscuits on top of the buttery mix to make sure the base isn't made soggy by the cheese.

 The 500ml tub of quark is mixed with 200g of icing sugar. To make it set I mixed in a sachet of gelatin with about 10 tablespoons of hot water as well as 2 tablespoons full of cocoa and instant coffee. There was no reason for the amount of the flavours I chose here other than the amount of cocoa I had. I mixed all this together and put it on the base.

 Left in the fridge and sprinkled in the very last degrees of cocoa powder and I had a cheese cake. Yay!

Review:
This worked pretty well. A little too bitter so maybe needed more cocoa and less/better coffee powder, but in general, quick easy (and for a cheese cake fairly cheap and healthy due to the quark).

Cider and Star Anise Pork with Polenta and Samphire

I've had quite a few people tell me recently that they don't like pork, so I thought I'd try to prove them wrong. Also there was a big lump of meat half price in the shop...

The aim was to roast the pork with some big flavours in the hope the'd permeate the meat a little. Therefore the pork loin went in a pan with cider, a chopped apple, garlic, some star anise, a cinnamon stick and some caraway  seeds. I just rubbed salt pepper and oil to the  skin the hope of getting crackling (I wasn't expecting much with the cider in there though). 2.5 hours 170 degrees.

 I've bought the ready made polenta shown below a few times before and am usually disappointed with the result, but I decided I wasn't ready to give up yet, there was at least one way of cooking it from the back of the packaging left. Slice and and put in the oven.

The final element of the meal was the vegetables. I went for a long and green theme, samphire, green beans, some kind of broccoli, garden peas and asparagus. Too many for one go really but I like to get my 5 a day all at once if I can. These were steamed.

 So after the time was up the pork looked as below. I drained what remaining sauce I could from the pan to use as gravy, then took the slices from either end for the meal as these would be the bits most exposed to the flavourings.

Finally I put everything together along with a little homemade mayonnaise to produce the plate of food shown below. By my standards I was happy with the presentation here.

Review
I liked this one. The whole roasting with cider worked well, keeping the pork tender whilst adding what amounted to a fairly delicate flavour. The little amount of sauce I managed to collect was awesome, basically being sweet sticky and aniseedy. Samphire kind of distracted from the meal a little as it should probably be classed as a beer snack rather than a vegetable for its saltiness, the mayonnaise helped a little here. The disappointing blandness of polenta actually suited this meal so I've finally found a way of using it.