Best Dinner EVER & Groceries #2

Dinner tonight: Lemon Dijon Pork Burgers with Home Cut Spicy Fries and Green Salad. Drool drool drool.

But before the fun stuff let's get the money business out of the way.
I bought:

Farmer's Market Veggies $8
Ground Pork $3.71
Two Tomatoes $1.77
Local Apples $2.61
Red Leaf Lettuce $1.79
Fresh Parsley $1.59
1 Can Chickpeas $0.99
1 Packet of bread yeast $0.66
Flour $1.00

Total $22.12

Plus my carry over condiments $3.46

Total's total $25.58

Now. Onto the BEST DINNER EVER!!
I used half the amount of pork I bought and it made 3 large burger patties.

I put in them:
1 egg (still have a few from the last 2 weeks)
2 generous handfuls of chopped fresh parsely
1 heaping tsp of grainy mustard
1/2 a white onion, finally diced
Dash of lemon juice
Salt and pepper

But the mixture was much much too soupy so what did I add in lieu of bread crumbs? You guessed it! Cornmeal. My favourite pantry item (shhhhh don't tell the rest of the pantry!!)

Once I'd mixed all this up I put a pot of water on to boil and chopped up my potatoes in fry shaped pieces.

Now, when making fries from scratch in the oven remember that sweet potatoes have a lower starch content than regular potatoes so they don't need to be blanched first. They can just be tossed with oil and spices and put in the oven. Potato potatoes need to be blanched first.

Bring salted water to a rolling boil and drop in your taters. Turn the water down to medium high and boil for 5 minutes. No more no less. Drain and rinse. Toss the "fries" in oil, salt and cayenne pepper and painstakingly lay them out, EVENLY spaced, on a cookie sheet.

Put them in a 425 degree oven for ten minutes. Now here comes the finicky part. You gotta flip each one over after 10 minutes. Don't just toss the pan around and hope that all of them flipped cause believe me they didn't. Flipping them by hand (well okay, with a fork cause of the burning hot oil) is WELL worth the effort.

Leave them in for another 10-ish minutes. It behooves you to check them quite regularly they are wont to burn if you're not careful.

The burgers go into a medium to medium high frying pan with a bit of oil. In order to keep any type of burger from puffing up in the middle and looking like a large meatball put a small divot in the centre when you're forming them.

Cook for roughly 6 minutes on each side. Mine weren't quite done all the way through at this point so I turned the pan down and cooked them covered, on low for few minutes.

I love lazy weekends at home because I have time to do all my food prep and planning. This weekend I made bread (which I haven't blogged about yet because I'm still tweaking the recipe, maybe next week...), hummus and I also washed all my lettuce and cut my carrots into carrot sticks.

Here's a little secret about me. I love vegetables but I hate having to prep them. I hate washing lettuce and I never peel carrots. Having to wash lettuce before making a salad can actually make me go without salad that day. So lazy.

I would buy pre-washed baby greens but they are much more expensive than a simple head all by its onesies (if you're wondering how that word is pronounced it goes One-zeeies).

So I washed all my lettuce and put it back in the bag with the little holes that it came in. I also washed and cut up my remaining carrots. When I buy celery I wash and cut it up too. Both go into a large container filled with cold water in my fridge. If I didn't do this I would never eat them. Sad but true.

So my fries turned out perfectly, the burger was flavourful and tender and it tasted divine on two slices of freshly baked bread. Who needs burger buns!

I was a good little eater and made salad. I turned my fresh batch of hummus into salad dressing by thinning it out and the leftover burgers will make a great lunch and/or dinner in the next few days.

So good.