Author: Steve

And the peanut.

It’s a big job, but someone has to move those peanuts from one place to another.

It’s a big job, but someone has to move those peanuts from one place to another.

Clean and full, hanging in the sun.

We had three different feeders up for the migration, refilling them daily.  Now we’re back to one feeder and it only gets the occasional visitor.  The migration is over for us.

We do have turkey vultures though.

At one point this evening we had 50 of them all within our field of view.  They’re never not here, but there are way more in the winter than in the summer.  They are migrating in.

Who knew a person could screw up hamburger by handling it too much?

I grilled some great-tasting patties, but they were tough.  Tough hamburger?  Who knew that was a thing?  I googled it.  It turns out that the more you handle hamburger meat the tougher it gets when you cook it.  All my effort to shape it into nice round evenly sized balls, then massaging it out into perfect patties with smooth edges, was actually screwing it up.  Keep it simple.  Ground chuck.  Separate it into the right size chunks and smush each one into a patty once.  Don’t stress about smooth edges.

One more factor.  There is a grain to hamburger meat, and it matters.  It doesn’t matter as much as the grain in a tough piece of meat like skirt or flank, but it matters a little.  When hamburger comes in a round tube, the grain, the way it comes out of the grinder, runs horizontally the length of the tube.  If you slice crosswise across the tube you’re cutting across the grain; you cut the pound of hamburger into three or four pucks.  Take each puck and lay it on the flat side.  That orients the grain vertically.  That’s the way that will result in the most tender bite.  Squash it out into a patty.

Okay, one more thing.  You can fashion the patty with your hands and put a dimple in the middle so it won’t ball up when it’s cooked, or you can squash out the patties with the dinner plate method.  Place a plate upside down on the counter.  Lay a square of waxed paper over the round part on the bottom of the plate.  Put the puck of hamburger meat in the middle of the upside-down plate, put a square of waxed paper on top of it, and with a second plate, right side up, squash the hamburger down into a patty.  They come out like this:

Salt and pepper.  Grill to 165 degrees.

Melt in your mouth tender and juicy.  Best burger ever.

And there we have today’s installment of “Answers to questions you never asked!”

He’s a happy boy.

All better.  Never happened.