Bring Back The Onions

Part of my cooking adventure is to challenge myself, improvise, and try things even if they might or might not work. Thus, I found myself creating tonight’s turkey burgers with no garlic and no onions. I put onions and garlic in just about everything. And even if something I make doesn’t have garlic in it, you know it’s going to have onions in it. So with the ground turkey I bought today, I decided to add other flavorings and see if I liked it. I sautéed some finely chopped celery and some corn that I had blanched and frozen last summer. I added this to the ground turkey with a little bit of miso, salt and pepper, unseasoned breadcrumbs, two eggs, some hot sauce.

 In the future, I will be adding the garlic and onions back in. 

The turkey burgers were bland but OK. To cook them, I sprayed a sheet pan with cooking spray, made the patties, and baked them at 365°. They were very tender and not dry at all. They just weren’t very tasty. They needed twice as much hot sauce,  twice as much pepper, twice as much salt. And they needed the onions. Because they were so bland, they needed a sauce-  I didn’t have much to work with, and was too lazy to do much work. So I put a couple of tablespoons of butter into the celery sauté pan, melted that, and added a cup or so of vegetable broth that I had sitting around. Tossed in about half a cup of heavy cream. All that was left in the carton-I would’ve used more if I had more. Added about a half cup of marsala wine, the only wine I had around. The Marsala was a little risky because it’s so sweet, but it worked. I reduced that down, added a quarter cup of Parmesan cheese and another little knob of butter at the end. It was really tasty and it was what the turkey burgers needed. 

I did like cooking the turkey burgers in the oven on the sheet pan. They required a lot less oil than they would have if I cooked them in a frying pan and there was almost no mess to clean up ( The sheet pan was a brand new, nonstick pan). 

Served with oven-roasted Yukon Gold potatoes. A hearty dinner, saved from being too bland by a good sauce.