Avigayil Damm

Tonight’s dinner recipe was taken from Femina, an Indonesian women’s magazine. Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

• 100 gr onion, chopped
• 300 gr minced meat
• 8 tbsp breadcrumbs
• salt & pepper to taste
• 1 tsp dry thyme

Mix all ingredients, shape into burger patties and fry on pan. Stack with tomatoes, onion rings or whatever you like to have on your burger. Easy huh?

Unfortunately neither my hubby nor I were quite satisfied with this, honestly. To us, the taste of thyme gave it an unwanted earthy smell. So I guess next time we will skip the thyme altogether.

Have you got any successful burger patty recipe you’d like to share with us?

We left a little bit late from the office today and we also needed to stop by at the supermarket for some weekly shopping. Naturally, we didn’t really feel up to cooking when knowing we would be arriving home late, so we stopped by at Burger King in Kemang. I remembered one blog post I once stumbled upon, titled “Fast Food Reality” in which the blog writer compared fast food pictures from ads and the reality. So I decided to take a picture of the cheeseburger I ordered too, just to have fun. Here they are. Picture on left is the ad, and picture on right is – obviously – the actual cheeseburger that I had. Pardon for bite marks since I almost forgot to take a picture of it. Well, not really almost, but I did. Luckily I remembered before it was completely gone.

The picture was taken in the fast food joint, since we were dining in. So it was probably photographed within 10 minutes after it was packed.

Aside to the burger bun being more pale due to the poor lighting and also probably lack of cooking time, I don’t think there is much difference in them, do you? You can see the tomato sauce, the cheese (which has naturally melted since it is squeezed between a hot bun and a hot burger patty), the burger patty (which is slightly paler than the ad picture) and the pickles.

I would think that for the sake of advertisement, during the photo session, the burger bun was cooked a bit longer (to give it a golden colour), and the burger patty was probably also cooked longer (to make it browner) and then sprayed with some oil for shine. Then, all ingredients were probably put together when they were cold, to keep each ingredient’s original shape. If you browse through the links on the left of this page, you will find some websites on food photography and then you’ll see what I mean. Is this called ‘lying to the customers’?

Well, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s simply advertisement. I know a lot of people doing worse, such as touching up their CV to make it look like they are excellent achievers on paper, only to be discovered later (when hired) that they are nothing like they sold themselves to be. At least with these food photography and advertisement, you have the choice of not falling for it (by not frequenting those places), while getting rid of a wrongly hired person would probably not be as simple. (Yeah I know, the two situations are not really comparable but I am in that kind of mood).

Well, apparently it doesn’t really take much time to find an excuse to call in the guys from Amigos to deliver their cheeseburger. We like it obviously because it tastes good, the burger patties are very juicy so it’s not as dry as any regular burger from other places (well except Burger King)

Usually they serve it with garden salad and slices of water melon but they haven’t done so in a long time. Now they serve it with onion rings and coleslaw. We skipped the coleslaw but I enjoyed the onion rings.