Cajun Blue Cheese Burgers - Recipe #72

I worked on Valentine's Day. The library was bustling until about 4 p.m. - I'm assuming everyone left early to get ready for dinner with their sweeties. Neither of us particularly enjoys dinner crowds, so I decided to cook one of two choices: chicken fricassee or blue cheese burgers. Of course, I had ingredients for neither, so I headed to QFC, where there were a number of men buying last-second flowers. About 60 minutes after disembarking the bus, I arrived home to find a romantic Valentine's Day surprise - Trent had adjusted the gears in my Brompton so that they could shift again (when I got home from work yesterday, I called across the house to him, ¨you've made me the happiest woman in the world! Riding both ways for work has lifted my mood!¨).

However, after a full day of work and a grocery store trip, I had no desire to wait for a lengthy dinner, so I made a meal far more reminiscent of our early days of dating, when we'd walk across the University Bridge either alone or with a passel of dorm-mates to the original Red Robin, with the stoned-looking robin on the wall. We'd get a fancy burger, bottomless fries and a frou-frou drink, like Cookie Magic (¨yeah, it's been a long time since we've had one of those,¨ Trent mused at the dinner table). This meal was a step above and included non-bottomless sweet potato fries, made from the two sweet potatoes hiding in my kitchen cupboard and seasoned with Lowry's Seasoning Salt, and beer - Lagunitas Little Sumpin' Sumpin'.

This recipe is a Trent original. I have a few recipes for the challenge that originated from him. Most of them are written on an old phone bill or a piece of paper with circuit diagrams and lines of code written next to them. Some have directions included, while others are simply a list of ingredients. I just now unfolded the sheet of paper this one comes from and noticed that above it are three separate recipes for blue cheese OR cajun burgers in the quest to get the perfect hybrid (now that I've noticed, does that mean I should make each individually to follow the true spirit of the challenge? perhaps).

Cajun Blue Cheese Burgers

• about 1 lb. ground beef
• 1/2 c. diced onion
• 1 t. Worcestershire sauce
• 1 t. Tabasco sauce
• 1 egg
• 1 clove garlic, minced or pressed
• 1 T. cajun seasoning (our local grocery store didn't carry this the last time we ran out, so I substituted Creole seasoning)
• 1/3 c. blue cheese
• some parsley
• 1/2 t. cayenne pepper
• 2-3 T. breadcrumbs

This particular recipe did not have instructions included, so I just combined the ingredients, divided them into 4 patties and made two of them on the George Foreman grill. I had a few mushrooms remaining from an earlier dinner, so I sauteed them and added them and some spinach to the burger, serving on Macrina brioche buns. It made my taste buds so happy - I might have to have one of the leftover patties for lunch today.