1. Get good beef. What does this mean? Don’t buy the non-specified mystery meat; if they don’t tell you it’s ground round or ground chuck, you’re getting lips & assholes. Buy the good stuff: Angus beef (at least here in Texas) doesn’t cost that much more, and it’s so worth it.
2. Baby your beef. Don’t handle the meat too much when you’re actually forming the burgers into patties. Pat it into a roughly rounded shape, but don’t try to make it perfect. The more you handle the meat, the more moisture you press out of it, and the more dry your burger will be.
3. Searing-hot pan. Make sure your pan is hot and ready to go before you put your patties in. It should be hot enough that when you put in a pat of butter, the butter will melt but not turn brown before you put in the beef. (And yes, you are using butter to grease your pan. None of this Pam or margarine or olive oil horseshit. BUTTER!)
4. Set it and forget it. Put in your patties and leave them be. Do not slide them around, press down on them, or otherwise meddle with the beef once it is in the pan. Let them brown for between 4 and 5 minutes before you flip them over. Do not mash them down once you’ve flipped them! Just let them do their thing. This is the secret to moist, delicious burgers.
5. Use a thermometer. You’ll know your burgers are ready based on their inner temperature. Insert a meat thermometer and take your burgers off the heat when they’re around 130 degrees F. (Don’t worry; although most recipes will tell you to cook ground beef to 165 degrees, we’ve been eating these regularly with no ill effects, mostly since they’ll eventually get that hot even without the help of the stove. You may want to abstain, however, if you’re knocked-up—just to be on the safe side.)
6. Cheese and cover. Put your bleu cheese on top of the burgers, which are still resting comfortably in the pan, and then cover the pan with a lid. Let the burgers sit, cheese slowly melting, for at least 5 minutes before plating them up. Use a good quality bleu cheese; we like the Salemville Amish Blue Cheese (available at Randall’s), which has been aged for 60 days. Delish!

Those are the basic steps to great burgers, even if you’re not big on the bleu cheese idea. But if you are, let us also recommend additional toppings (which you really MUST do) of bacon strips (easy to make in the microwave!), some romaine lettuce, and a bit of mashed avocado. Pure decadence, pure bliss.

Wine pairing: a delicious ($5) Chilean wine, the Frontera Carmenere, tastes fabulous with this bleu cheeseburger. Yum!

There should obviously be a tasty and succulent photo of our burgers here, but we were salivating too much to take pictures and gobbled them up before a photo shoot could be arranged! We’ll try to get one eventually, but no guarantees.

I grew up watching Jeff Smith’s Frugal Gourmet program on PBS, so I knew from previous exposure that the book was going to be a good bet, but I never realized how truly awesome some of the dishes really are until I actually started cooking them at home. After all, anything can look great on TV when a professional is doing the cooking, but how will those same dishes stand up to the test in a not-so-tricked-out home kitchen?

As a home cook, I’m a big fan of recipes that involve minimal specialty ingredients, as well as anything that will have multiple servings I can freeze and reheat in the future. The recipe below for Chicken and Chickpea Stew from the “Spain” section fulfills both of my requirements, and as an added bonus it can be made on a weeknight if you make some of our quick ‘n’ easy substitutions. Check this out:

Shoestring Austin’s Simplified Chicken & Chickpea Stew
(based on a recipe from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks With Wine)

Ingredients:

• 2 cans chickpeas, drained
• 3 T. olive oil
• all the meat from a store-bought rotisserie chicken, torn up into bite-sized pieces
• 1 slice whole wheat bread
• 1 large yellow onion, peeled and sliced
• 2 large ripe tomatoes, diced
• 1 slice bacon
• 2 c. chicken stock (preferably from a can or carton, rather than made from the bouillion cubes)
• 1 bay leaf
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 eggs, hard-boiled and peeled
• 1/2 c. dry sherry

Directions:

1. Heat a large frying pan and add the oil. Brown the chicken pieces on all sides and remove from the pan.
2. Fry the slice of bread in the remaining oil. Remove it and set aside.
3. In the same pan, sauté the onion, tomatoes and bacon. Cook until the onions are clear.
4. Place these veggies into a big (6-quart) lidded Dutch oven, and add the chicken pieces and chickpeas.
5. Deglaze the frying pan with a bit of the broth (i.e. pour in some of the broth and scrape any browned bits off the bottom of the pan). Add the pan drippings and all the stock to the pot, along with bay leaf, salt and pepper.
6. Cover and bring to a simmer. Simmer until the chicken is tender. (The original recipe required about 45 minutes, since you only browned the otherwise uncooked chicken, but since you’ve just browned pre-cooked chicken, this shouldn’t take as long; probably 10-15 minutes).
7. In the meantime, crush the garlic into a small bowl. Break up the fried bread and add to the garlic, along with the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs. Mash the mixture with 1 T. of the sherry, creating a garlic/egg yolk paste.
8. Chop the white of the eggs.
9. When the chicken has been simmering for 10-15 minutes, add the garlic paste, chopped egg whites, and remaining sherry.
10. Stir the pot carefully and simmer for another 10 minutes and you’re done!

The Frugal Gourmet recommends enjoying this dish with a light red Rioja wine on the side, which sounds great to me. I’ve made this dish the “long” way, with a full chicken, and even that doesn’t really take too much prep time. You just have to keep an eye on the simmering pot and stir it every once in a while, since it’s on the stove for 45 minutes. If you’ve got the extra time, I’d definitely give it a try that way to see how you like it, but our weeknight version with the pre-cooked chicken will shave off quite a bit of cooking time, getting your meal on the table faster, and will still give you a lot of the original recipe’s great chicken stew flavors. This is a great wintertime dish to warm you up, and if you like you can serve it over rice as well. Enjoy!