February 3rd, 2010

Wednesday Dinner: Onion Mushroom Burgers with Mashed Potatoes

I love com­ing up with new recipes and new ways to try some old-time favorites with a new twist. If you have been fol­low­ing my weight loss jour­ney you know that I have a seri­ous prob­lem get­ting enough pro­tein in my diet.  So, I decided to add a lit­tle ground beef to my menu. The prob­lem is that I really don’t like the taste of meat. It makes me gag to think that I have to eat beef.

So tonight I tried to cre­ate a burger that was more like a Sal­is­bury steak and paired with some of my favorite veg­gies: mush­rooms, onions, and green peppers.

Burger Recipe

Mush­room Sauce:

• 1 pint Baby Bella Mushrooms
• 1 large onion
• 1 large bell pepper

Saute this mix­ture start­ing with the onions and then adding the green pep­pers and then the mush­rooms. Cook on medium until the green pep­pers and mush­rooms have released all of their liq­uids. ( I learned this tech­niques from the Iron Chef com­pe­ti­tions). Remove from pan.

Burger Sea­son­ings (I cook by smell so the mea­sure­ments are all palm –sized)

• Black pep­per
• Ground Thyme
• Paprika
• Gar­lic Powder
• Red Pep­per
• Cumin

In a bowl com­bine all of the dry ingre­di­ents and mix well. Mix half of the dry mix­ture into the ground beef. Form your burg­ers (4) and “flour” each burger patty with the remain­ing dry sea­son­ing  mix. Cook burg­ers in pan (8 min­utes on each side if you like yours well done).

For Sauce

• Mush­room, Onion, Pep­per mixture
• 1 cups of hot water with a beef bouil­lon cube dissolved
• .5 cup of Bal­samic Vinegar

Remove the burg­ers from the pan and add vine­gar and water/broth. With fire on medium scrap bot­tom of pan and mix well. Add MOP mix­ture and bring to a slight boil. Add burg­ers back to pan and cover. Turn fire to low and cook until the mid­dles of the burg­ers are as pink as you want (I like them well-done so it took about 13 min­utes to cook thor­oughly. This will dif­fer based on the thick­ness of your burger)

Serve with mashed pota­toes (I used instant mashed pota­toes and made them with Soy Milk) and a side salad (my salad had baby car­rots, 2 kinds of let­tuce, pep­pers, mush­rooms, and onions). Cover mashed pota­toes and burg­ers with sauce/MOP mixture.

The burger is about 215 calo­ries alone.

*The pic­ture fea­tures a very large burger that I cut in thirds.