Chili Calamity

Lest you go on thinking that every meal in my house is a wonderfully successful treat, I feel the need to tell you about my dinner last night. To briefly describe it I will say only this: I was cooking outside, but ended up setting off the smoke detectors inside.

Martha Stewart: Fail.

So Garrett has been craving a GIANT BEEF BURGER (Yes, in all caps) because I torture him a lot, you see, by serving him ground turkey things like turkey burgers and turkey chili and turkey meatloaf. And Oh! The Horror! Where’s The Beef? and all of that business. I mean holy moly is there any graver sin that a big beefy looking meal, made with -- ha! I tricked you, it's turkey! According to Garrett, no. So to assuage my carniverous companion we picked up some ground chuck and I scoured through some cookbooks and ended up finding a recipe for Chili Cheddar Burgers that sounded pretty good.

Now, I feel the need to interject for a minute that at first the name sort of turned me off. Because even though we all know how much I love chili, many of you may not know that I am absolutely NOT a fan of other foods covered in chili (see: fries, burgers, etc). It’s sort of like chicken on pizza for me. They are two great tastes that should just NEVER get tasted together. ICK. Yes, even if there is cheese involved. Yuck.

Anyway, back to the chili burger. So this burger was not actually smothered in chili but rather contained the flavors of chili on the inside. It had jalapenos, onions, garlic, chili powder, and cumin all mixed in and then, as if it could get any more cute and clever, it called for cubed up cheddar cheese to mix in. How could this go wrong?

By putting them on the grill that’s how. Because do you know what happens to cheese when you put it on a grill? It melts. And do you know what happens when dripping cheese pours into a fire? It smokes. And do you know what happens to smoke detectors when the lovely Delta Breeze blows the smoky billows inward towards the house?

Well I’ll tell you this, it’s not the Mormon Tabernacle Choir ringing in your ears.

So we pretty much let the burgers just char out on the grill, brought them into the house, dressed them up, then sliced them in half only to discover that they were TOTALLY RAW on the inside. So RAW, in fact, that I thought someone from the WWE was going to come into my kitchen and put me in a headlock over a dinner so botched. But alas, they did not, so I just finished cooking them in a pan and a few minutes later we ate them; however, not with any of the planned side-dishes, because I was too busy doing BBQ triage to prepare any of them.

In the end, a valuable lesson was learned by all, and the moral of the story is this – don’t get cute with chili-burgers. Have them the way nature indended, or don’t have them at all.