After quaffing down a couple of my favorite beverages last night I decided to head on home to make myself a simple dinner and figuring I had all the necessary ingredients on hand to make myself a simple cheeseburger, I figured that a trip to the local grocery store wasn’t in order.
I got home, opened up the fridge and pulled out a pound of ground beef, a small onion and an overripe tomato along with some lettuce. Imagine my surprised that when I rummaged through the fridge I was shocked to discover there was nary a slice of cheese to be found. What’s a man to do?
Sure, I could have jumped back in my car and ran to the store but since I’m the lazy sort of person, the type who once they get home don’t want to go out again unless absolutely necessary or in the case of an emergency and these circumstances didn’t seem dire enough to qualify as either of those instances, decided to make do with what I had.
Then, out of the corner of my eye I spied a half full bag of Cheez Doodles sitting on my kitchen counter and an idea began to take hold. They say that “necessity is the mother of invention” and since I was bound and determined to have a cheeseburger some inspiration took hold. I grabbed the bag and dumped the remaining contents into a blender and pulsed it around a few times until I had what looked like a very orange form of bread crumbs. I thought to myself, hey, I’ll try just about anything once and decided to give it a go.
What follows is the recipe for what I’m tentatively calling “deep fried cheeseburgers without any cheese” and keeping in accordance with the “deep fried craze” that has swept the nation will be trying to sell them at the local state and county fairs.
Here’s what you need.
Here’s what you do.
Combine the ground beef, chopped onion, barbecue sauce and salt and pepper and mix them all together. Form them into two patties and set them aside. Follow the advice I offered up earlier regarding the Cheez Doodles, if you don’t have a blender or food processor you can mush up them with a fork or bash them with a hammer until they resemble bread crumbs.
Toss the patties in the egg and coat them on both sides with the pulverized Cheez Doodles. In a decent sized frying pan, heat up the vegetable oil or butter and toss in the patties. With a spatula, flip them over a few times until they’re fully cooked. Be careful, my first attempt at this resulted in the coating getting a little bit burnt. Remove them from the frying pan and cover them with paper towels to soak up any extra oil or butter they might have retained.
Place them on the hamburger buns and add the lettuce, tomato and any other toppings that suit your fancy and dig right in.
Okay, after consuming these maybe they aren’t the best or even cheesiest cheeseburger that ever came down the pike but they were pretty damn tasty and had the added benefit of getting my creative juices flowing both in the kitchen and in contributing a write up.
On a side note, if you see these being marketed in the near future by the likes of McDonald's, Burger King or any other fast food burger joint, you’ll know who to thank
Or not.
As always, bon appétit.