East Meets West Burgers

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I was so excited to make the East Meets West Burgers for the What’s For Dinner Wednesdays hosted by the National Cattleman’s Beef Association. Burgers are not something I make a lot, although my husband loves them! I’ve never really believed that I could make really good, restaurant-style burgers at home since I have no grill experience.

Well, I think I’ll have to readjust my thought process on that one. Because these burgers turned out so delicious and I don’t think Eric will let me get away with my old excuse any more.

I decided to tackle the preparation of these burgers from a frugal perspective. I know I often avoid recipes when they call for specialty ingredients or even ingredients I don’t regularly have on hand. So I figured I’m not alone in this and I wanted to show how you can tweak any recipe with just a little creativity. I made this entire “specialty” dish with products that I had on hand, with the exception of the red cabbage.

Find the entire recipe for East Meets West Burgers on the NCBA website.

Here are the few changes I made:

For the mayonnaise sauce,  I omitted the sesame oil (not a regular purchase in our house) and the soy sauce (we ran out). Instead I used about 1 tablespoon of General Tso’s sauce that I had in the fridge. It was absolutely delicious. In fact, it was so good that we used it as a dipping sauce for our french fries too.

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For the slaw topping, I replaced the rice wine vinegar with apple cider vinegar. I also used some thinly sliced arugula instead of romaine lettuce, because that’s what we already had. Simple substitutions, but the core taste stayed the same, at least in our opinion.

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For the burgers, I decided to take an extra whole wheat bun and use that to make the bread crumbs. It worked perfectly!

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I decided to make these burgers as a special date-at-home treat for my husband and I. So I used the extra meat mixture to make some mini-meatballs for a soup I’m planning to make this weekend.

Now that I’ve gotten all those little things out of the way, let me say this – you NEED to make these burgers. They were so delicious. All of the subtle flavors combined to make a burger full of unique taste. So good!

Did you make the East Meets West burgers this week? I’d love to hear your thoughts if you did. And don’t forget to add your link or share your thoughts on the recipe  in a review of the recipe or on the NCBA’s facebook wall. Once you do that, you’ll be eligible to win a great prize package from the NCBA.

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