May 31, 2013

budget meals - hamburgers

The other night I had a moment where I looked in the fridge and it was BARE. There was mince in the freezer and a little bit of salad. It was looking quite grim. I couldn't even make spaghetti as I had run out of pasta and tomato sauce!

I defrosted some mince, I freeze portions of mince (about 250grams), this is usually enough for tacos or spaghetti for the 4 of us. I popped the defrosted mince into a bowl and sprinkled some salt, pepper and dried oregano in. Mixed it all around and formed 4 smallish hamburger patties. I didn't add any breadcrumbs or egg or anything to bind. Just formed them and popped them back into the fridge for a while to firm up. I buy the best quality mince which is about $11 per kilo.

I make all the bread we eat in the house so I took out some dough I had preprepared and made a fresh loaf. A loaf of my bread costs us about $2.50 to make and is as good as any Pane or artisan loaf you can buy.

I had a couple of onions rolling around in the bottom of the fridge so I sliced them up, softened them in a small saucepan with a little butter, then added 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and 1 tablespoon of honey per onion (so 2 of each in this case) and cooked it down to a jam consistency.

So when Guy came home I cooked up the hamburgers, toasted some bread, salad on the plate and some lovely onion jam and we had some very fancy homemade hamburgers.

Now obviously you don't have to make your own bread or have bread at all. I thought the onion jam added a fancy touch to what would otherwise have been a pretty boring meal, and the whole thing together was super tasty. I was so proud that I'd managed to make a 'silk purse out of a sow's ear' with my mince and onions.

All up this probably cost me well under $10, it was just for the two of us though. If I included the kids I'd say it would have cost around $12. The meat patties were only small but 2 was enough for us and the kids would only have needed 1 small one each.

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