Cracking Cracklin' Dinner

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Burgers are tasty, but I'm a bit scared of them. My dad makes awesome burgers, but he doesn't really use a recipe. He has a recipe in his head that includes eggs and dashes of this and that, but it's not written down anywhere. And I've had some yucky homemade burgers before, so I'm much happier to leave burgers for our visits to Kelowna in the summer.

Except that sometime we want burgers and we're not in Kelowna and we don't want to go out to eat.

Enter my new best friend, Jamie Oliver. I bought Alex Jamie's Food Revolution for his birthday (Father's Day?) a few years ago because I figured if Jamie Oliver could motivate and teach people who had no skills with food to cook, he could teach Alex, who was a prep cook eons ago, to cook. Except that I use the cookbook far more often than Alex. Oh well, we're married. We can share.

Now, we made this in the winter, so a salad didn't seem right as an accompaniment to Jamie's Cracking Burgers and oven roasted potatoes. After some thought and some consultation with the chief menu planner at our house, we settled on roasted cauliflower à la Mama Pea. I discovered this recipe after Kath at Kath Eats made it one night and talked about how expensive (!) cauliflower is - I don't know where she buys her cauliflower but at a few dollars for an entire head of cauliflower, it's a pretty good deal if you ask me. Anyway, I'd never had the Whole Foods version and we were out of curry powder, so I mixed up some cumin and coriander (at about a 1:3 ratio) and left out the stevia and cilantro. It was delicious. Alex and J both loved it. You can just barely see it just to the right of the burger.

We made that cauliflower over and over and over again all winter. I quickly figured out that the peas should be added closer to the end unless you want really crunchy peas, but yum! Everyone we fed this to loved it!

Oh, and the burgers? They're scrumptious and if my dad's not around to make me burgers, well, now I know I'm fully capable of making my own burgers and they will taste good too!