Meal: Hamburgers and roasted potatoes
Cooking time: about 40 minutes for the potatoes, 20 for the burgers, not including thawing time; 20 minutes for the buns, plus rising time for the dough (1.5 hours with the bread machine, and half an hour for first rest and 20 minutes for the second)
Cost per serving (1 burger, 1 bun, with cheese): $1.20
Local ingredients: beef, cheese, potatoes
Organic ingredients: flour

Jeff makes, hands down, the best hamburgers I’ve ever had. I spent five years as a vegeterian in my late teens and early 20s, and even after I took up eating meat again, I wasn’t big on beef. A lot of beef is just bad - tough, badly cooked, and with a flavor that I didn’t much care for. But then we found Rocking F’s beef, and I was converted. Grass-fed hormone-free beef is so much better than anything you’re going to buy at a normal grocery, and we’re lucky to have a source for it so close to us.

So, Jeff’s hamburgers. We don’t measure anything when we make these; it’s all by eye. Take a pound of beef, and mix it with worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, onion powder, and black pepper to taste. Form four burgers. Cook them in a medium high skillet, five minutes to a side. Serve up with homemade hamburger buns and roasted potatoes (cube potatos, coat with olive oil, and top with garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, salt, pepper, or whatever else appeals; 30 to 40 minutes, until they’re as done as you would like, at 425 degrees).

A couple of notes: the hamburger bun recipe calls for milk powder, which we’re out of; I found that a tablespoon of skim milk worked fine. I used olive oil for the shortening.

How long did all this take? I had to start the buns pretty early in the afternoon, which was fine, because I was home studying. Otherwise, it would have been a fairly quick dinner, since the buns can go in at the end of the potatoes cooking (just turn down the oven) and the burgers can be cooked while the buns are cooking, but for one thing: I forgot to take the beef out to thaw early enough. It came out at 6. We finally ate around 9. We often eat fairly late, especially on weekends. We could of course be a bit smarter about it and move the frozen beef from the freezer to the fridge the night before so it could thaw. Our meal planning hasn’t quite gotten to that level of detail though. Just goes to show that there’s always room for mprovement.