Mid-Week Gourmet

Tonight, I made gyoza burgers. :) Which make me soooo happy. Because they're delicious. Anyone who semi knows my family has had my dad's gyoza with our sukiyaki meal. (For those who don't know, gyoza is a potsticker and sukiyaki is kind of like stir fry.) A couple months ago Jeff and I decided to take the delicious beef mixture my dad uses for the gyoza filling and turn it into a burger. Amazingly good. And I made homemade teriyaki sauce to go with it, because ketchup would just be weird. This time we also sauteed mushrooms and onions to go on top and I made couscous with peas. Our friends brought homemade French fries and we topped it off with some of the cream soda and butter whipped cream from Jeff's birthday.

UPDATE:
Here's a recipe for gyoza burgers! The measurements aren't exact because, let's face it, it's my dad's recipe and what man likes to measure food perfectly? Not my man.... Jeff just dumps in what he thinks a good amount is. I've since had to give very specific instructions or just do the measuring myself. :)

Rachel and Dad's Gyoza Burgers

1 lb ground beef
1/4-1/2 of a medium onion, finely diced
1/4 of a napa cabbage, finely diced
2 handfuls button mushrooms (roughly 8-10 mushrooms, my hands are small), finely diced
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1/4 cup soy sauce
dash of sugar

Mix all the ingredients together until well mixed. Take a handful of the mixture and form it into a disk about 1 inch thick. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use. Repeat with remaining beef.

We cooked our burgers on our George Foreman grill, but I would suggest using a one-sided, open grill for these. The George Forman cooked them quickly, but it also flattened them, which squeezed a lot of the soy sauce out. I would strongly suggest doing this the old fashioned, flip-it-over way on a traditional grill. And don't smash them down with your flipper! All the juice gets squeezed right out and makes for a dry burger. This burger needs the juice to have the best taste.

I made homemade teriyaki sauce with the first recipe on this blog: www.teriyakisaucerecipe.blogspot.com

I only used one tablespoon of honey and added about 1/3 cup more water because it was really strong.

The sauteed onions and mushrooms are pretty self explanatory... Melt butter in frying pan, add onions and mushrooms and cook (stirring) until soft.

There you have it! Homemade gyoza burgers!

It's the last week of competition! Ah! Hopefully volleyball prep for next season will start picking up, though. I'm working on an all-time results table right now, and it's one of those things that I have to have a break every so often, or else my eyes start crossing and my brain gets fuzzy. Luckily I've had some releases to work on and other random things so I'm not doing the schedule all day every day. Unfortunately it's really slow work. I'm only back to 1984. :( Maybe I should have done soccer. That schedule only goes back to 1995. lol.

I got a kind of funny email from someone Monday. It was from a parent of a WCC player, but not a BYU player, asking a long list of questions about televised matches. TV personalities, definition, how many cameras were used. I laughed. :) And then sent back as detailed an email as I could write. That's a dedicated parent! And more viewers for BYU, so I didn't mind.

For the last week or so, crews have been digging up the road a block away from our apartment. It's been a little annoying, because that's the road that we have to pass to get to University. They have it blocked off for two or three blocks, so we have to make a huge loop to get to University. Luckily we don't live on the street that's being torn up, though! Driving past, it doesn't look or sound very enjoyable for the people that live where they're digging. I just hope they open up one of those streets by the end of next week, or moving to our new apartment is going to be annoying.

It's funny... Now that we're packing everything up, I'm in a crafty mood. I've thought of a ton of projects and recipes I want to try. Too bad just about everything is in boxes. Well, actually that's a good thing. Or I'd make our house even messier.

Off to Jeff's softball game. :)