Kitchen Adventure - The Pretentious Burger

Right off the top, let me say that I love me some meat.

(I'm not sure why I feel I have to put a caveat on it, but I do...) I have a freezer full of beef, pork, chicken, lamb, venison and even some moose to attest to my loving relationship with sinews and muscle, steak and sausage, oxtail and everything meaty in between.

In recent years though, I have had to spend more and more time reconciling the food I eat with the way it's produced.

On my farm, when I was a kid, we kept a series of cows in the barn to have milk for our family table. The rest of the cattle were on pasture in the summer and in winter, were given hay we grew and harvested on the farm. Our pigs ate the grain we grew and in their pens, the pigs played with a chain hanging from the ceiling so they'd have something to occupy them. It prevented fights. The sheep were on grass when they busy weren't escaping (stupid, stupid creatures!) and our chickens had the run of the barn until the dog died and the foxes moved in.

We cared for our animals, named them sometimes, showed them at the fair and eventually ate some of them. I didn't think much about it as a kid, but as an adult, I rest easy in the knowledge that the animals had a decent life before they met their end and we or someone else ate them. I was in the small abattoirs where the animals were killed and dismembered; their deaths were quick and merciful.

Now, though, the more I know about massive filthy feedlots, monocultures required to feed the animals therein and the treatment of the humans who work in the slaughterhouses, the more I'm re-thinking what goes into the grocery cart.

I buy beef from a farmer I know. My chickens, too, mostly, but maybe it's time for more of us to think about how much meat we eat. Sweetie and I plan our meals, and I try to slip one non-meat meal in there each week.

Which leads me to today's experiment.

On a whim one day about 20 years ago, I had a veggie burger at a restaurant in Toronto. It was terrific, and I have tried and failed many times to find one as good.

17 ingredients and two hours of roasting and mixing later, I will form and barbecue my own, homemade version of a veggie burger, from a recipe I read in the New York Times. I'm calling it the Pretentious Burger, because... New York Times.

Yup. SEVENTEEN ingredients, including some I had trouble finding in small-town Ontario, like tempeh, and others that are more pedestrian, like beets.

I'll let you know how it turns out, that is, IF I'm still alive tomorrow...