Evaluation: more successful than Shackleton's trans-Antarctic voyage, less successful than the Drake circumnavigation. I neglected to follow the recipe's instruction to chill the burgers for three hours before frying them, which meant that they held together only as long as I flipped them very, very gently and did not sneeze or make any sudden motions around them. Since I, um, slept in too late to get fresh hamburger buns started before going to work, I just served these with the last of the kale and a simple yogurt sauce. They had a nice golden-brown sear that unfortunately did not come across in any of the poorly lit photos I took. I also made a quick loaf of carrot cake at Andy's request; the photos of it were equally poorly lit and half as interesting, so those don't get to see the light of day.
And a note on garlic: Lately, these purple-streaked "jumbo garlic" or "Mexican garlic" heads have been cropping up at the various supermarkets we frequent, even Trader Joe's, and sometimes, like a pernicious invasive species, they drive out the cute, white little bulbs of much less expensive garlic I'm used to seeing in the grocery store. Uncomfortable race-related subtext aside, my unwillingness to pay $4 a pound for garlic led me to Trader Joe's pre-peeled packaged garlic cloves. In a quintessential example of overpackaging, one plastic zipper bag contains seven or eight vacuum-sealed pouches, each of which contains seven or eight peeled cloves of garlic. The convenience is not an enormous difference, but it is noticeable, and I'm willing to engage in this outlandish, yet inexpensive garlic purchase as long as purple jumbo garlic continues to reign supreme. Anyone else having this unfortunate experience?
huge garlic heads drive me nuts. they were all that was available at hannaford when i first moved in and i'm STILL working on two of the heads. and i use garlic basically every day.
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