Indian Spiced Chicken Pita Burgers
When I saw this recipe in my Great Food Fast cookbook, I knew that it would be a good one for us. We love Indian food - plus, it looked like a fresh, creative take on a regular burger.
I ran into a few bumps along the way as I ventured into this new recipe. Bump #1: because it was a bit more stressful and difficult than my usual meals, I forgot to take pics along the way.
Secondly, I had excitedly bought chicken thighs (what the recipe called for) on sale a few days ago. A pack of 8 for only $3!! I was thrilled. I was NOT thrilled, however, when I realized I had neglected to buy boneless, skinless chicken thighs, which are what the recipe really calls for. So I spent a good portion of my time pulling chicken thighs apart and salvaging the best parts of the meat for these burgers. Not the best time of my life.
Once they had been pulled apart, I cut up the chicken thighs and “marinated” them in the lemon juice, curry, fresh ginger, scallions, cumin, cayenne pepper, salt, and pepper. Once that hard work was done, I had to let the chicken sit in a blend of spices for about 30 minutes (bump #3 since I was not planning on this).
After the 30 minutes, I put the chicken/marinade mixture into the food processor. After about a minute of processing, the chicken was cut into much smaller pieces - somewhere in between ground and chopped. The pieces were all different sizes, too, which made it interesting (but tasty)!
Then, I formed the chicken into patties. The recipe called for 16 patties. I knew that I was making my patties too big when I got down to the end of the chicken mixture and only had about 5 patties made. Bump #4. I re-made the patties and the size was TEENY TINY - but it worked out ok because they went into a pita, and we put 2 or 3 patties into the pita.
After the burgers had been grilled, I put the yummy pitas on the skillet to toast them up. It was at this point that I ran into bump #5 - a pin-head speck of mold on each of the pitas. I am not going to make myself more professional or gourmet than I really am - yes, I really had mold on my pitas. Fortunately, there was one pita that was just fine. So much for “pita burgers”.
I put three mini burgers into the (one) pita, along with sliced cucumbers and cilantro. The topping for these burgers was a cumin yogurt sauce. Bump # 6 - The sauce tasted a little weird. Oh, well. Bjork didn’t “mind” it… and I used hummus instead. Since I ate mine without a pita, you can see the creation that we developed for eating the burgers plain.
Ok, I have been showcasing all the problems I had while making this… but really, this was a YUMMY recipe - the burgers were so juicy and full of flavor! My favorite thing about them was that they had this melt-in-your-mouth kind of texture unlike a regular burger.
Tonight’s dinner lesson: you can still get a good meal and a good story out of dinner mishaps!