Burger trials

In this era of increasing availability of gourmet goods, I’m finding it harder than ever to get my hands on a good burger.

Our local outpost of Kidd Valley is closing next week. Kidd Valley is a long-running Seattle chain (a dozen locations) with a predictable 50s soundtrack and decent fast-food burgers. They used to have a logo featuring a young girl in an absurdly revealing pose. Note also the shoes. Eventually someone realized this logo was more pornographic than actual porn and changed it to this.

Maybe the reason I’m so often disappointed by burgers is that there are three (admittedly indistinct) categories of burgers, and you have to figure out what you’re dealing with before you cast judgment.

* Kidd Valley is an example of the fast food burger (FFB), the lowest end of the spectrum. The Kidd gets props for decent-tasting beef and for offering real grilled onions. The top of this genre is In-N-Out Burger, which pretty much gets everything right. In Oregon, Burgerville is great.

* Next is the burger-with-aspirations (BWA) category. It’s not a fancy burger, but it doesn’t want to be associated with fast food, either. Think Red Robin for a pedestrian example. In Seattle, the undisputed heavyweight champion in this category is Red Mill Burgers. Red Mill has a pile of bacon that is much larger than Iris. They offer varieties like the Verde, with grilled anaheim chiles, and my favorite, the Red Onion Jam burger, with lots of caramelized onions. Many people call Red Mill the best in town, but I’m a little snobbier than that, as you’ll see. (You could also argue that Red Mill belongs in the FFB category, but when anaheim chiles get involved, it’s no longer fast food to me.) There is a doomed restaurant space down the street from me that currently houses a Polish barbecue place that puts out bad vibes but was previously an Irish pub that served a fantastic burger of this type. It may be possible to get a BWA served medium-rare, something that will never happen with a FFB. The best BWA I’ve had in Seattle is at Geraldine’s Counter, in Columbia City.

* Finally you have the gourmet burger. Here’s where you start to hear about the house-made bun, the 100 percent organic ground chuck, and so on. Daniel Boulud’s db Burger, stuffed with foie gras and short ribs (get it with double the truffles for only $120), falls into this category, but so does the $13.75 burger at Union Square Cafe and my favorite burger in Seattle, the $12 Palace Burger at Tom Douglas’s [Palace Kitchen](http://www.tomdouglas.com/palace/). The Palace Burger is an awesome thing. I’ve never had it arrive anything other than perfectly medium-rare, nicely salted, and accompanied by a delightful condiment rack featuring pickled green tomatoes. The fries are also good. The Palace is only open for dinner, or I would probably accidentally wander in there at lunchtime way too often.

None of this is groundbreaking analysis, I know. But tonight, while we were eating at Kidd Valley after Iris’s checkup (she’s tip-top), something occurred to me. There’s this bar down the street from us, The Deluxe, where I’ve been avoiding the burgers for a while, partly because they were always changing the bun and the fries, and partly because the patties were always perfectly round and I prefer a hand-formed patty, for no reason that I can verbalize. Anyway, what I realized was: if they had served me a Deluxe burger at Kidd Valley, I would have been dancing on the table with glee, to the tune of that great 50s hit by Tommy Peacock and his Shurlettes, or something. In other words, unless there’s something quite wrong with it, a burger can only disappoint within its category.

The corollary is: if you served a db Burger to an unsuspecting kid at McDonald’s, he would puke.

Feeling like crepe

I’m still sick. Today I ate toast, some almonds, a few bites of an ill-advised new flavor of Campbell’s soup (something with pork and beans, though not the classic Pork and Beans, which would have been preferable), half a Trader Joe’s frozen stromboli, and some macaroni and cheese with broccoli. You can see that the virus is affecting my judgment. I had great plans for this week involving short ribs and polenta, but the way things are going it’s going to be Spaghetti-Os and very stale Texas Toast by Friday.

This afternoon while I was lying on the couch watching episodes of The Office (UK), Laurie and Iris went down to Joe Bar for a crepe. They got cinnamon-sugar with whipped cream on top. On the way home, I am told, the following conversation occurred (I realize it strains credulity, but then Iris repeated it for me several times at home):

> **Iris:** Iris singing a little cinnamon song.

> **Laurie:** How does the song go?

> **Iris:** Cinnamon, cinnamon, cinnamon.

> (pause)

> **Iris:** It’s on iTunes.

National Pie Day

A few years ago I was watching the NBA finals, and Michael Jordan was playing. As the game got underway, the announcer said he’d just been informed that Jordan had been experiencing flu-like symptoms, and perhaps we should not expect him to perform up to his usual standard. Of course, Jordan went on to score like 175 points, and the announcer kept saying, “Look at that shot! And with flu-like symptoms!”

My point here is that last night I developed flu-like symptoms, so I am lying in bed not feeling like eating anything. I just had a piece of plain Texas Toast. I’ll know I’m getting better when I start to crave peperonata. Last night I was up half the night with a fever dream that, among other things, involved someone complaining, “You got tzatziki on my dashiki!”

I picked up Ken Haedrich’s book Pie from the library, and I flopped it open to a random page, trying to take my mind off my various aches and pains. On the page was a sidebar about National Pie Day, created by the American Pie Council. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s today, and I’m in no condition to eat pie. What other sorts of baked-good councils do you think there are?

> The APC services two special groups…pie loving consumers and pie-related business professionals.

If I were an undercover CIA operative, I would answer questions about my line of work by saying mysteriously, “Let’s just say I’m a pie-related business professional.”

So I forced myself to celebrate NPD by eating a couple of leftover cookies that Laurie made from the book The Weekend Baker by Abigail Johnson Dodge. They’re bar cookies with a brownie layer on the bottom and a chocolate chip cookie layer on the top. It sounds like a gimmick, but they’re delicious and not hard to make, and the book endeared itself to us by giving ingredients by weight. I’ve thought about writing a polemic about weighing ingredients, but a guy I know already wrote one, The Kitchen Scale Manifesto, and it’s much more thorough than what I would have come up with.

I think I may have solved the adult bib problem. Laurie got me a Salumi apron for Christmas. It’s black, with Salumi’s great pig logo on the front. I’ve been wearing it in the kitchen, and then when it’s time to sit down for dinner, I conveniently forget to take it off (although Iris will often say, “Dada, take off Dada’s apron”). This does leave a dangerously exposed area between the top of the apron and my neck, but it’s much better than nothing.

Brawn

Perhaps my biggest sin in the kitchen is overuse of paper towels. The other day I went to the QFC in search of more, and the brand on sale was Brawny.

Brawny is not your sissy metrosexual paper towel. To use Brawny, you have to be like Brad Pitt, both in terms of the character he played in Fight Club and the Angelina Jolie-knocking-up character he plays in real life. If there is estrogen in your system, Brawny will recoil in horror when you touch it. A sheet of Brawny can withstand a kick from Jet Li. Brawny is the preferred paper towel for wiping down your axe after chopping a cord of wood.

In short, don’t even think about buying Brawny unless you fulfill both of these qualifications:

1. You are one bad motherfucker.
2. You can’t get enough Mary Engelbreit.

The toast of my youth

In the course of turning Texas Toast into French toast, I noticed two facts about Texas Toast. First, even if French toast isn’t your thing, Texas Toast makes great regular buttered toast (actually, Laurie discovered this). Second, Texas Toast is dyed yellow with annatto and turmeric, which I guess is how they do it in Texas.

This was indeed the French toast of my youth. We’ll probably go back to challah French toast next week, but it’s good to know this is available.

While I was mixing up the batter I realized that there are two kinds of French toast batter, and each of them can be used as something else. This kind is an egg custard. The kind we make on usual Sundays includes flour and is a thin pancake batter. I wonder what would happen if you used brownie batter.

**FRENCHIE**
Serves 2 adults and 1 child (multiply the recipe at will)

*”Unless you are Jake or Ben, you will not need additional butter,” writes my mom. Jake and Ben are my younger brothers; the two of them together can eat four times as much as me. Mom’s recipe didn’t include salt, but I like to put some in.*

5 slices Texas Toast or other thick-sliced sandwich bread
4 large eggs
1 cup half-and-half
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. In a pie pan, whisk together the eggs, half-and-half, sugar, salt, and vanilla. Place two slices of bread (or more, if you have a really big pie plate) in the mixture and poke the top sides of the bread all over with a fork. After 30 seconds, flip the slices and soak an additional 30 seconds. Transfer to a plate. Repeat with the remaining bread.

2. Heat a stainless or cast-iron skillet, or an electric frying pan (best choice, because it can cook four slices at once and a skillet can only manage two), over medium to medium-high heat. Melt a generous knob of butter in the pan and add as many slices of bread as can comfortably fit. Cook 2 to 3 minutes per side, or until nicely mottled golden brown. Serve with fake maple syrup, or real maple syrup if that’s your orientation.