Okay, I’m a few days behind real life cooking on ye ol’ blog.  But let’s just imagine that it’s Sunday.  You get home from church, or you wake up nice and slowly.  Because it’s Sunday.  Yay!  And then you realize that you only have ingredients for two recipes–blue cheese burgers and fried backstraps.  We’ll get to the fried backstraps later.  They didn’t seem like the right choice for Sunday, so blue cheese burgers it is.  Such a hard life, you know?!

(We made the healthier recipes earlier in the week, I promise.)

Blue Cheese Burgers with Fancy Onions and Things (45-ish minutes, 4 burgers)
Ingredients

• 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (or a little bit more, if you like cheese like we do)
• 1/4 cup canola mayonnaise (equally delicious with plain Greek yogurt instead)
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme, divided
• 1/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce  (we might have used Frank’s)
• 1 pound lean ground sirloin or venison
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper, divided
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/4-inch-thick slices Vidalia or other sweet onion–1 onion gives you a few extra slices
• Cooking spray
• 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
• 4 whole-wheat hamburger buns, toasted
• Tomato slices
• Lettuce/arugula/spinach

Preparation

1. Preheat grill or grill pan to medium-high heat.
2. Combine 1/2 cup blue cheese, mayonnaise, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, and hot pepper sauce in a small bowl; stir well.
3. Divide beef into 4 equal portions, shaping each portion into a 1/2-inch-thick patty (with a slightly thinner part in the middle). Sprinkle beef evenly with salt and pepper.
4. Brush oil evenly over both sides of onion slices; sprinkle with remaining pepper. Place the patties and onions on grill rack coated with cooking spray; grill for 3 minutes on each side. Set patties aside; keep warm. Place onion slices in a zip-top plastic bag; seal. Let stand 5 minutes; toss with remaining 1/2 teaspoon thyme and red wine vinegar.
5. Assemble in any order that you prefer.  We feel strongly about order of operations, but you might disagree.  Bun, sauce, burger, tomatoes, onions, bun.  Sauce on both sides might be amazing.  And we didn’t have any greens to throw into the mix.

At our house, they came out looking like this:


What makes this burger special? Well, I’ll tell you.  We did use venison, so that made things a bit leaner/more exotic.  (I think it would still make me insanely happy with lean beef as suggested.  You could probably even get away with ground turkey or ground chicken.)  But the magic is the combo of the blue cheese sauce and the grilled onions in vinegar.  Om nom nom.  Yes, real words don’t even work for this.  I’m normally only kind of a fan of a homemade burger, but not this time.  I wholeheartedly dove into a second burger after round one.  Perfect for a quiet Sunday/Tuesday/day that ends in “y.”