Some days I just don’t plan. Then, ravenous, I have to do food, fast. Last night I was lucky. I found ground meat thawing in the fridge. Thinking it was lamb, I rushed outside to pick spearmint. With snow in the forecast, it was already on the pick list in my mind.
But then I got back inside and realized I was looking at thawed beef, not lamb. I consulted with Mary. “It’ll be fine. Use that bit of oil left from roasting the garlic on Friday.”
I chopped one red onion and got it sautéing in the garlic oil. I added salt and large handfuls of chopped mint. With fresh mint leaves, you want a lot — don’t scrimp. Once the onions were translucent, I used my hands to press ground beef into sliders, adding these one by one to the sizzling pan, pushing the onion-mint mixture to the side. After flipping the small burgers, I heaped the onion mix around the sliders to make them cook faster and keep them from drying out.
I rinsed and arranged Romaine lettuce leaves on the plates, from the last little heads to come out of the hoop house this year at Friends Farm. 20 minutes after rushing out to pick the mint, we sat down to eat. We learned that beef sliders are delicious when cooked with mint, just like lamb.
Reprinted with permission by Ben Sargent at Waves of Grain.
Image from Ben Sargent.
