No Recipe Meal--Turkey Burger

No Recipe Meal-Turkey Burger @livligahome

Every once in a while I just don't want to follow a recipe. I want to do a meal "free hand", using up what I have in the refrigerator. It is a little scary in that I don't want to add calories where I don't need to, and I want to be able to serve appropriate serving sizes.

I decided to try my hand at a summer-time turkey burger meal. As you can see by the photo, The meal consisted of a turkey burger with bun topped with a slice of tomato, sweet potato fries and a cucumber salad. Everything was on hand in my home.

Because these are items I have cooked before the "recipe" I used to prepare each dish was based off of how I have prepared them before.

The turkey burger was made with 1 pound of turkey meat, 1/2 cup of cleaned and chopped watercress, 2 tablespoons of minced onion, some garlic powder and some cracked pepper. That was it. I kneaded it all together and made 4 patties. These were cooked in a cast-iron skillet about 4 minutes to a side. The burger was assembled with a Rudi's whole wheat hamburger bun, one side topped with a slice of tomato, 1 tablespoon of nonfat Greek yogurt and a healthy teaspoon of Dijon mustard.

The sweet potatoes where cleaned and cut into strips to look like fries. I used 2. Then I sprayed the bottom of a cookie sheet with olive oil flavored cooking spray, placed the sweet potatoes on the sheet and sprayed them again with the cooking spray. I topped them with a sprinkling of garlic powder (California style) and Herbes de Provence with a pinch of salt. These were baked in a 375 oven for about 35 minutes.

Next I put together the cucumber salad. This was really easy. I peeled and cored the cucumber then sliced it into half moon pieces. The dressing was 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar with 1 teaspoon agave and a pinch of salt.

Since I had done recipes many times before for similar dishes it was easy for me to assemble this meal. In looking at the ingredients I included I felt I had not strayed far from the original versions so the calories and portions would be similar.In fact, if anything, the calories were a little less becasue I didn't include as many of the ingredients. My version was simplified. Here is a link to the recipe version: http://livligahome.blogspot.com/2012/05/from-grill-peppered-turkey-burger.html. That meal was a total of 536 calories.

It was fun doing a no recipe meal for a change. It felt good to feel like I knew what I was doing and that I was in control of the choices and quantities. I definitely want to try it again.