Harry's Ultimate Easter Sunday Apollo 13 Style Shiitake Beef Burger

I live in a household that really practices the holy week traditions. All meats, for instance, just randomly disappear come Holy Thursday. They vanish into thin air. It's like meat rapture, really.

Shiitake Happens

If the only tool you have is a hammer then treat everything as if it is a nail. I've been overusing that line a lot, really. I think it was Maslow who said that. That's where I got the idea of Apollo 13 style because most of the ingredients I use for this recipe are used not by choice but by chance. I work with what I have. I feel that this forces me to be creative and imaginative; unafraid to go against conventions and try new things. It's like what they say: Shiitake happens.

Thaw Something

Luckily, it's after midnight, sleep arm in arm in the stairwell. Just kidding, but yeah, so technically it's Easter Sunday and the tomb's supposedly empty by now so of course meat miraculously appears in my freezer. Such a magical place, this house I live in. And since S&R is always sponsoring your resident blogger with free taste of random food, they get that product placement on the photo above. 

Bread

Google results suggest that I can actually eat shiitake alone even without the meat but then what's the point in that. Randomly finding bread, I knew it was going to be a sandwich of some sort. Beef sounds perfect with shiitake. 

Sesame Oil and Worcestershire Sauce

And so I go back to this burger recipe I had from a long time ago. Sort of like Asian meets English concept that, again, is merely brought to me by coincidence and not by choice. 

Cooking

I dip the shiitake in water to make it just the right ammount of soggy before frying it in olive oil (I actually prefer canola oil but I couldn't find it). I then fry the beef patties I made on the same oil I cooked the shiitake in. Shiitake mushrooms really have such a powerful and influential taste.

Japanese Mayonnaise

And since I'm already sort of going for this oriental flavor of sorts, it would be heresy if I didn't put Japanese mayonnaise. I don't even think of Japanese mayo as a condiment but more of a main ingredient, really. And so I generously bathe my sandwiches with what I consider to be one of the greatest contributions of Japanese culture to humanity.

Harry's Ultimate Easter Sunday Apollo 13 Style Shiitake Beef Burger

I actually miss my DSLR. My pictures would be so much more awesome if I could use my prime lenses. I've actually just been using my Samsung Galaxy Y and the camera does the job but of course I know how photo quality can impact a food blog such as this one.

The burger was great. Long live cows and their byproducts. There's actually quite a bit of shiitake mushrooms here so I'm thinking of making more stuff with it so be sure to watch out for that. Follow me on my Twitter to get updated on my latest blog posts. For now, you can listen to me mess around with the vocoder in my cover of Daft Punk's Something About Us: