Hawaiian Entree
HAWAIIAN HAMBURGER
INGREDIENTS
3/4 pound ground beef
1 egg
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard
1/2 medium onion
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 tablespoon tomato sauce
1/2 cup pineapple juice
4 pineapple slices
4 hamburger buns
PREPARATION
Dice onion. Mix ground beef, egg, brown sugar, mustard, onion, bread crumbs, and tomato sauce by hand. Don’t say “ew” when doing so.
Make four patties. Brown both sides of each patty. Pour pineapple juice into pan. Cook at medium-high heat until all the meat in the patty turns color. (You can clip off a small section of a patty to look. After a few times, you’ll be an adept chef and know by looking at the meat’s outside or by a finely honed sense of how long things take to cook.)
Toast buns. Put patties in buns. Top each patty with a pineapple slice.
TIDBITS
1) Pineapples were a sign of hospitality in antebellum mansions. Many sea captains would return and put an apple atop on of the posts by the front gate. This meant that the man of the house was home and that you were welcome to visit the homestead.
2) However, it did not mean you would receive special hospitality from the lady of the mansion if you spent the night in a four poster topped with four wooden pineapples. Instead, finding those pineapples on your bed meant you had overstayed your welcome. The number of pineapples denoted the seriousness of the “please leave” message.
3) “Hawaiian” is one of the few English words with the letter sequence “aiia.”
4) If the first hamburger restaurant to have gone national had been from Hawaii, our favorite fast food restaurant might have been Nâwilliwili burgers.
5) This would have caused a national crisis as most word processors, including mine, don’t have the necessary foreign character of “a” with a straight line over it.
6) Would a national character crisis be bad for America? I don’t know, but the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was pretty scary.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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