the pragmatic chef™

Matt's "Everyman's Edible Sliders"

The start of the slider making is making the chili sauce. Diana recommends making a large batch and canning some. I wasn't up for that and consider it a near mortal sin to cook fresh vegetables, so I made a half-batch and served it fresh. I made some other un-authorized changes, as well (I don't take direction well, duh!). I only used about 1/8th of the sugar Diana put in, I doubled the garlic, I substituted red wine vinegar for the cider vinegar and instead of cayenne I used chipotle. I really prefer the smoky flavor of the chipotle to the raw heat of cayenne.

The tomato chopping is the best part. We have this Zyliss™ chopping thing where you just put the article to be chopped underneath it and then whack on the top until you have achieved satisfactory choppage. This recipe called for lots of whacking and chopping.

The next part of the recipe was mixing the meat. Since I'm a lazy bastard, I finished chopping all the fresh veggies and spices before doing the meat. This way I didn't feel guilty about not washing the cutting board between ingredients. To grind the herbs up really fine, I used my handy dandy Braun™ coffee bean grinder which really works in a pinch for fine chopping. Mmmmmmm, my kitchen started to smell really good!

The next step was the meat. Diana calls these Everyman's Sliders but the main ingredient is almost a pound of tenderloin. TENDERLOIN I tells ya! So I doubled it and got a pound and a half. Yummy! It looks like someone got ahead of himself though and started nibbling a little early. It's a damn shame to actually cook this meat if you ask me.

I gave it (begrudgingly) the bopper-chopper treatment and felt like I had committed a criminal act,then everything got mixed together and formed into nice little square patties and (begrudgingly) waved near the heat. Diana called for grilling but we had some mighty big thunder bumpers over head and I don't have one of those George Foreman thingies so I used the skillet. I really do think it was a crime to cook this meat so I seared it for as short a time as I could to make it look to evilwife like it had actually been cooked. After the meat, I did a quick deglasse on the onions and that was that.

Assembled, with fixin's and crumbled blue cheese:

Somehow or another eating these things only made me hungrier and we finished them all but one. Diana's recipe called for six and I made twelve. The kids sure wolfed theirs and now they're hitting the Fritos™ pretty hard.

They're all gone now but one. Where the hell is Major John when you need him?