This is the best "recipe" I have ever had for burgers, but I quite often will just wing it and toss in Worcestershire, ketchup, Montreal seasoning (they make one specifically for Hamburgers too) or whatever. Hamburgers Copyright, Ina Garten, All rights reserved Recipe Summary Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 10 minutes Yield: 10 to 12 hamburgers 2 pounds ground chuck 1 pound ground sirloin 3 tablespoons steak sauce (recommended: Crosse & Blackwell) 6 extra-large egg yolks 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter 12 hamburger buns Carefully mix the meats, steak sauce, egg yolks, salt, and pepper with the tines of a fork, but do not mash it. Lightly form each hamburger and lightly press into a patty shape. Make an indentation and put a thin slice of butter inside each hamburger, making sure the butter is entirely encased in the meat. Heat a grill, broiler, or saute pan and cook the hamburgers for 3 to 5 minutes on each side until almost done. Remove to a plate and cover with aluminum foil. Allow the hamburgers to rest for 5 minutes and serve immediately on buns.

I like my bread toasted most of the time. I think it improves a sandwich and it's fine by itself too. Makes a nice alternative to a bun for a burger. What goes on it depends on what's it for. Sometimes plain old buttered (not margarine) toast. Sometimes peanut butter, honey, jelly, cinnamon sugar or a combination of some. That's usually good for breakfast. For a sandwich I'll often top with ranch dressing or Miracle Whip, sometimes some steak sauce, ketchup or BBQ sauce dependin on what is in it.. If it's going with pasta, some garlic, Italian Seasoning and black pepper, sometimes some parmesan or mozzarella.

I used to go with very lean red meat but of course they ended up without good "burger" flavor. There is a reason "greasy spoons" were so well known for their great burgers - the fat is the flavor. A friend used to tell me that if I bought a burger and it didn't leave a greasy mark on the paper bag, it wasn't any good *LOL* I buy fatty hamburger and add some raw cooking oatmeal and an egg to actually hold the fat inside and to keep it together as it cooks. It's incredibly bad for you but it's also incredibly delicious. We love elk burgers - the elk in this area eat stuff which makes the meat wonderful, better than moo meat - we also have animal fat added when having it ground up for us as elk and most venison I know if is *extremely* dry. This ground elk meat is so good that we don't even bother having the elk meat cut up into anything other than the groud meat anymore - everything else really is too lean and to cook it to tender is to leave it too raw for us. Turkey burgers are just ok and much healthier but I have made ground chicken and couldn't stand the flavor.

In a way, yes, in other ways, about the same. Financially, about the same. I have a happy marriage with a great DH and we've had quite a few fun adventures together. My parents had a very happy marriage, albeit with less adventure, just way too short. They never had a mortgage on their home and always bough cars with cash. Dad was what I would call a "gentleman farmer" in the sense that he ran the farm and other ancillary operations from an office and Mom, with a fine college education, was a stay at home Mom until Dad died far too young, at 52, leaving Mom a widow at 44. While Mom would have preferred graduate school, instead she stepped in and ran the farm and excelled. She was the first woman on a number of agriculturally related boards and not just local small time ones either. While she enjoyed the challenge, especially in a male dominated world, and loved our small farming town, I also think she was trapped by the circumstances. Her plan was for my brother to take over the farm completely after 8-10 years at which time she planned on going back to graduate school, but my brother never got around to taking over the operations (I don't know any other way to put it, he's smart and knows the land well and will work hard on something that interests him, but he never developed the stick-to-it day to day work ethic). While this was going on, I went to law school and then got my LLM. Mom ran the farm until her seventies, but by that time we rented out all our land. Unfortunately about 8 years ago the farm started going down hill financially, most income was going to debt service, and at the same time Mom was developing AMD. Our banker and accountant realized that that something needed to be done to save the farm and came to me and suggested that we move to professional management. Mom saw that this was the right move, but my brother was resistant although eventually went along with it without a family fallout. That was a tense time, but he liked the bank management/manager and was not cut out of some control especially with marketing the crops, which is his forte,and now agrees that it was a good decision, actually I think it was a relief. We also sold off about 30% of the land, which was enough to retire all debt and pay the capital gains (basis was from the 1930s, so ridiculously low), with a bit to spare. The farm, though smaller, is doing very well, throwing off nice income to the three of us, while retaining a contingency fund, so all is well, and it's still a nice legacy even after selling a bit of the land, it is now a bit over 5000 acres total, cropland and timber. DH and I are both professionals and have had fairly successful careers. I am a lawyer, a partner in a great law firm, and DH is a dentist, who sold his practice when we recently moved. We are both scaling back. I am staying with my firm, working remotely, with regular trips back to the office for a couple of weeks every few months as the need arises. DH lucked into a two day a week job as an independent contractor with a good dental practice in our new location. We will probably continue to work along these lines for another 2-4 years. We have a wonderful, responsible daughter and son-in-law and a precious grandson. I think we will be better off than Mom in our later years, not so much financially because she is in great shape (she also had some money of her own and was a good investor), but because we planned ahead. She had planned to stay in her large house in the small town for the rest of her life. However that became impossible for her to manage. She moved to independent living in the city where I worked last year and now she moved to Colorado with us, living at a wonderful independent living center less than 5 minutes from us and I can go see her everyday. She seems content and loves having me so nearby, but it is hard to move to a new state and town at 86. We built our retirement house, actually a duplex, at 62 with (for) our DD and SIL, near all essential services and making it easy to maintain. As we age it will be easy for our DD to check on us as necessary, just pop over for five minutes and then go back to her regularly scheduled life. But, for now, DD also has a built in babysitter much of the time. If at anytime as we age we need more help than I am willing to ask from our DD, we can easily hire a caregiver for far less than Mom's place costs on a monthly basis and still stay at home (at least if our health is as good as Mom's is right now).