Mini Beef Burgers

Mini beef burgers - go well in mini bread rolls

This is one way to make dinner without adding more heat to the kitchen in hot weather, and without having to fiddle around with the barbecue (if you saw our garden at the moment you'd know why I don't want to use the barbecue).

I set up my electric frying pan on a little table outside the back door, and cook sausages or beefburgers for dinner.

As Coby was saying in her blog, mince is useful for feeding several people with not very much money.

Today I was making mini burgers - I sometimes make them normal size and put them in a roll with onion and tomato - but making them smaller means they cook faster, and for some reason less meat goes further - maybe because they're 'cute' and 4 or 5 small burgers look more filling than one big one! We eat them with salad vegetables, bread rolls or sliced bread, and plenty of tomato and barbecue sauce.

There are lots of different ways to make these, but this is how I make mine:

500 g minced beef (good quality, and not the extra lean type or the burgers may be dry)
1 egg
1 good handful of fresh breadcrumbs (I grate frozen white bread)
A good sprinkling of herbs and spices eg. dried oregano, mixed moroccan spices, allspice
A generous squirt of barbecue sauce
salt and pepper

Squish the ingredients together with your hands, form into small patties - about 24, and fry in a little olive oil. (Leaving the patties in the fridge for half an hour or so before cooking them helps prevent them falling apart in the pan.)