Leftover Burgers
So I have a question for you readers. What do you all do when you have a bunch of leftover burgers on hand. I hate to admit it but ours usually go into the fridge and then to the trash after sitting for over a week and being overlooked. If they get lucky and I happen to remember them in the frudge then sometimes before they go bad I will chop them up and give them to our dogs as a treat, but more times they go to the trash.
I had a bunch of already cooked burgers here tonight and was determined to actually use them rather than trash them. We used to have pizzaburgers pretty often when we lived back east years ago but I haven’t made them for us in a L-O-N-G time. Tonight when I found some leftover sauce and some fresh mozzarella in the fridge that needed to be used I decided to make all these things into our old favorite PizzaBurgers.
The next problem was how to re-heat and already cooked burger without drying it out. Microwaving it surely would dry it, same with heating it in a pan on the stove. Enter the rice cooker and its steamer insert. I put 3 burgers in the top of the steamer and a cup of water in the bottom, covered the cooker and hit the button. Rather than wait for the timer to go off I check the heating progress after about 5 minutes, they were still a little cool in the center so I let them go another 5 minutes and they were perfectly hot, they were also still not dried out in the center.
I put a small pan that would hold all three burgers in it on the stove and poured some of the tomato sauce into it, when it started simmering I put the three burgers in the pan too. I spooned some of the sauce over the burgers and then put some mozzarella on top, covered the pan and turned the flame very low and let them cook for a few minutes until the cheese was nice and melted. Hubby was happy when he saw what I had made for dinner and he didn’t realize that he was eating leftover burgers until I told him when he was finished dinner, he agreed that the burgers were not in the least dried out and the pizza burgers brought back lots of great memories too. I think the dogs will be upset when they don’t get the leftover burgers anymore. I also think that steaming is definitely the way to re-heat them even tho it is an extra step instead of trying to heat them on top of the stove in a pan.
