I think I speak for everyone when I say I overindulged for the whole month of December… So with the new year I’m looking for healthier alternatives to some of my favourites! I can’t avoid carbs completely, I love them too much so I have made homemade fries to go with these burgers. You could have the burgers on their own or have sweet potato wedges which are pretty much the same prep.

I got a new burger press for Christmas so I decided to test it out, and it’s great, all the burgers were the same size and thickness which allowed for even cooking. My burgers were slightly thinner than average, meanwhile Greg had monster ones! The recipe below gave us about 4 thinner burgers and 4 large ones. If you’re just having large you’d probably get 6 burgers from the below.

Trying to be healthy we ate these without buns and they were really good! A little tip, if you want to add cheese and have this melt on the burger, when your cooking the burger add the cheese to the top and cover with a bowl for about 20-30 seconds, the heat in the bowl will let the cheese melt.

Burgers

Ingredients

• 500g steak mince, nothing too lean at least 8% fat. I have a meat grinder which I use to make mince – if you don’t have this 500g of beef mince at 10% fat is perfect
• 1/2 onion, sliced very finely
• 12 Jacob’s cream crackers, finely ground
• 1 large free range egg
• 1 heaped tbsp Dijon mustard
• 5-6 dashes of Worcestershire sauce
• 3-4 dashes of soy sauce
• 1 tsp parsley
• pinch of sea salt
• freshly ground pepper

Directions

1. Heat a griddle pan on a medium-high heat and spray with fry-light. If you don’t have a griddle pan, a normal frying pan is fine.
2. Mince the steak and combine all of the ingredients in a bowl. Once combined create burgers of your preferred size and place on the griddle pan.
3. Cook for 3-4 minutes on each side.

Chips

Ingredients

• 3 Maris piper potatoes, washed and peeled

Directions

1. Cut the potatoes into chip shapes. Pre-heat your oven to 180-200C Fan.
2. Boil the cut potatoes for about 5-10 minutes just to soften them up.
3. Take an oven dish and spray with fry-light (I’m trying to avoid lots of oil here!) and then place the chips on here. Spray some more onto the chips and a little bit of salt. Place these into the oven for about 15-20 minutes, until they are golden on the outside and soft on the inside. Halfway through cooking, move the chips and turn them over to allow for even cooking. I’d just keep an eye on them as they can easily burn.

This has gone down well, Greg has had it two nights in a row. It’s a good alternative to an unhealthy takeaway on the weekend!