Grilling Burgers

We are cattle farmers and we raise our own beef for meat. So we through out the year we eat a lot of been and a good amount of it is in the form of hamburgers. During planting season and harvest season we eat a lot of burgers cause they are easy to make and take to the field.

Usually these burgers are pan fired. I'm pretty sure Caleb never gets sick of a pan fried burger, but I sure do. If I have the time to do I will usually fire up the grill and cook them on there instead cause they are soo much better when they are cooked on a grill.

I know there are some people out there who won't cook on anything but charcoal, well I'm not one of them. When it comes to grilling I use a gas grill. It's nothing fancy. Just one we got at Wal-Mart a few years ago.  I'm not against charcoal, in fact I love burgers cooked on charcoal, I just don't have the patience or usually the time to mess with it. Our neighbor Mr. Lyle makes the best burgers in the world and he uses charcoal...seeing how I will never be able to make burgers that good I don't even bother trying. lol

Now another fellow Kansas Cattle Woman, Debbie over at "Life On a Kansas Cattle Ranch", did a blog post about grilling burgers and I encourage you to check out her blog she does a really GREAT job talking about the ins and outs of grilling burgers.




















The size of group you are feeding will determine how much burger you need.  We have our meat packaged in 1 lb packages and I like making 1/3 lb burgers...

1/2 lb is too big

1/4 lb is too small

1/3 lb is just right!

I try and make the burgers as flat as I can across, cause I think they cook better this way.

Also I don't add anything to the patties when I'm making them. I will wait till I'm about ready to take them off the grill and then I will sprinkle some seasoning salt on them then.



















While you are making the patties it's best to have the grill already started and heated up cause you will want to put the patties on a hot, clean grill.

Once they are on there, they usually don't take to long to cook so you will want to stay close by. You will want the inside temperature to be 160 degrees, for the burger to be fully cooked.

Now one of  the major reasons I prefer grilled burgers to pan fried is they aren't greasy. All the grease and fat in the burger will cook away as you grill the burgers leaving you with a deliciously juicy burger.



















Once your burgers are cooked it's now time to enjoy them and top them with whatever sounds good to you. Hope ya get a chance to support a local cattle rancher and grill some hamburgers.

Enjoy,
Janet

Let the Planting Begin!!

It's that time of year again it's Christmas...

Wait, it's not Christmas, it's spring time...

Crazy woman!

Oh, did I saw Christmas, what I really meant to say was corn planting time. The red tractor and green planter confused me with Christmas.

And to be honest I am pretty sure Caleb is more excited about about planting corn than he ever is about anything I ever get him for Christmas. I guess I should start buying him seed corn for a present...lol

Anyways, it's true we have started planting corn. Our ground finally got dry enough to plant last Saturday afternoon, so let the madness begin!

They were calling for rain possibly on Tuesday morning, so bright and early Monday morning we thought we had better get started.

So all hands on deck when we start going...

Even the smallest hands on the farm had to do their part...

But their part was to sleep in the car seat while momma worked some ground.

Caleb and I got up at around 5:15 yesterday morning and headed out to the field.  I fed and changed Stinker before leaving the house and then put him in his car seat and away we went. He fell strait back to sleep and slept till just before we got relieved from our position.

He thought riding in the tractor was pretty cool. After our hired man took over for use we went and crawled into the planter tractor with Caleb and rode with him for a while. Chester thought it was pretty cool, but didn't like the fact that he couldn't touch any of the buttons or the steering wheel (auto-steer isn't as cool to little kids as it is to us big kids).

When we start going it's all hands on deck and it go like crazy time. This field isn't all that big, but we got 3 tractors running in it at one time.

Tractor 1 is field cultivating...or he's tilling all the weeds under.

Tractor 2 is smoothing everything back out so we can have a nice seed bed to plant in.

Tractor 3 is Caleb and he is planting. He really doesn't like to share the planter with anyone. He's kind of a planter hog..lol

Here's little man and I when we were taking dinner (aka Lunch) to Caleb in the field.

If I look tired, well that's because I am! 5 am came early and I only got to have a little bit of coffee.

My job most of the day was to run around like a chicken with it's head cut off...aka be the gopher (or go-for) person.

One of the things I had to do was go to the John Deere dealership and pick up some parts. One of them was this little rubber strap that holds the seed box lid on. I'm pretty sure the guy helping me had never seen a planter, cause I had to show him in his picture what this was, and I need to get another part for the planter and he had no clue what I was talking about and even when I gave him the phone to talk to Caleb about the part it took awhile to get him lined out with what we were needing. Oh well at least we were able to get the parts we needed and get going. There was another lady there fetching parts for her husband and John Deere had it all messed up and their big planting tractor was down so they couldn't go, so it could have been much worse than a dumb service guy.

We were able to go all day and we made it over a lot of acres, which was GREAT!

We had the alarm set to get up and do it all again this morning, and at 4:50 am Chester wakes up and fusses a little, so I go in and put his pacifier in and that's when I hear some rain coming down. It wasn't enough to keep us from getting up to go so Caleb heads up and gets the planter ready to go and I stay and sleep another 30 minutes then I got up and got Chester ready to go and then it started to rain again and this time it was enough to keep us out of the field. So I took Chester back in and put him in back in bed. That's how it goes sometimes...lol

We really didn't get all that much rain so hopefully we will be able to go again here after while if we don't get anymore!

Later,

JP