Dinner Report: Burgers on the Grill; Heart Attack to Follow...

As if I'm not already a poster child for San Antonio's continual ascendancy to the top of the yearly "Fattest City" race, my wife decided that we had experienced enough restaurant dining this week and suggested I grill up some healthy homemade burgers for dinner. Yea. Healthy.

On our recent outing at Clear Springs, we picked up some of their special onion ring batter, so now, not only would we have some healthy burgers, we'd accompany them with some batter-fried onion rings. That's a vegetable, right?So, here we go. If you want to know the big secret, the onion rings are chilled in iced water for a while, then dipped in a mixture of eggs and creamer, then covered in the special dried batter mixture. Not enough? After that, a second dunk in the egg and cream and a second coating of the specially seasoned mix.Sure, they would probably be tasty after two good coatings, but we fried them in a healthy pan filled with oil.

For the burgers, I mixed the hamburger meat with some crumbled Ritz crackers, a sprinkling of sea salt with black pepper and then, once pressed into patties, I sprinkled some dried garlic on them. Yum.The burgers are cooked in the usual way on my grill, and other than the fact that they aren't perfectly round, I'm sure most of you cook your burgers the same way. They start out on one side... Then I flip them over and after some point in time, they are finished.But before I pull them, I have to load up the grill with the buns, slathered with a mixture of butter and honey mustard. Oh, and cheese on the burgers.Now, back to those onion rings. You know, you could probably just eat these and call it a day, right?But no burger in our house is complete unless we load up on some bacon. I know, you are probably calling the paramedics as I type this up, but it could be worse.I could add some mayonnaise, pickles, bbq sauces and more onion rings.

Clear!