jalapeno cheddar stuffed burgers;

This recipe worked out great because I had pretty much everything in my fridge.  It actually worked out great, one of those clean-out-the-fridge recipes!  In general, though, I wouldn’t really call it that.  This recipe is adapted from Holly’s Jalapeno Cheddar Burgers recipe on Spend with Pennies.  Definitely tasty, though I had a few twists to the original.

Firstly, I ended up using vegetable cream cheese.  Now you only need regular cream cheese, but I think you could spruce this recipe up, or change out the center for something different!  A chive cream cheese with some roasted garlic would make a great stuffer, or you could swap out the cream cheese entirely for some bacon or onion jam.  Yum.  You can’t see it but I’m smacking my lips, ready for round two.

Another small swap that I made was one (large) shallot in place of the onion.  I’m not a huge shallot or onion snob one way or the other, but I do like shallots.  Normally I wouldn’t bother using a shallot in a burger mix like this because I don’t think you get the subtle difference in flavor.  But this shallot had been in my fridge for a bit, so I figured I’d use it up before it went bad.  I did use a few slices to top my burger as well, and I liked it much more than red onions–raw onions are usually far too potent for me.

This recipe also calls for salt and pepper for seasoning the meat.  Now you can go the normal route just adding in the two to your taste, but I made these with baked french fries and had some leftover seasoning from that recipe that I just tossed in instead of some arbitrary amount of salt and pepper.  I’ll post the fries recipe sometime soon–it’s killer! (UPDATE: fries recipe here!)  Not the same as your go-to fried fries, but a healthy baked alternative that’s still got some punch, for sure.  The trade-off is some time commitment to it though.  More on that later, though.

This would be a good recipe for company as well!  Make the jalapeno-cheese mixture ahead and cover in the fridge, pre-portion out the meat, and just slap them together right before guests arrive.  Actually, I guess you could also just form the patties beforehand and cover them up.  Let me know if anyone tries this!

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