My Bone-Sucking, Bacony, Browned Onion, Butter Lettuce, Blue Cheese Burger

There are times in life when nothing but a burger will do. Do you know the feeling? When it comes over me, when I don't just crave but need a burger, there are only two acceptable possibilities: Hutch's, and making my own burger.

Tuesday night I needed a burger. But going out was not an option: there was tremendous anticipation in our house for the season premier of Glee. (Of course, that anticipation was 100% Elizabeth. I was in the bedroom watching Ervin Santana throw one of the most impressive games of his career.)

So I got the ingredients for burgers at Taylor's in Sierra Madre. I will give you the rundown:

I caramelized a Vidalia onion. Vidalia onions are already sweet enough to eat when raw - I have read that the water and sugar content of a Vidalia onion is comparable to that of an apple; it certainly tastes that way - and when caramelized they are as sweet as candy. I am not sure if there is a better, less expensive condiment to add to a burger that can change the whole complexity of it.

Taylor's has thick slices of Amish bacon: meaty, fatty slices that compare to packaged slices of Oscar Meyer bacon in only the slightest of ways. I cook them in a pan at a relatively low heat so as not to burn them. (The slices are so thick that at too high a temperature the outsides will blacken while some of the meat will remain raw and fatty.) After several minutes - if I don't screw up - the bacon will be dark brown and crispy.

I formed two hunks of ground beef into elongated patties.

Did I cook them in the bacon grease? Yes. Yes, I did.

Elizabeth and I both love Bone Sucking Sweet Hot Mustard (although to be fair there are only one or two mustards I have ever tried that I did not love) so we usually have a jar of it in the house. It's a combination of brown sugar, molasses, paprika and jalapenos.

I spread some of the mustard on a roll and topped it with a large amout of the caramelized onions. On the other half I placed the patty and topped it with the bacon and some gouda cheese. Yes, I wrote blue cheese in the post title. I lied. I was going for alliteration.

I was so excited to photograph and then eat the burger that I forgot to add lettuce. My better half had to point it out to me.

I had wanted to melt the cheese on the burger, but it wasn't melting as fast as I expected. So I was left with a choice: melt the cheese and overcook the meat, or just eat it unmelted. An easy choice.

I added the lettuce to half the burger and took a picture of it. This was the best burger I have had in a long, long time.