One Hell of a Burger

With spring nearing, and a trip to the beach over Memorial Day weekend, we've decided it's time to whip ourselves into shape.  We both packed on a couple pounds over the winter, so we decided to take action!  I'm a newbie to the whole Paleo diet, and if you're not familiar, here's a simple overview of what you can/can't eat:

courtesy of dearpaleo.com

We already eat pretty well, so it shouldn't be too hard to transition to a slightly stricter Paleo diet.  We're allowing ourselves 1 cheat day a week.  This should help fuel my love of carbs.  

We had already planned on making burgers tonight, so to make it more Paleo friendly, we skipped the bun, and just placed the patty on a bed of bibb lettuce.  When trying to decide what kind of burgers we wanted to make, I thought of one of my favorite burgers in DC...Ray's Hellburger.  Sadly, the place has shuttered, but you can still try their burgers at Ray's to the Third.  Anyway...I'd always get their burger with roasted garlic, and grilled onions and peppers.  So this is an ode to Ray's Hellburger.

We started by roasting a few cloves of garlic...with a drizzle of olive oil, and sprinkle of salt and pepper, just wrap them up in foil and pop 'em in the oven.  An while the garlic roasted up, we also cooked up some sweet potato fries.  The fries got a brushing of olive oil, and a sprinkle of truffle salt, pepper, garlic and parsley.

While the garlic roasted and the fries cooked up, I got to work on the burger patties.  I chopped up a couple cloves of garlic, an mixed that with the ground beef, some truffle salt, pepper, and Italian seasoning.  We kept it really simple.

Since we had some peppers, onions, and mushrooms left over from last week's steak sandwiches, we warmed those up to top our burgers.  They were simply seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper.

As the components cooked up, we started to build the burger.  The burger went on top of the lettuce, we spread the roasted garlic on the burger, and then topped it with our peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

The crowning jewel was the fried egg on top!

The yolk was nice and runny, and since we held off on condiments, it provided a nice "sauce" for everything. An honestly, I didn't miss the bun.  This whole Paleo thing may not be so bad afterall.