Jalapeno Burgers

My family sometimes rightfully accuses me of trying to “sneak” healthy ingredients into our meals:

• Cy recently declared that a perfectly un-tampered-with batch of pancakes had something healthy in them…be it wheat germ, bran, banana, or oatmeal.  I joked that, “Sure, there’s vegetable puree in there!” and the kids nodded at each other and replied, “Probably!”

• I have had a few flops with additions to meatloaf and burgers, and I have vowed to never again add rice or quinoa to either one.

But something I did do with burgers was this:

I chopped up 1/4 green pepper; about 1/6 onion; and about 3″ chopped off the end of a zucchini (See?  I come by this reputation of sneaking in the healthy food honestly!) by pulsing it in my chopper-dicer-slicer tool.   Then, I added several sliced, pickled jalapenos, and pulsed it all again.

I dumped it into a bowl with three pounds of ground chuck and about 3/4 cup of shredded cheese, and made 8 man-sized burgers.

I’m not taking any chances! Years ago, I made some kind of fresh jalapeno something for a Super Bowl party and spent the entire game running my burning fingers under cool water. The burn did not go away until the next day, so gloves it is!

I like uniform burgers, so I usually weigh the meat before I made it into patties.

This post was originally published in September 2011. Updated in May 2021.