Getting foodie on a Sunday evening

How was your weekend? As you could probably tell, our date night ROCKED! Heart was a fantastic concert and I couldn't have had better company. OhCountess and I shared one of those rare evenings spending a little time alone together. You see, time has become very scarce.

OhCountess is counting the days to graduation. She's got 19 day until graduation. W00T! W00T! Unfortunately, that means everything is due. We get what time we can from her right now and enjoy it as much as possible.

Last night, we had a family wedding to attend. Today, OhCountess has been working hard on finishing her last paper. HER LAST PAPER. To cap off our weekend, we spent the day letting mom write the paper and dad and the kids cleaned the house. Our reward at the end of the weekend was preparing a feast suitable for eating on a blanket in the living room while watching one of our new favorite movies, Bedtime Stories.

That movie is just hilarious. I've always been an Adam Sandler movie fan, never seeming to get sick of watching Billy Madison, but Bedtime Stories is one of the few movies we can watch with the kids. Explaining why Chris Farley is kissing a giant penguin or why a guy with a potty mouth just punched Bob Barker can be so hard.

I would like to warn the vegans, those that are offended by SPAM or people thinking all foodie posts should be fine dining. The rest of this post is not for you. We are about to make an old OhCaptain family recipe - Spam Burgers.

When I was a kid growing up, there was one dinner that my grandmother would make that made my brother and I go crazy. We begged her to make us them when ever we were visiting.

Both of my parents grew up in Spamtown, USA. It wasn't until later in life that I actually found out that some people just don't get spam. To us, it was the main ingredient in one of our favorite dinners.

During the getting serious phase of dating my wife, she at first told me she would never eat these little round slices of goodness. Of course I talked her into trying one (I used the "you made me eat squid" line - they told me calamari was onion rings. That one still hurts). Her love for me grew. After eating her first, she too became a fan.
There was a time when my mother-in-law and sister-in-law (she was 9 or 10 at the time) had come to live with us. OhCountess was working evenings and I decided to make my favorite childhood dinner. It's impossible to make a single serving of these, so a batch was made. I put 2 on a plate and brought them to our house guests. At first they said, "You're kidding, there's no way we are eating these."

I left the plate and told them to throw them away if they didn't want them but this was all I was making.

5 minutes later, my SIL returned the now empty plate and asked if I could make them some more. The rest is history.

You see, these aren't the prettiest things in the world and I'm quite sure they aren't health food but making them and eating them is always really easy. Here's the recipe:

• 1 can of Spam. We prefer the lite or low sodium varieties.
• 1 can of cream of mushroom soup. Again, the light or low sodium is preferred. There will be plenty of salt...trust me. Besides, it's not a true Minnesota recipe without cream of mush.
• 1 6-8oz (170-225 g) brick of medium ore sharp cheddar cheese.

That's it. To prepare them, preheat your oven to 350° (177° C). While the oven heats up, put the spam and the cheese through a meat grinder. This is mostly to just schmooyee them together.

Once everything is ground up, add a can of cream of mushroom soup to the meat and cheese and stir until well blended. Spread on burger buns (we prefer the cheap ones, fancy ones just don't get crispy...go figure)

Bake for 10 minutes or until the spread starts to get gooey.

This is both OhPrincess1 and OhPrincess2's favorite dinner, just like their dad's and their uncle's. We have yet to serve these to anyone that have tried them and really didn't like them. A couple of vegans looked at them and thought we were the devil incarnate, but I could have served them a slow cooked slab of prime rib and got the same response.

The best part of spam burgers is we can do them together. I operate the meat grinder and the kids are in charge of spreading the love.

You know what, I think this is the first post I've ever done in the "Food Porn" category. hehe. 

I leave you with the only Heart video I could find from the last 2 or 3 years. Just in case you didn't know who they were...