Post Wedding Burgers

Meh. I said (or rather, typed - on Facebook) that I wasn't going to write today, but I changed my mind. I have been doing too much of nothing (or would that be too little of anything) lately. So, while my children are occupied by their hour of "screen time", i.e. the grand old dame of electronic babysitters, television, I shall quickly post something new.

In my last post, I mentioned what a crazy whirlwind my life has been the past couple of weeks and last weekend was kind of the pinnacle of wonderful chaos for me. I graduated from culinary school last Thursday and then my children acted as flower-girls in the wedding of a very dear friend of mine, so we had wedding-related activities Friday and Saturday as well. After the wedding ceremony itself on Saturday, we headed to downtown Austin for the reception at a fairly swanky hotel. We ate dinner, drank ourselves (read: mostly my husband) silly at the open bar and ended up, after cake and dancing, in the lobby bar around 10 pm. After having another round of drinks with which we toasted the bride and groom again, a group of us decided to hit the entertainment district in search of.....a hamburger. Yep, you read that right. In our defense, it was purported to be one of the city's best: a 3/4 pound hamburger with all the trimmings at an Austin bar called Casino El Camino.

So, there were six of us, three of which have been friends since we were children plus our respective spouses/significant others, and between us, we ordered five of these mammoth burgers. (Now, I say "mammoth", but it was a bar and it was REALLY dark, so I had to rely upon my sense of smell, taste and touch, rather than my eyesight in these circumstances. Really - the only light came from the street outside, the scattered neon on the walls and the TV over the bar which was unfortunately playing the last half of the movie, "Deliverance". Good times.) In any case and, hopefully, needless to say, I was not really hungry, especially since I had already eaten a full meal only a couple of hours before, but I decided I could handle the burger on my own. (One of my friends did the intelligent thing and split a burger with her husband.)

I have to say, right here and now, that I am no burger connoisseur, so if you are, please do not be offended by the next part of my post. The burger at Casino El Camino was good. It was good and it was huge, so if you are starving and in desperate need of a hamburger, this sucker is for you. It smelled amazing - full of grilled, ground beefy goodness, punctuated by the pungency of raw onions, the sweet earthy tomato slices and the toasted-yeasty scent of the bun. It tasted pretty good, too - hot, rich, juicy, savory meat with the light acid of the tomatoes, fresh crisp of the lettuce and sharp bite of the onions. I ate half of the hamburger completely naked - mostly because I couldn't make out more than a vague hamburger shaped blob sitting in a basket in front of me and also because our somewhat grouchy waitress didn't offer any condiments. The french fries were also fairly tasty - just hot and crisp enough and with only a light dusting of salt. I wanted to finish the second half. Honestly I did, but I figured that if I continued to cram food into my already full stomach, I would not be happy with the results. So, I offered the second half to my equally full husband who was more than pleased to help finish my meal. Like I said, I am no burger expert, but I was not completely blown away by the burger at Casino El Camino. It was good, but fell a little short of great. Blame it on my own slight intoxication, the late hour, the level of food fatigue I was already feeling - what have you - but I probably won't be making a trip back to Casino El Camino for the burger. Now the Bloody Mary, on the other hand.....well, we may just have to see about that.