The Chic Chef

That’s essentially what you get at a fast food restaurant, right? A burger and fries. Let’s face it…a single slice of tomato isn’t anywhere close to the serving size of vegetables you should be eating; so I’ll just ignore that.

Considering the fact that I eat exclusively halal meat (sort of like Kosher, but for Muslims), I hadn’t had a burger in a while. So I decided to make a typical fast food meal atypically.

I got this ingenious idea at around 7:45pm (which, for me, is late to start cooking), so I decided to pass on making the burger fancy, and I decided to focus my attention on the potato.

I don’t know of very many ways of making potatoes. I could make fries or a baked potato, but those are pretty typical. Same goes for mashed potatoes. I love baking cupcakes, and I take advantage of any opportunity to use the decorating tips from the “Dessert Decorator Plus” kit one of my best friends got me. So I decided to make a twice-baked potato cupcake.

I wrapped a (fairly large) russet potato in foil and baked it in the oven (set to 400°F) for about an hour. After letting it cool a little, I cut the potato in half (not length-wise). Then I chopped off the rounded ends of each half so each piece could sit flat. Next, I carefully spooned out the ‘meat’ of the potato (pun intended) into a bowl, making sure to leave about a quarter inch of potato at the bottom of each piece so that the hollowed out skins looked like cupcake liners. Mixing in some salt, garlic powder, and chives, I mashed up the potato and scooped it into a plastic piping bag with a large round tip attached. I placed the potato-skin-cupcake-liners into a cupcake pan, piped the mashed potatoes into them, and baked the potato “cupcakes” for about 20 minutes (again, at 400°F). While the “cupcakes” cooled, I put about 5-6 tablespoons of sour cream into a piping bag with a star-tip attached, and I piped the sour cream onto the potato “cupcakes” as I would pipe frosting on normal cupcakes…liberally.

For the burger patties, I seasoned ground beef with spices I normally use when cooking Pakistani food: cayenne pepper, a little bit of cumin, a little garam masala (a blend of ground spices), and salt. I added chives, mixed it all up, and formed patties about 4 inches in diameter (they shrank when I grilled them because of the fat in the beef). I grilled the patties for about 3-4 minutes on each side with the grill on a medium-high heat setting.

I popped a patty on a bun and placed the burger and potato-cupcake on a plate and (after taking a picture, of course) happily devoured my atypical fast food meal. I’m not too hard to please, nor am I a food critic, but the beef patty was delectable. And the potato cupcake? Perfection.