Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Now I'm hungry. Very hungry. And it's quarter to four in the morning!

One day I will go to America and try the HFCS-sweetened Coke. The trouble is, I'll know what it is and expect it to taste strange. Hmm. Might have to think of another plan there. (Lifelong drinker of English Coke).

Although that said, I did think when I was in Sweden that their Coke tasted different. I'm pretty sure the formula is slightly different everywhere.

(Swedish Fanta sure is different - so many flavours! So many!)

This works nicely - I've done it. A BBC programme "The Good Cook" covered this a few weeks ago, and it was more or less the same recipe. The main difference was that he just said an overnight marinade in the fridge, and he used ready-made tandoori seasoning mix instead of making up the spices himself.

Oh and then he cooked it under the grill (broiler, I think it's called in America) in the kitchen, having first allowed it to preheat to its fiercest temperature. I tried it with mine and it worked great, with the grill pan as close to the elements as you can get it without losing the clearance required to fit the chicken in. He also mentioned that it works nicely on a BBQ though (which is what you call a grill. I find this confusing).

It's actually really good to see pretty much the same treatment elsewhere - more people should know about this because it's completely delicious. I made naan to go with mine (very similarly to Kenji's recent naan recipe) and munched through an indecent amount of chicken, naan and a nice cooling cucumber/mint salad.

Hey at least the soybean meal means they're wasting less beef in these things!

We have them in the UK too, along with chicken sandwiches and other such misguided microwaveable monstrosities. I once watched someone eat one, but the smell put me off my own lunch.

I had planned to submit a submission for this, but then I forgot, so if nobody minds I'll talk about the awesome burger I made during May (and enjoyed too much to photograph):

I will admit at the outset that I have not yet got into grinding my own meat. Please don't kill me. I'll do it one day, especially once I've figured out what the British names for all these cuts of beef people grind into their burgers are so I can talk to my butcher. Then again, maybe the butcher knows what the American names are. I should find out. And get a meat grinder.

But I digress from the main subject: burgers!

During May I made a few burger-centric meals. The most archetypal being Perfectly Ordinary Cheeseburgers.

It goes like this, with apologies for teaching Grandma to suck eggs: get some rolls. For this one, I made them myself, sometimes I just go buy some.

Get some meat. I got freshly ground beef steak mince from the shop. Must get a meat grinder one day.

Make 1/8th of a pound balls of meat.

Get big heavy-based frying pan. Make frying pan hot. Really very hot indeed.

Put meat in pan, smash it down into patties. Season with salt and pepper, flip, season again, keep flipping for even cookedness. Maybe turn the heat down once the nice outside crust has formed, especially if going for a high level of doneness (this is shop-bought mince, after all).

As it approaches done, take thin slices of cheese and lay onto the top of the patties. Allow to melt. Which cheese? I used Lincolnshire Poacher, it's a Cheddar-style cheese made fairly locally to me, with a nice pungent flavour and a good meltingness factor. Stands up well to strong beefy flavour.

Pause. Travel back in time a little way and thinly slice an onion. Put it in a small pan with a little olive oil and salt, and cook low and slow until soft and sweet.

Return to the present. Put the burgers to rest, deglaze the frying pan with some balsamic vinegar, then add to the onions. Some sugar and pepper, then reduce to stickiness.

Popping back in time again, split the buns and lightly toast them.

In the present, smear some good tomato ketchup (you don't need much if it's the really good stuff) on the bottom bun, place patties on top (I use two per burger, cheese side up), top with the balsamic sticky onions and the top of the bun, then eat them.

Remember at all times to defend burgers from the attentions of the cat, who thinks they smell better than cat food does (and is in fact perfectly correct about that).

So no surprises there really.

The other burger I want to mention is pork and apple. It goes like this:

Obtain buns. Obtain minced pork. Obtain a medium white onion. Obtain an eating apple, or the equivalent amount of a cooking apple (such as Bramley, which tend to be huge) if you want a sharper flavour.

Finely chop the onion, and put in a pan over a low heat. Add oil and salt.

Grate the apple, or if you feel like I sometimes do, cut the apple into really tiny little cubes with a very sharp knife. It's theraputic!

Add the apple to the onions.

Liven it up with some Worcestershire sauce, then cook until softened.

Put in a mixing bowl and allow to cool to a handleable temperature.

Combine with the pork mince, then split the mix and shape into patties. I go for thin ones, I don't do rare minced pork, and thin ones are a lot easier to cook through without drying them out.

Cook the patties. Less heat in the pan than for beef, usually.

Serve on a toasted bun, maybe with a bit of watercress and/or rocket/arugula, and watch out for the cat sneaking in from the side.

Oh as for bought rolls, things like Martin's Potato Rolls don't appear to exist in my part of the UK (if anywhere here), so I either make them (sometimes I even use a potato-including dough), or buy some. Those sold as 'burger buns' here are usually awful things, dry and bland and kind of horribly sweet on the edges of the mouth, with boring sesame seeds on the top. My favourite choice are things called 'oven-bottom muffins'. I have no idea what they really are, but they're pillowy, light and remarkably resilient to burger juice after a light toasting. Even better, they don't taste horrible! From various packages, I get the impression they're a northern English thing, as they're often said to be 'Lancashire oven-bottom muffins'. They are not at all like English breakfast muffins, or American muffins which belong to the cake family.

I love the idea of the griddled jalapeños. That Burger looks mighty tasty. Now, how to solve the problem of being on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

Sometimes, even those of us who love beef burgers have to feed vegetarians, or people who don't eat red meat, or some other such inconvenience. Sometimes, I actually want to eat a lamb burger, because they're extremely delicious.

So, I don't have a problem with non-beef burger coverage, because variety is the spice of life.

They're called fries because they are fries! I think here in the UK a lot of people understand a distinction between British-style chips and US-style fries, where fries are long and thin and crisp on the outside, while chips are a lot chunkier, generally shorter and may be anything from crisp on the outside to quite soft and squidgy (especially chips obtained from a chip shop that have been wrapped up in paper, steaming in their own steam, while you take them home). So I do appreciate McDonald's calling their fries fries, so we know exactly what kind of fried potato product we're getting.

I wish they wouldn't put as much salt on them though.

Well...

Aeros aren't necessarily mint or caramel - they do a normal just-chocolate one as well. At one point you could get orange ones, with a lurid orange centre (even more lurid than the vivid green in the mint one), but I've not seen one of those for years. They're very nice though - but inferior in my opinion to the Wispa, which is a recently-revived much-missed classic. Something about the texture, even though it's just ordinary Dairy Milk chocolate.

Flakes are superior to Ripples, not due to anything to do with the coating of chocolate but because Cadbury make better milk chocolate than Galaxy do. Galaxy is okay, but it's a bit too insistent on being smooth and creamy in my mind. If you really want the coating, do as cyberroo says and get a Flake - you get two fingers of what's effectively a more regularly-shaped Flake coated in chocolate, and it's delicious, although not as delicious as the seldom-seen and probably-discontinued Spira.

Actually it's amazing how the shape of chocolate affects the taste and feel in your mouth. Wispas and Aeros, by the way, are much better straight out of the fridge due to the textural shift that causes.

Maltesers are perfect in every way. White Maltesers are an abomination. There is no way in the world that M&Ms can possibly be better than Minstrels, but Maltesers are better than both of them anyway so why bother?

Well, unless they've run out of Maltesers, in which case you should buy Smarties, which are also superior to M&Ms. Or chocolate-coated raisins.

Do I come across as prejudiced against M&Ms? Good, because I am. They're okay, but they're the wrong shape.

@plazmaorb maybe she just didn't go anywhere decent in Italy - I assume that despite the rumours, not everywhere there serves amazing food.

It certainly looks delicious... I'm going to have to try something like this, with ordinary milk and three kinds of chocolate chip probably (I always like to have dark, milk and white chips in things like this).

Black onion seeds/nigella seeds are a big favourite of mine, with a mild sort of unassuming onionyness. They go extremely well alongside cumin, another essential in my cupboard.

So my list looks something like:

Coriander seeds
Cumin seeds
Chilli pepper flakes
Whole dried chillis
Black peppercorns
Szechuan pink peppercorns
Cinnamon (ground)
Ginger (ground)
Turmeric (ground)
Green cardamom (whole)

And, of course, salt, fresh garlic and all the other essential flavours, as well as a load of herbs - fresh from the garden at the right time of year, or dried if necessary (I get through utterly ridiculous amounts of sage).

What a ridiculous set of challenges. There's no way they'd be able to succeed in Chinatown without having learned Chinese food, and the speed challenge just sounds utterly pointless. Must do better.