"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Mum testing a homemade burger.

When we lived in Fore Street in Old Hatfield one of our lifes' mini-missions was to make decent burgers. Here is Mum testing one.

In those days we went rock climbing all the time and had to put up with Roy (my climbing partner) and his hopelessly blokey inability to cook.

Naturally this was much more of a problem for me than for mum because Roy drove me mad on purpose but was always very nice to mum (Can't think why, but wait a minute!). Roy's signature dish was beans on toast with chopped onion on top as a garnish. I never worked out if he could actually cook anything else because he was too busy annoying me with not being able to.

Once, while I was trying to teach Roy how to make an omelette in front of an audience of French students he announced that he had been a chef in a restaurant! Ok, that turned out to be a Chinese takeaway in Birmingham's Gravelly Hill. And it was only for a few weekends. But, surprised, I asked him what he cooked there so he proudly showed me how to prepare an onion by cutting it in half and then into quarters. That was it. I was confused.

But there were some occasions when I cooked and Roy was impressed enough to ask for the recipe. This usually turned out to be research into what to cook for the girl he had talked into visiting him in his London flat (airless basement bedsit - no frills - bare light bulb dangling from ceiling). I doubt they got as far as dinner but if they did Roy certainly didn't cook. It would have been "chicken tikka masala with extra garlic" at the local Indian restaurant, The Kwality Inn, Bayswater.

Hopefully that sets the scene for this burger recipe. I did this as a web page with the idea of just sending a link but of course Roy had completely exaggerated his ability to use the internet and probably never even saw it. A few years later I did another web recipe for him to impress his new girlfriend Nicky. That was for Cullen Skink. I doubt he saw that either but it's a good recipe so I'll post it soon.