Grilled Burgers Stuffed with Feta, Thyme, Garlic, and Sundried Tomatoes

Stuffing Burgers with Goodness

The other day we had Josh’s family over for dinner, and decided to make hamburgers. If you know me at all, you know that I can’t do anything typical. Grilled burgers just sounded so…. boring. So I started thinking.

Let’s stuff the burgers with some feta! Yum.

Hmmmm… let’s stuff them with feta and garlic! Yum!

Hmmmm… let’s stuff them with feta, garlic, and thyme! Even better.

Ooooh! What about feta, garlic, thyme, and sundried tomatoes!

(Just letting you get a glimpse of a genius mind at work.) Haha!

A trip to Central Market (one of our favorite places to be) resulted in us stocking up on goodies at the antipasto bar (along with other essential ingredients for our meal). Fresh feta went into the cart, and of course I couldn’t decide between the roasted tomatoes or the sundried tomatoes – so we got a little portion of both.

The first thing was to make the filling. I chopped up a generous portion of garlic (every time I use garlic, it always involves a generous portion. Skimpy garlic users are terrible cooks in my opinion.), some fresh thyme from our garden, and the beautiful roasted and sundried tomatoes.

Garlic, Sundried Tomatoes and Fresh Thyme

I mixed all this deliciousness in with some fresh feta. Side note: blocks of feta from an antipasto bar tend to have a different flavor and texture than the crumbled feta that is packaged. When I have the opportunity to get the fresh, I go for it. There’s something about crumbling up a hunk of cheese and straining it from its juices that just feels more authentic. The flavor is creamier, more subtle, and the texture is moister. It’s wonderful.

With that being said, I mixed up all the ingredients together, added some fresh ground salt and pepper, and started flattening hamburger. I made the burgers about half the thickness that I normally would, so they would sandwich together well.

Next Step in Stuffing Burgers

After spooning some of the filling onto the bottom layer, and spreading out a generous layer of filling almost to the edges, I added the second layer of meat onto it.

Getting Hungry Yet?

Then I pressed the edges together so everything was tucked in neatly, and they were ready to grill!

Almost Ready!

The rest was cake. Grilled up the burgers, and threw some corn on (the new favorite of browned grilled corn with lime and salt – can’t seem to get enough of it!), and we’re just about ready for dinner. Of course, as everyone knows, the best thing to go with cheese is more cheese. Even though these amazing burgers were stuffed with feta, they needed some melted cheese on top. I chose havarti for its mild flavor and creamy texture – I thought it wouldn’t fight with the feta. It tasted amazing.

Stuffed Burgers with Melting Havarti and Grilled Corn

Platter of Stuffed Cheeseburgers and Onion Kaiser Rolls

Burgers like this call for toppings a little different than ketchup and mustard… I dug out some yummy things from our fridge and found that some artichoke tomato bruschetta and artichoke spinach jalapeño dip made amazing spreads for this. Top it off with some fresh tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers, and you’re ready to go!

Even Josh’s 9-year-old sister loved it. She took a bite and said in a surprised voice, “Wow, this is really good!”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Were you not sure it would be? There’s some kind of funky stuff in there, isn’t there?”

She nodded and took another bite. “Yeah… but it’s good!”

Yum.

Tags: Grilling, Veggies

This entry was posted on September 18th, 2008 and is filed under Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.