Our dinner last night was about as American as they get. We made a trip to the grocery store to stock up while we had a rental car, and came home with a packet of ground buffalo meat. Now, I’ve never eaten buffalo before, despite growing up in the “wild west” of Colorado… I guess Dances with Wolves, a movie I loved as a child, traumatized me to the point where the thought of eating buffalo made me feel horribly guilty. But the meat they had at the store looked really beautifully fresh, and I know buffalo is high protein and low fat, so I tried not to think about all the sad flayed buffalo in the movie, and put the packet in the cart with some whole wheat burger buns and Kettle Chips.

I made up the burgers pretty simply, with a small minced onion, a healthy splash of Worcestershire sauce, kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, and 2 tablespoons of tomato paste. We had 1 1/3 lb of meat, and Jeremy shaped them into 4 perfect patties and grilled them to the perfect degree of doneness, tender and juicy. I like my red meat at least medium well done, but I am trying to allow myself some leniency with really high quality meat, or meats that will turn to shoe leather when cooked to that degree. So, with a Herculean effort, I managed not to examine the interior of my burger too closely for pinkness, and I actually really enjoyed it, even if it was too much food for me to finish (but that’s what Jeremy’s for, right?). With a side of honey dijon Kettle Chips (another first for me, as I don’t traditionally like mustard) and a bowl of Rainier cherries for dessert, we had the perfect meal over which to watch an nail-biting Yankees-Red Sox game.