Not too long ago someone said to me, “Reba, why do you keep posting recipes that take so dang long to cook?” Well, that’s cuz some of the cheapest, healthiest foods take a long dang time to cook! Like beans! Yep, my old favorite beans. 

 

But don’t get me wrong, I want to satisfy my audience, so here’s something you can pull right out of the freezer and have ready to gobble in 12 minutes, messing up only one dish and a knife and yur out the door!

 

Ever time I hear Philly cheese steak, I always get my juices flowin’ for some cream cheese. But there idn’t no cream cheese in a Philly cheese steak. For us Southerners, Philly is more liken to the cream cheese than the city. So this here burger is gonna satisfy that longin you get for cream cheese when you hear the word Philly. 

 

I know what yur thinkin’, “Cream cheese on a burger???” Yep, and it’s good. If you like mayo on yur burger, you’ll like cream cheese even better.  Now my recipe calls for a veggie burger patty cuz I’m all about healthy stuff, but if you have to have red meat, go ahead and do yur dirty deed and make ya up a quarter-pound patty from lean ground beef. 

 

– One bell pepper

– One small onion

– Salt, pepper, garlic powder

– ½ tsp. olive oil

– Whole wheat bun

– Veggie burger 

– Cream cheese

– A-1 Steak Sauce (optional)

 

Now here’s how it goes down. They only sell hamburger buns for families, ya see, not for singles, so as soon as you get home from the store, put those buns in the freezer. They’ll stay good for a couple of months and whenever you want to use one, you just pull it out and do like I’m about to tell ya.

 

Remove from the freezer one veggie burger and one whole wheat bun (don’t you use that white bread crap!). Spray a large skillet all over with cooking spray and put it on a burner cranked up to medium. Place yur frozen veggie burger in the skillet and yur just gonna leave it there for about 8 to 10 minutes, but ever coupla minutes, flip it over. 

 

Now get yur onion and pepper and cut you up some thin slices of both. If it were me, I’d use about a third of each of the veggies and then I’d put the rest of the seeded pepper in a ziplock baggie in the freezer (cuz I don’t use green pepper all that much, so I want it to stay good for the next time I make this recipe) and I’d put the onion in a baggie in the fridge (cuz I use onions a lot more). Throw those sliced veggies in the skillet with that “meat” patty and drizzle that ½ tsp of olive oil over the onions and peppers. (You can use canola oil if you don’t have olive – but if you don’t have either of those oils, what the heck kind of oil do you have? You need to go get yurself some olive or canola oil!) Sprinkle as much salt, pepper and garlic powder as you think you can stomach on those veggies. Whoa! Easy on the garlic powder, that’s stuff’s gonna be with ya all day!

 

The onions and peppers are gonna need about 8 minutes to soften up and just like that veggie burger, you oughta be flippin and stirrin those veggies. Round about two minutes before that veggie burger is finished cookin’, lay yur hamburger bun in the skillet outside down first. Flip it after one minute. Even if it was frozen when you put it in there, this’ll warm it right up.

 

Ok, time to put it all together. Get yur cream cheese out – and I have to say here that even though I’m big on healthy cookin’, I love to use the full-fat cream cheese. That Nuftushell or whatever the heck it is just don’t cut it for me. Put one once of cream cheese on the bottom bun. If you bought a small package of cream cheese, that’ll be one-forth of the package. If you bought an 8-once package, that’ll be one-eight of the package (Lord, girls, do the math!). Then put yur veggie burger on toppa that and pile them onions and peppers and on toppa that. Then slather it with some steak sauce if yur feelin adventuresome. That’s it – start eatin’, whatcha waitin’ for? Oh, you need a side? Why don’t ya throw some carrot sticks or something colorful like that on the plate? If you have to have fries with yur burger, take one potato, wash it real good, cut it into thin slices and throw it another smaller skillet with ½ tbsp. of canola oil before you start to cook yur burger and you’ve got some home fries.

 

If you go out and buy all the ingredients for this recipe at once, yur gonna have enough for at least three or four burgers, so though it might cost ya $8 or $9 to get the ingredients you need, when you price it out over let’s say 8 burgers since that’s how many buns ya got, it comes up to about $2 a meal. For a gourmet burger, that’s chicken feed. And this one is so dern healthy! 

 

But ya know what I like best about this dish? It makes my house smell like a greasy spoon for the rest of the day! Reminds me of my childhood!