Making chicken burgers with Erin

My youngest daughter Erin used to have a very limited range of foods she'd eat but slowly over the last year or so she's started eating more and more different foods. It makes for an easier tea-time and makes us feel better about the food she eats.

Chicken nuggets and burgers used to be a firm favourite with her. In fact for a long time she wouldn't entertain eating chicken unless it was breaded. Now she's keen to try chicken in new ways and even eats chicken curry.

We recently found a meat grinder in our local charity shop for £5 and snapped it up with the intention of making our own chicken mince to make chicken burgers. Why is it you can't buy chicken mince in supermarkets? It's strange!

The meat grinder didn't have any instructions but after a bit of trial and lots of error we got it working. Luckily JD was on hand to persevere with it as I was ready to give up and take the grinder back to the charity shop :D

So here's us making chicken burgers:

I chopped the chicken up into smallish pieces so it'd go easily through the grinder mechanism. I did this because Erin wasn't keen on actually touching the raw chicken.

Erin really enjoyed mincing the chicken up but said it looked gross. So guess who got the job of forming it into patties, yeah me! The chicken mince was moist enough to form into patties without any other ingredients. It'd probably be good to add salt and pepper or some other seasonings but we really wanted to try the chicken plain and see how it tasted.

The chicken burgers were great, really tasty. For some bizarre reason we didn't have them in bread buns but I imagine they'd be even better like that. Erin enjoyed them and didn't even mention that they weren't breaded. Cooking them in a frying pan gives them a nice browned outer coating and they stay quite juicy inside. So this is a great way to feed your kids a healthier no additives etc version of a food they already love.

Since making these burgers we've also made beef mince successfully too so it seems to be a fiver well spent so far. I'll have to think of some more uses for chicken mince too. Watch this space! :)