Shrimp+Hamburger=?

As I mentioned, I made hamburgers last weekend. This, of course, means I have a surplus of hamburger buns.

I clearly needed to come up with a ridiculous scheme for using them.

Ridiculous? Check.

Take a few large, peeled shrimp and embed them head-to-tail, in a circular fashion, inside a hamburger patty.

The trick here is to make sure that the shrimp cooked properly. Shrimp and hamburger cook at somewhat different rates, after all.

I like my burgers medium rare. If I were smarter, I would have used pre-cooked, frozen shrimp without fully defrosting them first. Cooking the burger would probably heat them through.

I was more worried about overcooking the shrimp. I didn't want them to get tough... so I used raw shrimp. I decided to 'pre-cook' them a bit by soaking them in an acidic solution of vinegar and horseradish. It worked fine. I wasn't that worried about it, as shrimp cook pretty quickly.

Thinking that shrimp and beef both work with horseradish, we topped the burgers with a horseradish sauce, chopped onions and tomatoes and some baby spinach.

They certainly weren't bad, but I'm not sure that the shrimp really added that much to the burgers. Obviously, they added... well... shrimp, but it was more of a "Hey, there happens to be some shrimp in my burger," rather than a masterfully choreographed culinary ballet of beef and shrimp. Nothing really tied it together. I'm not sure what would, if anything. Maybe keeping the shrimp whole wasn't the best idea.

Have you ever tried creating choreography for a cow/shrimp ballet? Not easy.