After last week’s post on cleaning out my freezer, my old friend Constance emailed me from Taiwan (where she has lived ever since she married the Chinese Pop Star). Constance wrote:

I suggest that you go Vietnamese with your Game and Pork burgers- I did an Indochine Burger thing with Buffalo and pork at my parents’ this summer. Very tasty, basil, fish-sauce,green onions,ginger and peanut butter or sesame paste. Nice with a little parsley and basil mayonnaise

Hmm. I thought. Yum. I thought. Constance has always been one of the best cooks I know, so this afternoon when I took the thawed package of ground elk out of the refrigerator, and the package of pork sausages that had been in the freezer for a very long time, I thought about Constance’s suggestion.

I went out to the garden and pulled four small red onions out of the ground. I gave them a rough chop, including the greens. I put the elk, sausage, onions and a few cloves of roughly chopped garlic through the fabulous Kitchen Aid Meat Grinder I bought a few months ago so that everything would be amalgamated.

I took about half the meat and mixed in a soupspoon of Sambal chile sauce, a knob of grated ginger, two or three rosettes of basil julienned, a big squirt of fish sauce, and a squirt of soy sauce. I mixed it all together, made patties, and while I froze most of them,  kept one out for dinner.

So there it is — a delicious Elk Burger Indochine a la Constance, some sauteed beet greens (with ginger and garlic) and a little rice … it was delicious. Juicy, spicy, yummy and the beet greens were a good contrast … it was all very yummy. Thanks Consuela!