Turkey burgers and bubble and squeak - hurrah for yellow stickers!

So far, I've been rubbish at keeping up-to-date with my kitchen blog, and now find myself in a not-so-small kitchen! I do, however, still have very little storage space (I share with others), and a very, VERY small budget (currently trying to get back into employment). 

So here is what is going on in my kitchen today: 

Lunch - leftover bubble and squeak and pitta bread. 

I got some beautiful red potatoes on sale (hurrah for yellow stickers!) and had a cabbage in desperate need of using up in the fridge. I had also picked up a couple of packs of pre-chopped onions which I normally deplore, but for the amount of onion in each one and the price, it was cheaper to buy them than the same quantity of whole onions - yellow stickers again. My last yellow sticker bargain was a pack of leeks for £1.27 -- not the cheapest of the cheap, but far better than the £2-something that I normally refuse to pay. 

I steamed the cabbage, sauteed the leeks and onions and boiled the potatoes. Once everything was cooked and cooling, I popped the potatoes out of their skins and crushed them with a little butter. I stirred through the cooled onion and leek mixture, and then the cabbage. I formed half the mixture into little patties, dusted them with a little flour and fried them in a butter/oil mixture until they were golden brown. Really tasty. Today, I had some of the leftovers, cold from the fridge, stuffed into crispy toasted pitta. Really, really good! 

This evening, I had the last of the leftovers along with a leftover turkey-burger from yesterday, too. The turkey burgers were another bargain. The turkey was from my freezer and really wanted using up. When I fried off the leeks and onions for the bubble and squeak, I kept some back and kept it cooking and added in a cubed red pepper. I took it off the heat and cooled it, then mixed it by hand through the defrosted turkey meat along with some paprika, cayenne pepper, lots and lots of black pepper, some oregano and an egg yolk. If I'd been more prepared, I'd have set aside some breadcrumbs, too - the mixture needed a bit of extra stability. 

I fried them in a pan with hot olive oil until the edges were blackened and crisp, and the peppers on the outside had taken on that glorious bitter, burned sugar taste. I found that the mixture was too wet (I ought to have drained the meat a bit, or used less egg, and certainly to have added some toasted breadcrumbs), but I got 3 nice little burgers out of it, plus a pile of 'deconstructed' turkey mince with some veggies through it ;) 

Proper recipes will go up at some point, once I've got some quantities. For now, I hope you're inspired, or at least hungry!