I was nothing less than a miserable failure tonight when attempting to cook dinner. I was planning on making myself a turkey burger on the stove in a fry pan. But when my mom said she wanted a burger, too, and added that my dad and my sister would probably want one, too, I had to change my plans. Everyone wanted food, but everyone was busy.

I figured at this point it would be easier to just fire up the grill, and so I did. I got it lit alright. I asked my dad what temperature I needed the grill to be at before putting the burgers on. There was no response, for he was busy altering the rental house contract. I asked my mom; she said it didn’t really matter. So I waited a couple minutes and put the burgers on.

I asked my dad what temperature the burgers needed to be at. Again, no response. Everyone was too busy to help me. My mom was cleaning up the sink, my sister was in her room listening to music, and my dad was glued to the computer screen editing the rental house contract. Boy, was that the worst mistake everyone could have made tonight. I was about to server them the worst burgers they ever would have.

I let those burgers fry. In the past, my parents have told me that when cooking burgers, it is six minutes on the first side and four on the second. I knew that in order to lock in the moisture in burgers, you sear them on high heat. So I turned both burners at high, planning on searing them for a total of 10 minutes, and then they’d be ready. I threw some onions on the grill, too. My mom seemed to think it would be a good idea to grill the onions instead of eating them raw. Cooking them reduces their potency and also adds a bit of smoke flavor.

Despite being summer time, it’s a little difficult to see the grill at 11 p.m. The grill sits behind the porch light and so you’re really cooking by moonlight, except there’s a huge deck above you blocking out the moon’s light. If people lived behind our house and were crazy enough to cook dinner at 11 p.m., and had their porch light on, which might just so happen to illuminate over the fence and possibly shine a hair of light onto the grill, I might have been able to get a status update on the burgers. But there’s nothing besides trees, birds, and skunks behind our house.

We didn’t have any buns on hand—we rarely do unless we’re planning on having burgers some night. But tonight was one of those “What should we make for dinner?” “I dunno. Look through the freezer and see what we’ve got” kind of nights. Sitting in the fridge was a loaf of artesian bread. It’d just have to do. I plucked off a tiny bit of mold that had accumulated on this loaf of artesian bread.

The burgers had a puddle of grease and juice and stuff on top of the burgers. With poor grill visibility, I flipped the burgers over after “searing” for 5 minutes on the first side. I thought I saw that the bottoms of the burgers weren't cooked very well. Now keep in mind that I could have been—and in all likelihood was—imagining the burgers looking undercooked.

Inside, I prepared some romaine lettuce for the burgers. I put the bread in the oven because the oven was finished preheating.

Then back at the grill, the burgers had been on the other side for 5 minutes. I figured “okay, 5 minutes plus 5 minutes”... they're ready to go out now. So I asked dad again how he cooked burgers. This time, surprisingly, I got a response out of him. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t asked him. Everything might have turned out okay if I had followed what I knew.

“I usually cook them 10 minutes on the first side to thaw the burger, and the 5 minutes on the other side to brown the other side,” he said.

Great. It’s gonna take another five minutes to cook those burgers, I thought to myself impatiently. I was hungry, and I was tired, but I definitely did not want the burgers to be undercooked. So I left them on for another 5 minutes. I didn’t check the grill because every time you open it up, the grill loses heat, which might make your burgers take forever to cook or get dried out if it isn’t hot enough. Had I known that the burgers couldn’t be farther from either of those risks, I would have at least checked the burgers, if not pulled them off the grill.

Meanwhile, my bread was warming up. I set the table with plates and forks.

***

I took those burgers out after they had had 15 minutes of pure carnage on high heat. Now I should have known that you don't generally cook food on high heat using the grill, but my dad has never told me that. Until after tonight.

So I opened the grill, hoping to see some perfectly-done burgers—not undercooked, not burnt to a crisp.

Burgers usually shrink when they cook. It’s a normal thing. But when two of the burgers were about the size of a half dollar, one of which was on fire, you really start to question your barbequing skills. The onions are sitting on the top of the grill saying “wtf, mate.” I'm slapping the fire out with the only tool I've got... a burger flipper. I'm pulling all the burgers off the grill—or at least what were once burgers. The fire has already done a number on all of them, and I don’t need any more cooking to be done.

I bring them inside and slap them on people's plates. You could tell which side of the burger was face-down the longest. All you had to do was see which side was chocolate. Well—that only worked for one of them. The others were soot black on both sides. I take the one burger that is still alive and take a bit into it.

It's exactly what I wanted: lock in the moisture by searing it. Of course, when they say that, they mean to lock the moisture inside, not scorch the living daylights out of the burger.

At any rate, eating the burger was like biting into a chunk of thick, warm cardboard. Add some ketchup, a jalapeño pepper, an eight of a grilled Walla Walla onion, a slice of warm bread, and a piece of lettuce, and you've got yourself something that's almost edible—assuming you concentrate on the condiments and not the actual burger. It was just like eating.... well...... it was just like eating a burnt burger, drowned in ketchup, with a jalapeño pepper, and an eighth of a grilled Walla Walla onion, all on a slice of warm bread, stacked between and a piece of lettuce. There. It wasn't so bad.

Everyone else wasn't as lucky. Their "toasty delights" sat on their plates. Their burgers life had been charred within inches of utter destruction. Covered in a toxic, carcinogenic coat, the burgers were not even edible by dogs. The burgers were, in short, donations to the Holy Trash Can God.


==Epilogue==

Dad, who finally took a break from his rental house contract forms, promptly rescued dinner by throwing some garden burgers into the toaster oven. We sat there eating bread topped in artichoke dip and the lettuce that was supposed to go with the burgers. We polished off the apple juice and drank water.

And then, after it was about time for the garden burgers to be done, Maisha walked over to the toaster and said “Dad, it helps if you plug it in first.”
We, at 11:30 pm, are a dysfunctional family. The End.