Gluten Free Super Bowl Sliders

I look forward to the (ads on the) Super Bowl every year, but this year we are really excited around here because the Steelers are back! If you love Green Bay, sorry. Don't stop reading. I also get really excited about the Super Bowl food that you get to eat, which is almost like a total junk food binge, but I always see great little recipes and ads in the paper for Super Bowl snacks that I wish I could eat but most of them are full of gluten. Which makes me mad, but only for about 10 seconds. Since I like to cook anyway, I love coming up with great party food for one really fun day out of the year. I posted some other great recipes last year, like Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Strawberries with Sour Cream and Brown Sugar, and Hearty Chili. I have a great easy recipe based on one of Rachael Ray's that makes about 16 delicious mini burgers called sliders. Come to think of it, I don't even have a clue as to why they named mini hamburgers sliders. Is it because they are easy to slide down your gullet? That is a great question for someone to Google.

To start, I made some hamburger buns using Grandpa's Kitchen bread mix and I put little handfuls of rolled dough into muffin tins to see if that would help them keep the bun shape while they were rising. It worked, and the buns were pretty good, although I guessed on the baking time (25 minutes) and I think they baked about 5 minutes too long. So check the buns at around 20 minutes and see if they're ready to come out. I'm not so good with the yeast breads and I would really love to perfect the art of baking gluten free yeast dough. Maybe that's my new resolution. I'm dying to try the Cheese Bread Mania gluten free buns to see if it's good with the cheesy flavor.

Then I took 2 1/2 pounds of hamburger and added 1/3 cup of A-1 sauce, and one packet of onion soup mix, which now I have to make by hand with this recipe. It says to use 5 tablespoons of the mix to equal one packet. I mixed it all together in a huge bowl with my hands and then patted it out in a greased 9x13 pan. I baked it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. (I checked it at 12 minutes, which the recipe calls for, but the meat was still raw. At 15 minutes it was just a bit pink in the middle. Cook it until you feel comfortable with the meat's doneness.) When you take this out of the oven, be careful, because the fat from the meat will be hot and bubbly and you'll have to carefully pull it out so as not to burn yourself. I used one of those basters to suck the fat out of the pan. Then I cut it with a pizza cutter into squares (so cute) sized to fit onto my buns. I got about 16 patties out of this batch. The nice thing about this recipe is that you can make all the patty batter for everyone and they can use little dinner rolls and you can put a little patty on your own gluten free buns just like the rest of the world. For the toppings, I sliced roma tomatoes, because they are small and cute for the mini burgers, tore some romaine lettuce into small chunks, used the small rings of a red onion, and cut pre-sliced cheese into fourths and let people have at it with the ketchup and deli mustard. You could use arugula instead of lettuce if you wanted to. I served them with some homemade fries, which were really simple to make.

Homemade Fries
1.Peel 4 potatoes and slice into steak fries. Place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
2.Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with coarse kosher salt to taste. Toss to coat.
3.Roast for 45 minutes-1 hour in a 400 degree oven, or until desired crispness, stirring occasionally.

I loved these fries! If you love fast food fries, they might not be your favorite, but they tasted like delicious homemade fries to me.
Check back tomorrow for another gluten free Super Bowl Recipe!
Happy eating and Go Steelers!