Canadian Bacon Cheeseburger with Poutine

I will normally only be cooking a meal and posting once a week, but today being Canada Day I made an exception (probably will be doing something for the fourth of July, but don't quote me on that).  Today I decided to make a Canadian style dish.  I couldn't think of anything better than poutine to better represent the great homeland, however poutine on it's own isn't much of a meal, so I decided to also make a Canadian inspired burger.

Burger
Extra lean ground beef
Canadian bacon
Maple Syrup
Italian bread crumbs
Canadian cheddar
Lettuce
Tomato
Sesame seed bun

Very simple burger with I feel incorporates some nice Canadian ingredients, mainly (read: only) maple syrup and Canadian bacon and cheese.  I mixed together the lean ground beef, maple syrup and the bread crumbs in a bowl until the meat held together nicely.  I'm not entirely too sure of the portions sizes, just kept adding enough until the meat held its form long enough.  I formed the meat into a nice patty shape and cooked in on the stove top until thoroughly done.  I would definitely prefer to cook on a barbeque but unfortunately there's only one of the rooftop patio and it was being used so I made do.

Once the burger was about 90% done, I placed the cheese on the burger while still cooking to get the cheese nice and melted.  After cooking the burger, I cooked up two slices of bacon using the same pan until they were warm and showed some slight browning.  Putting the burger together was a breeze, as I simply stacked the burger, bacon, lettuce and tomato on the bun, and voila.... a delicious burger was created.

One a side note, I made sure to slice the tomato as thin as I could.  During a recent restaurant trip, I have a sandwich with giant slices of tomato which made the sandwich nearly impossible to each without deconstructing the sandwich.  I made the mental note to try to keep all ingredients in sandwiches/burger/etc. nice and thin in order to make eating it easy and carefree.


Poutine
Shoelace french fries
Thinly grated mozzarella cheese

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
1 cup of beef stock
Pinch of salt
Ground black pepper

I opted to not make fresh fries cause a) no deep frier b) pretty lazy.  Instead I used some frozen shoe string french fries I had picked up from the local grocery store.  For the cheese, usually I would recommend and use curd cheese as that's the way it's supposed to be, but unfortunately I couldn't find any at the store, so I decided to go with some thin mozzarella.  This choice actually turned  out really good, and I'm glad I didn't go with the curd, since I used such small french fries, I think the curd would have been too large to make it look good.  And as we all know, the appearance of the food sometimes makes an impact on the tase (doesn't really make sense, but I know it to be true).

For the gravy, I heated the butter on medium and mixed in the flour to make a nice dark roux (I think that's what it's called).  I then slowly stirred in the beef stock and then cranked up the heat to get the mixture boiling.  Once it started bubbling, I reduced the heat and allowed the gravy to reduce down to a nice thick consistency.  I added in a bit of salt and pepper to get the taste right.  And that's just how easy gravy is to make.

A quick plating job later, and the following was made....

Can't really go wrong with a burger and poutine.  This was the first time I've made poutine and it turned out pretty good actually.  It was a good way to celebrate Canada from down in the states.....wasn't quite the same without some fireworks and good company, but having some home country food made the night alright.