Mmm....Lamburger

Last week when Dylan and I went to the market on Sunday (in the pouring rain), we picked up the usual fresh fruit, vegetables, olives, eggs and cheese and decided to buy some meat from one of the butchers too. If you can picture this market, there are probably 100 produce vendors, 30 cheese vendors and at 20 butchers plus about 200 of just 'other stuff' which may dub as 'junk'. This market is huge!

So of course, I look for the tables or carts with the 'deals'....just like we can't buy all the veggies in one place (which drives Dylan nuts btw), we had to browse and find a deal with the meat. We found a large vendor with a variety and a good price on ground beef and another with a great price on chicken. We purchased the meat and were on our way.

So if some of you haven't heard, I'm having a hard time thinking of different stove top recipes every night since we've been here. With no oven, it cuts out quite a few options.
When we got home, the meat was divided up and thrown in the freezer (of our bar fridge) and life went on.

Last Tuesday I cooked the 'beef' and made an extremely hot chilli. It was good, but when I was cooking it, I thought the meat smelled funny, but decided it was just 'Belgian' and went on with it (it was fresh, I knew it wasn't bad). The chilli was good, but had a very distinct taste which I couldn't pinpoint....
Sunday past, Dylan made spaghetti sauce with the rest of the 'ground beef'....as soon as he started cooking it, we figured out the 'different taste/smell'....it was LAMBURGER!

The lamburger spaghetti was good, but once we knew what it was made of, it was obvious. We ate lamb in Dubin when we had Irish stew and neither of us were huge fans, but in Ireland, you have to try the most famous dish. From now on, we will only buy chicken (or Kip in Dutch) at the market - or ask specifically if it is ground beef before we buy it.

As a sidenote, when I go to the grocery store, there are two types of ground meat there to buy - ground pork or ground beef. They are labelled in french, so easy to distinguish and you can also tell by the color - beef is red, pork is pink (with green things in it - not sure what they are). I always buy it at the meat counter, since there is a limited variety in the fridge there. Also, when I buy eggs, it is not uncommon for them to be spotty or even still have feathers attached to them when I open the package - which I've been able to get past in the last few months.

That is our LAMBURGER experience - a mistake we will not make again!!!