Sometimes, this food blogging thing can get a little obsessive.  When you’re a bit Type A, like I am, you start food blogging, taking kind of crappy pictures with whatever ambient light you have (even after dark) of the food you make which happened to also taste good.  Then, as the years go by, you find yourself with a little studio in your basement, a window of about two hours when the light streaming into your little photography space is just right, and you refuse to post a recipe that isn’t original and hasn’t been subject to round after round of testing.

And that’s not all.  You have several detailed lists of recipe ideas as well as a Pinterest board full of delicious looking food, and you ponder them on a weekly basis, making sub-lists in your day timer of foods that you will make and photograph during that week in particular, paying close attention to opportunities to make cake (aka places and people to pawn said cake off onto, so that you don’t have to eat the whole cake yourself simply for the sake of a blog post).

You work at your food blog every day, writing posts, devising recipes, photographing food, scanning other blogs, Pinning your posts and others’, and spending as much time responding to Facebook comments and tweeting and retweeting as you can muster the patience for.

And then, one Sunday night, you get totally inspired.  Inspired outside the realm of your structured brainstorming sessions or your late-night Pinterest peruses:  like the culinary goddess you are, you see some ground beef in the fridge and the opportunity to use up some cabbage that has been floundering there for weeks, and you happened to have some wicked blue cheese from the farmer’s market and then…

…you have, on your plate, a blue cheese stuffed hamburger with caramelized onions and apple cabbage slaw, snuggled into a pretzel bun you made from scratch and you didn’t plan to do a blog post about it, so in the glaring light of a summer evening sun with a picnic blanket spread out on the front deck, a beer poured, and your toddler nibbling at the end of an asparagus spear, you snap a few photos before the blue cheese leaks and dribbles and slides out of the succulent burger patty and onto your plate.  It does anyways, but you put your camera down unceremoniously, swipe a stalk of asparagus through the runnel of potent cheese, and get on with dinner.

Given that I didn’t write down a single quantity or measurement as I made this meal, think of this more as a source of inspiration than a recipe.  I chopped the cabbage finely and grated an apple – equal parts of each – and tossed the mixture with some olive oil and apple cider vinegar and set it to marinate.  The pretzel buns came from the ever reliable Smitten Kitchen, and were, as all of her recipes always are, perfect.  I did the caramelized onions the real way, like, instead of adding any honey or brown sugar to help them break down and caramelize faster, I just cooked and cooked and cooked them in a splash of olive oil over really low heat for about an hour, et voila.  Incredible.  The burgers were thrown together very simply, with little more than generous sprinklings of salt and pepper for seasoning and an egg to hold them together.  I made a little indentation in each patty with my thumb and pressed a chunk of Dragon’s Breath Blue Cheese into it, folding the meat around the cheese and gently forming into a patty, which I grilled on the barbecue.