Absurd Burgers: A Creative Craft for Kids

If I were going to make a hamburger craft using cardstock or construction paper, it would look something like this:

I cut the individual pieces of a traditional burger from cardstock: a pair of tan hamburger buns, a white onion slice, a red tomato slice, green lettuce leaf, a slice of yellow-orange cheese, a brown burger patty, and a blue plate for them to sit on. Then I arranged them on a black piece of paper. But I didn't glue them down. Why? Because this craft is called Absurd Burgers. To make an Absurd Burger, you have to change things up from what is expected, which is where the creativity really comes in. 

This is an example of an Absurd Burger. 

Melting the cheese onto the plate and then stacking the items on top of the melted cheese is absurd. 

This Absurd Burger looks challenging to eat. 

Is this burger actually absurd, or is it just vegan-friendly, with the meat and cheese separate from the rest?  

This is definitely an Absurd Burger.... 

... but at least the bun is what's touching the table. In this burger, the meat is. 

After the last two burgers, anything with the plate at the bottom suddenly doesn't seem quite as absurd. Until you stop and think about how you'd react if this is what you were served at a restaurant.  

There is so much room for creativity with this project. I stuck to traditional burger components, but I know that if you let a classroom of kids loose with this activity, you'd eventually see non-traditional ingredients in some of the burgers. The more absurd, the better! 

When everyone has made their Absurd Burger, have them glue it to the background paper. Then it's time for a writing assignment. Give the kids several options: 

• Write the menu description for your Absurd Burger, with the goal of making it sound as appealing as possible. 
• Write a restaurant review, imagining you ordered an ordinary burger and your Absurd Burger is what arrived. 
• Write about an alien planet where your Absurd Burger makes perfect sense. 

Wouldn't you love to read the results?! 

Watercolor Hamburger

Burgers are great year-round, but there's something about summer that makes them taste even better. They're also a really fun subject to paint. Affiliate links below. 

Watercolor Hamburger

Materials:

• watercolor / mixed media paper
• Koi travel watercolors
• Faber-Castell World Colors

Steps:

Note that, as usual, I've used a pen for the step-out photos so that you can see them easily. On the actual painting, I used a pencil to sketch as lightly as possible. 

I've found that the easiest way to draw a burger is from top to bottom. If you want to do the opposite, just reverse my directions. 

Start by drawing the arc of the top bun in the middle of your paper. Rather than drawing a straight line across to make a half-circle, use a very wiggly line to draw lettuce on the left side and a smoother line to make an onion on the right side. Then draw in a layer of tomato slices. 

Beneath the tomatoes, add the corners of some cheese slices. Draw the curved ends of a nice, thick burger patty, then draw a wiggly line to make more lettuce. Finally, draw the bottom bun.   

Now it's time to paint the burger. With watercolor, you want to make sure one section is dry before adding color to an adjacent part so that the color doesn't run. I do this by skipping around. Instead of painting the bun and then the lettuce, I do the bun and then the meat, because those sections don't touch. 

Start with a golden color for the bun, adding shadowing along the top and bottom. Use the same golden color to add dots of color to the meat. Choose a medium brown and add more dots of color to the meat. Continue adding dots of color to the patty until it resembles perfectly-cooked hamburger. Paint the onion a pale purple and the tomato red. Paint the lettuce using a similar technique as with the meat, adding dots of paint in different shades of light green. Paint the cheese yellow. 

Paint a horizon line behind the bottom bun, then color beneath that line with whatever shade you've chosen to represent your plate / countertop / serving tray. Allow that to dry, then add the color of the wall / sky / backsplash above the horizon line. 

This is what my burger looked like when I put away my paints. 

 

You can stop here, but I wanted a cleaner look. I went in with my colored pencils to add definition. This is most evident on the cheese, onion, and lettuce. I also added the hint of sesame seeds to the top bun. 

It looks almost good enough to eat!

Impossible Whopper Taste Test

As you know, the deRosiers are all about trying new foods and love any sort of taste test. So when Steve suggested we try Burger King's new Impossible Whopper and pit it against their standard Whopper, Trevor and I were all in. I can't remember the last time I had food from Burger King. I'd even forgotten what's on a Whopper (lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, white onions, ketchup, and mayo on a sesame seed bun). The Impossible Whopper is the same, but instead of a beef patty, the patty is entirely plant-based.

Here's what the two look like on Burger King's website.  Impossible Whopper on the left and standard Whopper on the right:

    

I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that the burgers we actually received looked a little different than their styled version. Unlike the menu photos, neither of our Whoppers' patties was overhanging the lower bun and neither Whopper had the same amount or apparent quality of produce. They did, however, look very similar to each other. 

Impossible Whopper on the left and Whopper on the right:

When I removed the top bun, we did notice some differences. The Impossible patty was clearly larger than the beef patty, extending all the way to the edges of the lower bun (but not overhanging, like the menu photo). The Impossible Whopper had more tomato and pickle slices than the regular Whopper, which had more onion. The lettuce and mayo were similar. Neither had visible ketchup. 

I cut each into pieces so we could taste them side-by-side. That's where things got interesting. 

The two burgers tasted identical. There is no way we would have known we weren't eating two regular Whoppers when just biting into them with all the toppings. Interesting!

We carefully scraped away everything and tried just the patties side by side. Now, we could taste a difference. Not a big difference, and certainly not a meat-vs-not-meat difference. While they were a tiny bit different, none of us had a strong preference between them based on flavor or texture. 

So how does the nutritional makeup of the two compare? They aren't all that different. The Whopper has 660 calories, while the Impossible Whopper comes in at 630. There are 40 grams of fat in the Whopper and 34 in the Impossible Whopper. Here's the rest of the stats:

Whopper:

Impossible Whopper:

There's one other difference between the two, which is the price. The Impossible Whopper costs about a dollar more than a Whopper, at least for now during their trial release.

So what conclusion did we reach? All of us enjoyed the Impossible patty and could see getting it again in the future, particularly if it were to make an appearance at our preferred burger places. We like the idea of eating less meat and are glad to see better, more meat-like substitutes being developed. But the Impossible Whopper is far from a healthy choice.

Have you tried the Impossible Whopper? I'd love to hear what you think!