Biggest Loser Carrot Fries and Almost Fast-Food Burger

Today, I made Biggest Loser Carrot Fries and Biggest Loser Almost Fast-Food Burger. You can get to the recipes by clicking on the names. I made the fries first. The recipe said that the carrots were cut in half, but my husband and I looked at the picture and thought that they were quartered, so I quartered mine. I put the spices and the olive oil into a bowl, I mixed them up with a fork and then tossed the carrots in. Cutting up the carrots was easy and tossing them around in the olive oil helped burn a few more calories for the day. The recipe called for two cookie sheets, but I only had one, so I only used one. They fit just fine in a single layer and barely touched each other.

While they were cooking, I measured out my burger patties. I made four since I like having left overs for lunches for my husband and I. I wasn't able to get it to be 1/2" bigger than the bun, but that was okay for me. I didn't season the meat since the receipt didn't call for any seasonings, but that was really weird for me. We usually throw in garlic at least. While the burgers were cooking, I mixed up the sauce. I only made enough sauce for one burger since I don't like sauce. I found it made more sense to make the sauce while the burger was cooking since what else was I going to do? Once the carrots were done, I tossed the cheese on the burgers to let it melt a little bit.

Then it was time to assemble it. I set the buns out on the plates and put all of the sauce on the top of one bun. I skipped the onions and sauce on my burger. I forgot the pickles completely. I wasn't able to get a full quarter cup of lettuce on the burgers, but I got as much as I could.

My husband really liked the burger and said that it was better than his burgers. I don't agree that it was better than his, but I don't add sauces to my burgers so all of the flavor has to come from the patty. His burgers are heavily seasoned and are more like mini meatloaves which I love!

The carrots were soft, but they weren't crispy. They cooked for the amount of time that the recipe called for. I don't like carrots, but the fries were edible for me. They didn't have a strong carroty flavor. I'll be honest, I didn't really taste the seasonings and I had to put extra salt on them. My husband enjoyed the carrot fries and didn't need the extra salt. He said, "The initial flavor when you put them in your mouth, you get the bite and flavor of the seasonings that then goes into the sweetness of the carrot and blends very well." (I should have him write all of my recipe reviews.) He also said that he would make carrots like that all the time. I'm willing to give them another try and see if I can get them crispy. Since I didn't get a strong carroty flavor, I'm willing to swap these out for regular fries if I can get them crispy. I might try using the broiler on them or using our counter top convection oven.

I was a bit annoyed that the recipe says that one service is about 12 fries, but it doesn't tell you how many servings that you should get out of one batch.  The fries in the picture look like they are a lot longer than mine. I have a hard time believing that 12 of my tiny little fries is 139 calories. According to my good friend Google, a cup of carrots has 45 calories and a teaspoon of olive oil has 40 calories. I ate about a cup of carrots and two teaspoons of olive oil, which would get me 125 calories.