Mediterranean Turkey Burgers - Clean Eating Magazine

You know when you have one of those days when every single thought about yourself is negative, and you are down, and have no energy, except for the occasional burst of "I can get through this I am an amazing wonder woman who is worthy of love and acceptance" energy?  The kind of day where you waffle back and forth between guilting yourself for sitting on your butt and reading and telling yourself you deserve to sit on your butt and read?  The kind of day where you feel like you're worth nothing, and that if people had to choose between going to your birthday party or sitting through 37 straight hours of CSPAN, they would choose CSPAN?

Yeah.  That was my day yesterday.

I was miserable.  In all honesty, at times I felt like I was going a bit mad.  It's very disconcerting to have a battle going on inside your head, between the part of you that wants you to enjoy your summer break, and the part of you that says you're an idiot if you don't take every single second of this "free time" to clean, organize, and/or fix yourself.

So it came as no surprise when I found myself staring down at a recipe at 7:30 last night, crying because I did. not. want. to. cook.

I called in my DH for reinforcements.  He is very busy planning my above-mentioned 30th birthday party, so he didn't want to cook, either.  After gently giving me several suggestions that my stress-addled brain quickly dismissed as pure idiocy (even though they were very nice and helpful suggestions), I literally dismissed him.  A flippant wave of the hand, a careless "You can go now."  Is it too late to apologize for that?

The battle in my head raged on.  The voice saying, "You're so tired.  Just give up.  Order in.  Eat some Nutella and crawl into bed."  The voice saying, "I don't know what the heck this is but this isn't you.  Just start cooking.  Once you've started, it'll seem easier.  You'll feel so much better aftwerward."

The second voice won.  And I am so happy that it did, because these burgers were AMAZING!!  The kicker was the sent-from-heaven sauce - I never knew that spinach, feta, hot sauce, and greek yogurt could taste so good.  I made a few adjustments (like adding more hot sauce, and snazzing up the turkey burger itself, and do you really need to separately roast and then peel that red bell pepper? - 'cuz I didn't!), but the original recipe can be found in the July 2011 issue of Clean Eating magazine.  Just writing this post now, I realize I forgot the portobello mushrooms.  Damn.  That would have been good.

(Addendum - 08.19.11 - Clean Eating magazine has asked me to remove their recipes from my blog.  I apologize for any inconvenience this causes any of you.  I try to make sure I post the month and year of the issue where I found the recipes so you can find a copy for yourself.  You can order back issues here.  Eat well!)