Becky Welborn has both, thanks to her Becky’s Got Back Burgers, which is one of 150 recipes featured in the NBC Sunday Night Football Cookbook.
The recipe came to Mrs. Welborn one night while she and her husband, Chris, were sitting up in bed watching a hamburger cook-off on the Food Network.
“I fell asleep watching the hamburger cook-off and I dreamed all night about cooking hamburgers,” she said. “I dreamed about making this incredible hamburger where everything is falling out the other end.”
The next morning, Mrs. Welborn woke her husband, who both admit is the real cook in the house, and set out to find the ingredients to the perfect hamburger.
“We came home, tried the hamburgers out and everyone just fell madly in love with them,” she said.
She has refined the massive burger creation over time, until she got everything just right.
“This still has a lot of crap in the middle but that’s the best part about it,” Welborn said.
Cynthia Green, Welborn’s sister-in-law and best friend, said she was one of Welborn’s first guinea pigs.
“I tried this as soon as she’d dreamed about it,” Green said.
The grill was already fired up and the burgers - too big for a regular sized bun, or any bun for that matter - were stuffed with mushrooms, onions, bacon and cheese.
When all was said and done, the burger was topped with a teaspoon of pepper jelly and eaten with a fork.
“What I don’t finish I can eat for dinner,” Green said as she sliced hers in half.
Of course, no one would have known about Becky’s Got Back Burgers if it were not for a contest she entered several months later for NBC’s iVillage, a Web page dedicated to women’s issues.
But it was not the possibility of winning a contest or obtaining a little fame that drove Mrs. Welborn to enter the contest.
“What really caught my eye was that a portion of the proceeds go to America’s soup kitchens,” said Welborn, who works for the postal service. “At the post office every year we have a big food drive that goes to our local soup kitchens. That’s the main reason I entered the contest.”
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be sharing the pages with NFL great Willie McGinest, country singer Faith Hill and Chef Emeril Lagasse.
“I think it’s realy kind of awesome,” Mrs. Welborn said.
Her husband thinks it’s pretty awesome too.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” Chris said. “I’m proud of her. She says I’m the better cook, but she is the one with the published recipe.”
To learn more about iVillage and get the recipes, log onto http://food.ivillage.com/cooking/
