Saturday, January 5, 2013

Bring back the Veggies

I can cook and eat vegetables again! JOY!

Veggie burgers are tough.  They are tough to successfully order and enjoy at a restaurant and even tougher to master at home.  They always end up too mushy or too tough, in my opinion.

So when I saw this recipe for black bean quinoa veggie burgers, I was intrigued!

I basically followed the recipe as you'll see on her blog, with the exceptions of using regular flour, no egg, and vegetable flavored quinoa.

I used a can of refried black beans instead of processing whole beans (no lard added).  If you are concerned about salt, use regular beans and process as she instructs.  


I got this snazzy balsamic reduction for Christmas so I had to try it out!  It was awesome!


Instead of a full-sized onion, I used these smaller pearl onions (they were in my pantry).  If you have these, make sure you boil them first for about 3 minutes.  Cool them in cold water, cut off the root, and the onion meat should slip right out.
 
So, the flavor of these little patties was fantastic, however, the texture was not quite ideal.  No matter how much flour I added, they were still quite wet.  Reading the comments on the blog made me think I didn't need the egg, so I shrugged my shoulders and treated my mixture more like pancake batter.



I dropped about 1/4 cup in a hot pan with olive oil and flattened it with a spatula as they cooked.  I then baked the patties in the oven (350) for about 15 minutes to toughen them up.  They were crispy on the outside and soft in the middle...a fair victory!



I topped them with honey mustard and avocado and sandwiched them with slider buns.  You can double stack the veggie patties for more "meat."

Burgers, patties, pancakes...call them what you want, they were quite delicious and nutritious!

Combine with a sunny winter day hike when you can!  If the sun is shining and it's above 48 degrees, get yourself outside for at least an hour!  All natural vitamin D is hard to come by these days!

2 comments:

Kelly said...

Well that looks like a great Christmas gift....!

Unknown said...

It was awesome!!!!