Most people I know are omnivores so when they want something substantial to put in a bun they simply go for the classic meat burger.  I was brought up as a vegetarian and have never reconciled myself to the taste, and more particularly, the texture of meat.  So when I want to eat a substantial sandwich I turn to veggie burgers, and I don’t want ones that are meaty and chewy.  I want one that is flavorful, robust, and textured without being toothsome.  So I am on a quest to develop a repertoire of veggie burger recipes that I can make, freeze, and then grab for easy nutritious meals when I haven’t had time to cook from scratch.

This particular recipe can be baked or fried (sautéed) but will not hold together on the grill.  I will be experimenting with bread  crumbs which are a usual ingredient for their ability to soak up moisture and stiffen patties.  I didn’t want to have breadcrumbs in this particular recipe because I wanted to keep the proportion of beans to grains at a 2 to 1 ratio.  The results are satisfying, flavorful, and just the perfect quick meal I was hoping for.

Ingredients:

4 cups cooked kidney beans

2 cups cooked quinoa

3 large carrots diced small

1 large onion diced small

3 ribs celery diced small

2 tbsp olive oil

1 bunch cilantro (chopped well)

1-2 pickled (or fresh) jalapenos (finely minced)

1 tbsp cumin

2 tsp salt

Makes 10 to 12 patties

Method:
Have your kidney beans and quinoa prepared ahead of time.  Heat the olive oil in a medium sauce pan (on medium high heat) and add the carrots, onion, and celery.  Once they start lightly browning turn the heat down to med/low and stir frequently.  When the onions get soft and sticky they’re done.  (It should take about 25 minutes.)

In a food processor combine the kidney beans and quinoa and pulse several times.  You want the beans to maintain texture but you want enough of them to be crushed that the beans and quinoa stick together.  Put this in a large mixing bowl.  Add the caramelized vegetables, cilantro, jalapenos, cumin, and salt and mix really well.

Form into patties.  You can make them any size you like.  I made mine palm sized and kept them fairly thick.

To cook: heat a tbsp of oil (any you choose) in a sauté pan and sauté patties on both sides until they develop a crispy brown crust.

To serve: I don’t eat my veggie burgers with buns when I eat them at home.  I like to eat them with sliced avocado, some cheese melted on top, and some salsa.  These have a slight spiciness (depending on how many jalapenos you used) so if you like really spicy food you can use a super spicy salsa or a hot pepper sauce drizzled on top.  If you like your veggie burgers with a bun you can eat them with a bun as well with pickles, lettuce and tomato.

If I had sides to go along with this veggie burger, like steamed or roasted vegetables, I would use one patty per serving.  If it’s going to be your whole meal, I would use two patties per serving.

Recipe Notes: I use 2 jalapenos for mine because I don’t like really spicy food.  There is a wide variation in spiciness when it comes to jalapenos so be cautious.  I prefer them pickled because they have a little tangy taste to them.  Veggie burgers freeze well.  To freeze them: lay the formed patties on waxed paper on a baking sheet and freeze for several hours until they are hard, then put them in freezer bags.  For longer term freezing I recommend using a vacuum sealer.   Caramelizing vegetables takes time but in this recipe it adds an important dimension to the flavor so I don’t recommend skipping it.

This recipe is vegan: unless you melt cheese on it or top it with sour cream.

This recipe is gluten free: provided the quinoa you buy was not processed in a facility that also processes wheat and if you use fresh jalapenos instead of pickled ones.

Spiced nuts make great holiday gifts but I usually make them for myself to put on salads.

Spiced nuts are easy to make and can be customized to suit your tastes.

Spiced Nuts
Ingredients:

6 cups of nuts, I prefer walnuts

3 egg whites

2 tbsp water

2 cups granulated sugar

2 tbsp ground cinnamon

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp salt

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp allspice

1/2 tsp cloves

Method:

Preheat oven to 300.  In a mixing bowl, beat the egg whites and water until frothy.  Fold the nuts into the egg whites gently until they are completely coated.

Combine the sugar, salt, and spices and blend well.  Add it to the nuts, stirring gently, until it is mixed in well.  Spread the nuts onto two large greased cookie sheets.  Bake uncovered for 20 to 25 minutes being sure to stir the nuts a couple of times while cooking.

Let the nuts cool completely before storing.  They will not be crisp when they first come out because of the egg whites but after they are completely cool they will be.  Store in an airtight container.

Coating the nuts with egg whites.

Coating the nuts with the spiced sugar.

Making them pretty if you’re generous enough to give any away.

Recipe Notes: If you haven’t worked with egg whites before then you may not know why you have to be so gentle with them: when you beat them they fill with tiny bubbles which give them loft but if you stir too roughly or too much the bubbles collapse.  In this recipe it isn’t as vital to maintain loft as it is in other recipes that use meringue like souffles, but it’s the gently cooked whites that give a special crunch to these nuts.  Feel free to play around with the spices- leave one out if you like (or all of them if you want candied nuts with no additional flavor).  If you know your oven runs hot, try setting it a little lower.  If you don’t like walnuts, like I’ve used here, use any kind of nut you like.

Growing your own beans to dry is easy and rewarding.  For this recipe I used the last of my home-grown dried beans, a mix of varieties including Jacob’s Cattle and Tiger’s Eye, and a jar of my home-made tomatillo salsa.  It is unbelievably easy to make and not only filling, but really tasty!  The beans and tomatillo salsa mixed together make a soup that you can eat plain, but when you poach a couple of eggs in a portion of the soup and top it with sour cream and cheese it is even better in my opinion.

The Bean Soup
Ingredients:

Approx 2 cups of dried beans (pinto or similar style bean recommended)

1 pint jar of home canned tomatillo salsa (store-bought if you have no home-made)

Salt to taste

Making the bean soup into a whole meal:

1.5 cups bean tomatillo soup

1 or 2 eggs

1-2 ounces jack cheese

1-2 Tbls sour cream

Method for making the soup:

Put your dried beans in a crock pot and fill the crock pot with water.  I put my crock pot on high for a few hours and the beans were perfect.  The cooking time will vary depending on the age and size of the dried beans.   When the beans are tender pour them, liquid and all*, in a large enough sauce pan and pour your whole jar of tomatillo salsa into the beans and mix well.  The salsa will have salt in it already so you should taste the bean soup before adding additional salt.  I added about a teaspoon of salt to mine.

Heat the beans and tomatillo salsa up until hot.  If you want a vegan dish- it’s really good plain like this.  No diary.  No meat.  I love to add sour cream and cheese to this soup but it’s really good without any additions.

Method for poaching eggs in the soup:

To make this soup into a hearty breakfast or lunch ladle about a cup or cup and a half of it into a medium saute pan and turn the heat to medium high.  With a spatula make two wells in the soup- it should be just thick enough for you to do this.  Into each well crack an egg.  Cover the pan and let the eggs cook until they reach the consistency you like.  I like my eggs whites to be completely cooked but the yolks to be just barely cooked all the way through.

When the eggs are as done as you like them, remove them from the pan with the spatula and put them in a bowl, then pour the rest of the soup over the eggs.  Top with the cheese and sour cream.  That’s it.

Recipe notes: this is a protein rich meal, if you want to serve the soup with a grain instead of more protein you could serve it with corn muffins or fried or grilled polenta rounds.  This soup works because the beans have a rich earthy flavor which is perfectly complemented by the salsa.  Don’t be afraid to try different kinds of beans or different kinds of salsa.  I came up with this recipe because I want to develop an arsenal of satisfying meals made almost completely with my pantry staples.  Salsa with beans is pretty simple and two things I almost always have on my shelves.  If you don’t have a crock pot for the beans use a soup pot on the stove on medium heat, add water as necessary.  Obviously you can used canned or frozen beans if that’s what you have.  But it is better when you make them from dried.

*If you have so much liquid that your beans are more brothy than soupy then drain some of it out.  If the liquid in the beans is fairly thick then don’t drain any of it away.  While cooking beans I keep my eye on them, even when they’re in a crock pot, so that I can add small amounts of water as needed so the beans cook up thick but have enough water for the beans to soak up and become tender.   If you’ve never cooked dried beans before consult your all-purpose cook book and if it’s a good one it will have all the information you need to know about cooking dried beans well.


Recipe for my tomatillo salsa
Soup Philosophy

Pouring the milk into the blender.

This is a recipe that uses your frozen strawberries to make a milkshake that is low in sugar, high in flavor, and got my picky eater child to get some protein and fruit in his system.  It is simple, fast, and a great alternative to the more traditional shakes made with ice cream.

Ingredients:

8-10 frozen strawberries

1 cup milk (whole or low fat)

1.5 Tbsp sugar

Put everything in your blender and pulverize it until it is completely smooth.  How many strawberries you use depends on how large yours are and how thick you like your shakes.  Start with the proportions here but feel free to improvise until it suits your specific tastes.

This recipe makes 16 ounces of shake.  (One large one, or two medium ones).

Ingredients:

1 cup olive oil

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

3 tbsp mustard (spicy brown or Dijon)

3 cloves peeled garlic, roughly chopped

3 – 4 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped roughly

1 tsp salt

many grinds of fresh pepper

How to use this marinade: I brush it on everything I grill. It is my standby favorite. It is thick enough that it sticks to my vegetables and I love the rosemary and mustard combination. One of my very favorite ways to use it is to roast the following vegetables:

eggplant

mushrooms

onions

summer squash

Then chop all the roasted vegetables, combine with fettuccine pasta, and add some marinade to the pasta for sauce. Serve with Parmesan.

This would also be great on tofu.

*If you don’t have an immersion blender, use a regular blender. Or a food processor. And then let me convince you that an immersion blender is so much better than a regular one.

This is just about the easiest sauce to make. It’s also quite fast.   If you weren’t aware of it, you may like to know that walnuts are rich in the fatty acids every health guru has been going on and on about lately. The Omega-3′s.   So this is a healthful dish. Will this cost you many points in calories? Heck yeah. But if you only eat a cup of it, and the pasta is home made, the points are not wasted on your hips.

Here’s what you do to make it:

Put the following ingredients in your food processor;

1 1/2 cups lightly toasted walnuts

1/3 cup olive oil

3 medium garlic cloves (roughly chopped)

1 tsp salt

freshly ground pepper to taste

1/4 cup boiling water

Pulverize the heck out of it. When it’s all ground up, slowly add the olive oil.
When you’ve got a smooth paste, add about 1/4 cup boiling water.

Add it to 16 oz  hot cooked pasta of your choice.  (You can use half the walnut sauce on the 16 oz of pasta if you like a real light coating of sauce, or you can use it all.  I prefer more sauce.)

Recipe Note: You can add a little of the pasta cooking water to the sauce to make it even creamier.  I always add a liberal amount of Parmesan to each serving but it is delicious without the cheese.  An excellent accompaniment to this dish are roasted vegetables, my favorite being roasted asparagus.

One of the biggest staples of my fridge is a ready batch of mustard lentil salad. It’s good by itself but is even better scooped onto a large bed of lettuce with some feta, croutons, and a hard boiled egg. One of the biggest blessings of this recipe, aside from being very easy, is that it is high in protein and reasonably low in fat. Fresh parsley is an amazing accompaniment to lentils for flavor and for it’s vitamins, minerals, and the digestive qualities it offers. I always keep fresh parsley growing in my yard just for this recipe.

Mustard Lentil Salad

Ingredients:

2 cups dry lentils, rinsed

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 onion, diced

2 stalks celery, sliced

2 carrots, sliced med/thin

Dressing:

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/4 cup of favorite mustard (I used a spicy brown mustard)

1/4 cup (or more) fresh parsley

1 1/2 tsp salt (or more, to taste)

Hell of a bunch of grinds of black pepper

Method:

In a pot big enough to cook two cups dried lentils heat up the olive oil on med/high heat. Add the onions, saute until they start turning transparent, then add the celery and carrot. Saute all the vegetables for five minutes before adding the lentils and covering with water to about an inch above the lentils. Turn the heat down to low and simmer for as long as it takes for the lentils to be cooked through perfectly, usually between 2o minutes to a half an hour. If there is any water left at the bottom of the pan, drain the lentils in a colander and return to the pot, but not to the stove.

To make the dressing for the lentils:

In a container that will accommodate an immersion blender add all of the dressing ingredients. Then pulverize it until it is thick. Add to the lentils and stir well.

You can eat the lentils at room temperature, hot, or cold. I nearly always eat it cold as a salad. If you are eating it by itself it obviously needs no dressing, but when I put it on a bed of lettuce I add some dressing to the greens. You can cut down on fat by not doing this but I like a well oiled salad. Plus I like fat.

How I serve it: I put a big bed of lettuce on a dinner plate. I put about a cup of the lentils scooped onto the top. I add a sliced boiled egg, about a half a cup of croutons (when I’m being conscious, or about a cup when I’m not minding my manners and my waist), and about an ounce and a half of feta cheese.

This is a filling and very wholesome lunch or dinner. It includes protein, dairy, legumes, greens, grains, and a whole heck of a lot of vitamins and minerals. As far as calories are concerned I know that eating it as I often do will land you around 700 calories. If the rest of the food you eat in the day is leaner and smart I think the calories here are very well spent.

Note: If you have one cup of the lentils on one cup of lettuce with one ounce of feta cheese and 1 tbsp dressing for the greens it has only 470 calories. That’s also a good way to eat it and not spend so much of your daily calorie intake in one meal. I did the math on this quite a while ago as I eat it a lot and it was a staple when I managed to lose weight the first time (after having a baby. Now I have it all to lose again after breaking my hip!)