Black Bean Burgers

 More pictures showing how to make black bean burgers

• 1 14 ounce can black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1/2 cup oats
• 1 TBS herbs of your choice (this time I used oregano and cumin)
• 2 cloves minced garlic (I used more because I like lots!)
• 1 egg
• Salt and pepper to taste

Mash beans in a bowl leaving some chunky.  Add egg.  In a blender or food processor combine the onion, garlic, oats, and seasonings.  Add liquid if you need to, to make the mixture moist.  I used water, but you can use ketchup, wine, milk, or vegetable stock if you like. 

Add the mixture to the beans and mix well.  If mixture is too wet you can add breadcrumbs (I used Panko) to thicken it up some.

You can make this mixture in advance and leave in refrigerator a few hours or overnight.  It will thicken up nicely and make burgers that are easy to form and stick together well.  The mixture will also freeze well, in already formed burgers or in a bag.

To cook, just form into your preferred shape and pan-fry on medium heat in a little olive oil.  

You can substitute a flax egg, or other liquid to make this recipe vegan.  You can also freeze the burgers cooked if you like.

Try different herb combos such as cilantro and salsa; parsley and parmesan cheese; soy and scallions.  Be creative and experiment!

Mixing It Up

My big challenge is making food that has enough protein to satisfy FabHubs while not relying nightly on soy, soy processed foods, or veggie only meals.

While I know beans are a huge source of satisfaction for him and seem to generate the least amount of “meat missing”...I find I am not using them enough at all.   I definitely need to put some more energy into using beans more often.

This week I decided to go ahead and make some black bean burgers, hoping this would do the trick for him.

The past two nights we actually ended up having the same exact thing for dinner…not leftovers reheated but each cooked fresh again.

Of course I love the sweet potatoes and we have so many of those it was a great excuse to use them (fries with the burgers of course!).

I did these first since they would take the longest to cook.

First I washed and cut them into fry shapes.

Then I put them in my giant blue bowl that I seem to use for everything…and tossed them with olive oil, salt, and chili powder until they were well coated…and promptly forgot to shoot the picture of that!

Into the oven they went…single layer, 425 degrees, stirred every 15 or so minutes until they were brown and roasted and ummmmmm.

Next we had TWO heads of local Florida chard that I had to use, from two different weeks of produce box deliveries…those green bags sure worked their magic here.  The old head looked just as fresh as the one I got this past Monday!

I decided to go ahead with the two heads of chard.  But by the time they were both washed, chopped, and ready to go I saw that this was a huge quantity and would be too much for us so I ended up cooking only half.

I chopped fresh garlic and tossed that in a large cast iron pan with hot olive oil and cooked those a bit…then piled in as much chard as I could get to comfortably fit in the pan.  The rest went back into a green bag…to be used the next night.

Piled in the pan…

Starting to wilt some…

Now starting to look really tender.  I do cover the pan with a large lid in between photos and stirring to help soften the greens.

Once the greens were done I poured sprinkled a generous amount of fresh grated romano cheese over it…this and the garlic made the dish!  Seriously…coming from someone who never ate veggies growing up…I could eat this whole dish myself!

Romano all melty….YUMMMMMM

Okay…enough chard..onto the burgers. 

FabHubs had bought the huge can of beans and so the bean mixture ended being a huge amount…enough for two dinners and then some.

After two nights of making burgers I still ended up freezing some for a quick-ready future dish.

These looked pretty darn disgusting in the mixing process:

Really…they tasted much better than they looked!  I mashed a drained and rinsed can of black beans in a bowl while FabTeen put into a blender a rough chopped purple onion (it’s what I had), some oats, and some water to get it to puree.  We added the liquidy mixture to the beans, along with two eggs.  I did debate subbing out flax eggs for the eggs…but decided to just go with the eggs.

Really it is just like making burgers, except with mashed black beans instead of the ground beef.  I leave some of the beans chunky too.  Of course we added garlic…we are a garlicky kind of family.

The mixture was too liquidy the first night…so I dumped in a bunch of panko bread crumbs trying to thicken it up some.  It worked…but really the burgers were much easier to form the second night after the leftover mixture had sat in the fridge overnight.   

Finally we had corn that needed to be used up, so I boiled some water and threw it into a pot. I don’t like to cook my corn to death…I basically just heat it up. 

Boil the water, stick the corn in for a minute or two…and that it is it.  It tastes so sweet and crunchy that way!  No butter needed. A little wine and candle that FabTeen surprised me with to relax while I cooked…              

And the end result…which I thought was such a beautiful color combination!  My little point and shoot does not do the colors justice either!

Tasted really really good to boot…and the biggest bonus is I feel like I am eating like a queen and losing weight.

What more could a girl ask for?

Save The Produce!

As I mention often, one of the downsides of getting a large box of organic produce every week is that I have to be vigilant about using it up. 

It definitely hurts to throw away that produce I so lovingly packed one, two, or even (gulp) three Mondays or so ago!

One of my favorite “use it up” method is the often seen here huge pan of roasted veggies.  I love this because it is truly an anything goes dish…anything I have that needs to be used goes in it! I do try to make sure I use the fragile, tender, more easily spoiled produce such as the lettuce first. 

I have found that I am more apt to eat salad (and make my family eat salad) on a daily basis if I take the time to wash, spin, and tear the head of lettuce so it is ready to go.  I prep it and then stick it in a bag similar to those Debbie Meyer green produce bags.  Then all week it is just a matter of pouring some in a bowl and topping it with fresh cut salad veggies. 

Usually I will make an enormous salad with it…cut veggies and all, and then store that so all I need to do is pour onto a plate or in a big bowl for dinners or lunches….no more cutting necessary.

Isn’t that a gorgeous rainbow of colors?  Tastes pretty good too…I would much rather taste that rainbow any day. 

This was my prepped salad stash for this week….usually topped with some sort of protein…feta cheese, tempeh, seitan.

Stirring Up Dinner

Well this week I found myself, once again, with an abundance of veggies that were on their last legs or just needed to be used up…and to be honest I was kind of sick of the roasted veggies.  I wanted something different that  used a bunch of veggies….and wasn’t soup!

Stir fry to the rescue!

First I had some tofu in the fridge so I set that to pressing.   No…I don’t store textbooks on the stove…underneath all those textbooks is a brick of tofu!  You have to press it for about 30 minutes to get all the liquid out!

Second step was to get the brown rice cooking since that takes so long as well….that is in the pot to the right of the pressing tofu.

While those two were doing their thing largely unattended, I hunted down veggies for the stir fry that I knew were hiding out in the fridge and set to work chopping and dicing. I added orange carrots, yellow carrots, a large bunch of scallions (from three weeks ago!!!), some broccoli that was seriously on its last legs (and the inspiration for this dish!), fresh garlic, fresh ginger, and mushrooms.

Once the tofu was pressed and drained, I cubed it.

Finally everything was ready to go….I think this is in the pan cooking already but I am not sure!!!!

While the veggies were cooking, I got a pan out and tossed some sesame seeds in there to dry toast.  I saved these to put last into the stir fry.

Have you noticed that all of our pots are stainless steel and our pans are cast iron?  Our cast iron pans are so well seasoned they are all nonstick.Once the veggies were fork tender I began tossing “stuff” on them.  I wish I could tell you it was an exact recipe…but it wasn’t.  I subscribe heavily to the “pour it on until it feels right” method of cooking.

I added a hefty dose of less Na soy sauce and very generously poured some honey in there as well.  When I went for the taste test something still was missing….and I noticed the jar of natural peanut butter on the counter…so I opened that and got out a large spoonful which I stirred into the stir fry…perfect!!!  That did the trick! Final addition was the topping of toasted sesame seeds.  I thought about adding some cashews in there as well, which would have been delicious, but I decided the sesame seeds and tofu were enough.  After all, I am still trying to notch the scale downward!

Dinner was a huge hit…except for FabHubs who tolerated it…but that is to be expected….and the bonus is I successfully saved a whole bunch of veggies from a sad fate in the compost bin. 

Salads, Stir Fries, and Roasted Veggies…do you have any other Go To methods for using up large amounts of veggies?

New Things To Try

Gorgeous organic produce box came today and as always it has a great mix of some old favorites as well as fun new things to try.New and interesting includes these three beautiful flowery artichokes.  Sure I have had them marinated and jarred from salad bars but I have never ever cooked them before.  I don’t yet know what I am going to do with them! I also got these YELLOW carrots! 

Altogether this week I got:

• Artichokes
• Red and Yellow bell peppers
• Sweet potatoes
• Those Yellow carrots
• Celery
• Grape tomatoes
• Cauliflower head
• Butter lettuce
• Rapini
• Chard
• Lemons
• Blueberries
• Mango
• Lots of Mandarin oranges
• Pink Lady apples
• Lots of Bananas
• 1 bag of Kiwis
• Cara navels….LOVE THESE!
• Honey tangerines
• Grapefruit

Lots of yummies to enjoy this week!  I know I will be fighting Ms. FabPreteen off of those grapefruits and kiwis!

So what is your favorite way to prepare and enjoy artichokes?

A Super Sunday!

Today was SuperBowl Sunday…and while I am not a football fan, having the game right here in Miami made it all the buzz everywhere I went!

The weather was absolutely super too!  Our church meets outdoors and today we met under brilliantly clear blue skies with a slight chill in the air and no humidity.  Perfect!

After church I ran over to Starbucks for my blogger meetup.  I was a little bit late because I had a stop I had to make in between…but they were nowhere near finished by the time I got there.

I met up with Amanda from Run To The Finish, Meredith from Pursuing Balance, Jessie from Vegan-Minded, and Melissa from Trying To Heal.  Weird how blogging has changed the way some of us identify people!

We had a great time chatting for a while in Starbucks.  What an interesting group of ladies!

When it was time to say goodbye everybody kind of had the same goal in mind next…walking over to Whole Foods to do a little shopping!  So we all walked over there together and chatted up and down the aisles.

I hadn’t eaten since before I had left for church that morning and I was craving a fresh juice…but when I saw the green juice I wanted was nearly $10.00 ($10.00!!!!! for juice) I decided I would just head home and juice my own!

Back at home, ravenous now, I made my favorite blend of carrot/apple/ginger/beet/parsley.  I really wanted to down the whole thing myself…but I had to share with the family!!!

  Then inspiration took over and I decided to compete with FabHubs over the kitchen!

He was making us homemade pizza and guacamole for dinner and snacks…and out of the blue I had a weird driving need to make juice pulp muffins!

So side by side we worked…he rolling out the pizza dough and chopping veggies…

Me throwing ingredients into a bowl for my juice pulp muffins.  Some of us (hint, not me) were a little less thrilled about the space sharing than others!  Good thing we have a double oven so I could have my own!

I found this fantastic recipe on this blog I fell in love with and used it as a basis for my muffins, tweaking it here and there to make it my own.

I doubled the recipe since I had plenty of juice pulp!  I used one cup of spelt flour and one cup regular.  I also threw in some golden raisins, I had some fresh organic cranberries on hand (YAY!), and even some organic orange peel.

Sweetened by honey and no oil added, these are quite healthy.

I mixed all of the ingredients together but they seemed really dry for muffins…so I added a little bit of apple juice for extra moisture.  (I would have preferred to use orange juice if I had any!)

They were still thicker than most muffin batters…but I was afraid to add too much so I just went with it this thick.  I scooped up big handfuls and molded them into balls and placed them in the muffin pan….where ACK!  They looked just like mini meatloaves!!!!   While they cooked I snacked on our homemade guac with my new snack love,  Stacy’s Naked pita chips.Then the pizza was ready…custom-made for various tastes….my half has ricotta, portobellas, pineapple, tomatoes, green peppers,  garlic, and onion.

YUM!  And finally the meatloa….er I mean muffins were ready! 

They were a little dense but still pretty good!  Everyone liked them except….FabHubs of course!

He still made “the face” but on a scale of faces it was not a “10” face (which means I hate this…where is my steak and sausage…don’t you ever make this again) but more like a “3” face (not my favorite and a tad too healthy for my tastes, but I will eat just this one). 

Good enough for me!

Okay…Superbowl is over..Saints are winners and I am tired on this superfun day!

I Have Done Well!

Cookie goal you ask?  Almost there with less than 100 boxes left to sell!!  We did really well!

Weight loss competition you ask?  I lost a total of 9 pounds from January’s weigh-in to yesterday’s weigh-in…actually a little more but lucky me…my TOM started Thursday night before weigh-in and so my weight popped up a little.

Still, out of 42 competitors weighing in, I placed a respectable 11th place! 

I  did really well!!!

Where is the food for the week you ask?  Yeah well with cookies sales and work taking up much of my time eating has been rushed and pictures almost nonexistent.  But I have still managed to eat healthy, use what comes in my produce box, and lose weight!

I have done really well!!!

My best surprise came Wednesday night when I got home late from a cookie booth with my daughter.

FabTeen had cooked us dinner!  He took broccoli, red onion, and garlic from the produce box and made a stir fry with peanut sauce. 

These are pictures of what was leftover! He also made brown rice to serve with it. 

It was delicious!!!!  He also baked some chocolate chip/flax/pecan cookies…(yeah..we needed more cookies in this house!).  At least these were healthy…and so good!

I was pretty impressed with what this 18 year old kid came up with!  He has definitely learned something from me..and in this regard I really have done well!!!  I am so proud of him!  Hee Hee…he will make a fine husband some day!

Some EXCITING NEWS!  Tomorrow I will be meeting up with a few other South Florida healthy bloggers!  I will be meeting Meredith from Pursuing Balance, Vegan-Minded Jessie, and Melissa from Trying To Heal.  I think some others are coming but I don’t know who…at any rate I am quite excited to meet everyone!!!