Day 20--Adventures in Advanced* Cooking!

*Okay, my usage of the word "advanced" is relative.   When I say that, what I actually mean is I'm not used to making things that involve cooking in steps, or using a food processor, and last night's dinner involved both!

For my final step in adding beans to my diet,  I got a recipe for healthy veggie burgers.  Of everything I've made so far, I thought last night's ingredients made an incredibly tasty-looking picture:

Excitingly healthy looking, right?  Well, I was excited.  And then I learned some things:

1. My food processor is tiny.  I could only fit about a quarter of this stuff in there at a time, so, getting the mixture prepped took almost an hour, and got super messy at times.
2. You should read the whole recipe before you decide that's the right one for you.  I actually got the mixture all together, ready to press it into patties, when I saw the recipe called for them to be pan-fried instead of baked (what the hell, recipe??).  And my fallback recipe had only Celcius instructions for the stove (yeah, I'd had too many glasses of wine for conversions).  So I ended up winging the cooking time and temp.
3. All vegan recipes call for way too many onions.  I like (cooked) onions as much as the next guy, but seriously, sometimes less is more.  I'm glad I used my judgement on this one.

In the end, I think my efforts paid off!  I liked it, and I think Erica did, too.  I'm forcing her to be honest with me in this process, because if I make something she doesn't like, I want to know!  She said these are "different," meaning they don't taste like hamburgers, but that's to be expected, I think.  She did eat two, so it couldn't have been the worst thing ever.   Although I have to agree, the average meat-and-potatoes palate would think this is pretty off the wall.  Me, I'm really excited about having the leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

Chickpea veggie burger with lettuce and tomato on whole wheat bun.