Spiced Bean and Bulgur burgers with Silverbeet Stem Chips



Do you love my trashy stubbie holder as much as I do? Hahahaha

I made these the other night partly as a way to use up a heap of crap I have had lying around in my 'pantry' (I don't have an actual pantry so space is valuable) for too long, and partly because I haven't had a good vege burger for absolutely ages. The silverbeet on the side is a variation of a recipe I found in the Silverbeet chapter in the Kitchen Garden Companion (such an inspiring book!). It is truly an excellent way to use up those stems that always get left behind in the fridge to go soft! You CAN eat them, and they taste like the leaves, only subtler.

Anyway, to the recipe:

Spiced Bean and Bulgur burgers with Silverbeet Stem Chips
Makes 8 burger patties

Ingredients
For the Burgers -
2 1/2 cups cooked beans (I used a mix of white beans and black eye peas)
1/2 cup raw cashew nuts
1/2 cup bulgur/cracked wheat, soaked in 1 cup of boiling water until soft. Drain any excess.
1/2 cup mashed sweet potato
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 tsp garam masala
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 tsp curry powder, chilli powder, and ground coriander seed
1/2 cup whole meal flour
black pepper

For the silverbeet chips -
Enough silverbeet stems to serve who you are feeding (I used the stems of 1 bunch for two of us)
A few tbsp chickpea flour
Dried herb of choice
Juice of half a lemon
Oil for shallow frying

Method

In a food processor, combine the beans, cashew nuts and sweet potato. Blend until smooth (or if you like chunks, leave some chunks). Transfer to a large bowl and stir in the rest of the ingredients until well combined.

Shape into 8 flat patties and put in the fridge to firm up.

Meanwhile, slice the silverbeet stems into sticks. Bring a pot of water and the lemon juice to a boil. Boil the stems for 5 - 10 minutes. Drain and run under cold water to stop cooking and dry with a paper towel.

Put the dried stems in a bowl and toss with the chickpea flour and dried herbs.

Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the stems in batches until crispy. Place on a paper towel lined plate in a warm oven.

You can either fry or grill these burger patties. They are good either way :) I fried mine in the oil left over from the chips, until brown on both sides. For lunch the next day I grilled them for 10 minutes on one side, 5 minutes on the other.

Serve on bread rolls with salad and sauce of choice :) tahini-mustard-sweet chilli sauce was pretty good :)

I made my bread rolls myself - I used the exact same recipe as the bread I make, but divided it after it's first rising into 6 balls before rising again. I think I cooked them for 25 minutes at 200 degrees, but check them after 15 just in case. They were pretty damn good!
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All these ingredients I found lying around my kitchen. The potato was in the freezer begging to be used, I always have beans in the freezer, cashew nuts and bulgur were the last of their packets...Any nut could be used instead of cashews, cous cous, quinoa, buckwheat or rice would be a good replacement for the bulgur wheat. (I have had the bulgur in a jar for over...2 years now. Shame! I can't remember why I had it in the first place.)

I am definately cooking my silverbeet stems this way again next time I have them. I usually just chuck them into a curry or stir fry, but this way of cooking  them preserves their flavour a bit more.

Creamy pasta sauce

Yesterday my sister was talking about how she was going to make carbonara for dinner that night. It made me really want carbonara for dinner. My thought pattern went straight to an alfredo sauce recipe I have made before, and I would just add some thinly sliced seitan (I use the Vegan on the Cheap recipe) into it to sub for the bacon, or pancetta or whatever it is that you use in carbonara. I thought I had everything for the recipe at home, so I didn't go get anything at the shops.

Of course I didn't have everything (I was missing the tofu, duh) so I just threw together this mess:

It actually worked out really well. It was in no way a carbonara (I couldn't even be bothered defrosting my seitan) but it is a creamy proteiny pasta sauce and it satisfied the craving. It's a good way to use up any okara you have leftover from soymilk making, I also chucked in some almond meal/pulp leftover from my almond milk making. It works, trust me. Next time I will use all soy/almond milk, but I had some coconut cream leftover in my fridge that I didn't want to waste.

Pasta with Cream Sauce (inventive, I know)
Serves 3-4

Ingredients
200ml light coconut cream
50ml soy milk (I just topped it up to 1 cup)
3 garlic cloves, crushed or grated
1/2 cup nutritional yeast (1/4 cup provides 400% reccomended daily value of B12 did you know?)
170g okara (what I had leftover from making milk with 100g dry soy beans)
1/4 cup almond pulp
1 cup 'chicken' stock
1 tbsp tahini
black pepper
1 tsp mixed herbs
1 tsp chilli powder
3 tbsp flour*

1 cup frozen green peas
1 cup cooked white beans

375g cooked pasta

Method

Put the first block of ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth.

Put pasta on to cook, when almost done put mixture from the blender into a medium sauce pan on high heat. Stir until very thick. This won't take long. Stir through your beans and peas.

When pasta is done, drain it and return it to it's pot. Pour in the sauce and toss to combine.

Divide among plates and serve! We got three servings, but they were a little bit too big, so dividing it into four would probably be perfect.

So much of the okara I get from making soy milk gets wasted, which annoys me. I always have one lot in the freezer but never use it so I don't want to just keep freezing it all. However we have been using it lately! Such as in the above recipe, and the other week Nadine made an awesome lasagne and I told her to mix it into the plain tomato sauce. It made it quite meaty and cheesy tasting which we were pleased about. I'll use that trick again.

This ended up costing me $1 per serve (4).

*Next time I'll use only 2 tbsp flour.

Guacamole!

Yes it does look like a big bowl o' vomit, but I just wanted to post that the trick with using some frozen peas and white beans in place of an avocado in guacmole was a success :) Idea from Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap -

Guacamole

Makes a big soup bowl full

Ingredients

1 large avocado (I used a shepard avo)

1 cup frozen peas, defrosted

1 cup white beans

2 roma tomatoes, diced

1 garlic clove, grated/crushed

a generous amount of sweet chilli sauce

black pepper

juice of half a lemon

Roughly mash the avocado in a bowl

In a food processor, blend the beans, peas and garlic clove until very smooth.

Mix it all in a bowl with the other ingredients and eat!

We blobbed ours on top of vegan nachos, that I made up from 1 cans worth of kidney beans and 1 can's worth of white beans, mashed up, 1 onion, garlic, 1 cup of 'chicken' stock and a taco seasoning packet. I figured out that the secret ingredient to the deliciousness of taco seasoning is cumin. I bought the home brand version of it (instead of old el paso, for example) because it was less than half the price and the only difference in ingredients was the lack of cumin. So I juct chucked in some cumin with the packet :) Who doesn't have cumin in their spice rack? I put it on top of corn chips, covered the lot with vegan cheese (that we had left over from pizza night) and baked it in the oven until the cheese melted. The sour cream from the same book was also a success, though not quite as good as tofutti. But probably a lot better for us!

We also drank a carton of beer and watched bad movies til 3am, most of which were quite good. Except one. 'Bitch Slap'. It was so bad. Worst movie I've ever seen. I dare you.

Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable soup

This is the delicious pumpkin I bought the other day! I've never seen a pumpkin so orange. It smelled really good too. I'm going to be so sick of pumpkin by the end of it. Haha so worth it.

Roast Pumpkin and White Bean Vegetable Soup
4 small serves
Ingredients:

¼ medium sized organic pumpkin
1 med-large onion
1 small head garlic
1-2 tbsp rice bran oil
½ tsp dried oregano
½ cup uncooked navy beans (soaked overnight in cold water, or quick boiled and soaked for 1 hour)
½ red capsicum
½ small head brocolli
½ small head cauliflower
2 yellow squash
500ml ‘chicken’ stock (or vegetable broth, or water)
½ tsp chilli powder
½ tsp ground sage
freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Cook beans. Leave in the water until they are required.

Cut pumpkin into equal sized chunks. Leave the skin on if you want, I did. Put the chunks into a bowl with the oil and oregano. Toss until well coated. Arrange chunks on a baking tray. Put whole garlic (I took some skin off and trimmed the top) and whole peeled and trimmed onion in leftover oil in bowl and coat. Wrap them in tin foil and put on the tray with pumpkin. Roast at 180 degrees C (350 F) for one hour.

Once cooked, let cool for a little while and then put it all in a food processor (minus the skins). Blend until smooth and transfer it to a large saucepan.

Chop the capsicum, brocolli, cauliflower and squash into small chunks. Blend until mostly smooth and add to pumpkin mix in saucepan.

Make 500ml chicken stock out of the bean’s cooking water (no waste!) and put the beans in with the pumpkin. Add spices and turn element to medium heat. Add enough stock to get the consistency you want. I used pretty much all 500ml and it was pasta-sauce thick.

Serve with garlic bread!

This soup was quite sweet but so yummy. I'm thinking next time I make it I may roast all the vegetables. The extra veg was sort of an after thought when I looked in the fridge and saw it was about to go bad. I managed to get the seasoning perfect first time and you can pretty much taste each individual vegetable without it being too much. Tomorrow lunch we are going to have leftovers as a pasta sauce. Very excited :)