Vegan Black Bean Burgers

According to Robert, this is the "Best One Yet." You can be the judge of that with the recipe below!

This burger has over 10 grams of protein from veggie sources!

Ingredients:

o1 t olive oil

o½ red onion, chopped

o2 carrots, chopped

o½ bell pepper, chopped

o5 mushrooms, chopped

o2 cloves garlic, minced

o2 T ketchup - note, most ketchup contains high fructose corn syrup. I buy the "natural" or "organic" kinds to prevent this!

o2 T mustard

o2 t ground cumin

o2 t ground chili powder

o¼ t salt

o¼ cu breadcrumbs

o1 can black beans, drained and rinsed -or- 1 cu cooked dry black beans, drained

oBuns and other desired toppings



Directions:

1.Preheat oven to 450°F.

2.Heat olive oil in skillet. Saute onions, carrots, peppers, and garlic for 4 – 5 minutes. Season with ketchup, mustard, cumin, chili powder, and salt. Stir, remove from heat and let cool.

3. I made my breadcrumbs by putting the ends of a loaf of whole wheat in the food processor and pulsing on high until it looks like the picture above.

4. Place veggies in a food processor with black beans and breadcrumbs. Pulse 5 times to combine.

5. Form mixture into 3 - 200gram patties. Chill for 30 minutes in fridge.

6. Place on a lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes.

I served these with whole wheat and sesame seed flatbread. But that's another show!

Enjoy!

Vegan Pumpkin Pie

Seriously. You wouldn't know unless I told you!

Fall is in the air! Some of my favorite foods are associated with this weather. One of Robert's favorites is Pumpkin Pie. Now, I'm not going to tell you that by veganizing this pie it becomes healthy; rest assured, it's still loaded with fat and sugar! And taste!

NOTE: You could certainly take a lot of time and effort out of this pie by using store bought crust and canned pumpkin, and I'm not going to tell you not to. But from scratch cooking is my thing, and at 99 cents for a pie pumpkin, it certainly was less expensive to do so. 

Step One:Assemble your Ingredients

For the crust, you will need:

1 cup whole wheat flour (you can go with the regular stuff if you like, but the whole wheat adds a nuttiness to the pie that I am fond of)

1/3 cup vegetable shortening (see? unhealthy!)

1/2 t salt

2 - 3 T ice water

For the pie, you will need:

1 medium pie pumpkin (or 1-16 oz can of pumpkin)

1 - 16 oz package of silken tofu

1 cu brown sugar

1/2 t salt

1 T pumpkin pie seasoning (Robert brought this home for me, otherwise, I would've used cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, in whatever increments you like!)

 Step Two:Roast your Pumpkin

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Quarter your pie pumpkin and remove seeds. (I doubled this recipe to freeze half of the pumpkin puree for Thanksgiving!) Save those seeds for roasting! (Sort and wash seeds. Mix with 2 T olive oil and roast at 375 for 20 - 30 minutes until golden brown. Delish!)

Place your pumpkin cut side down on a lined baking sheet and bake for 1 hour.

When cooled, remove skins and puree in food processor. While this is roasting, you may want to move on to step three.

Step Three:Make your Crust

In a food processor, add whole wheat flour, salt, and shortening. Pulse until the mixture forms pea sized balls:

Turn on processor and slowly add ice water until mixture just comes together. Form into a disc and wrap in plastic wrap. 

Store in fridge for 30 minutes. Place a metal baking sheet in the freezer. In the meantime, you can skip to step four and press your tofu.

Once your 30 minutes are up, place your chilled disc into a gallon sized zip lock back. Use scissors to open the bag all around so you have the dough between two separate sheets., as shown.

 Roll out with rolling pin until it is just bigger than the bag, like this:

 Take the baking sheet out of the freezer and place it on top of the flattened crust. This will help to absorb any heat you gave it while rolling and make for easier transfer. Flip the crust over (still on the baking sheet) and peel off the bottom layer of plastic. Take your pie tin (that you sprayed with non-stick spray, right?) and place it face down on the crust. Flip this contraption over and remove the baking sheet and the final layer of plastic. While you don't have to, I'd recommend that you blind bake your pie crust for at 350° F20 minutes. So, it goes from looking like this:

To this:

Make sure you poke it with a fork and anchor it with something (I used dry black eyed peas) to keep it from bubbling.

Step Four:Press your tofu

Silken tofu is perfect for this recipe, but if you don't press it, you won't get a firm pumpkin pie. Pressing is easy. Just remove tofu from package:

And build a contraption like this:

Press for 15 minutes. Time to:

Step Five:Assemble Your Pie!

In a food processor, combine pumpkin puree, pressed tofu, salt, pumpkin pie spice, and brown sugar. Puree until smooth and pour into prepared pie crust. Bake for 20 - 30 minutes at 350° F until a toothpick inserted comes out clean and it goes from looking like this:

To this:

Robert ate a quarter of this pie last night! I supposed for all of the unhealthy comments, you can at least feel good about getting your veggies, whole wheat, and protein from tofu! :) Enjoy!

Vegan Minestrone

Recently, Robert and I have made an effort to cut animals out of our diet. For a multitude of reasons, most notably because we are reading this book:

And we recently saw this documentary:

The former looks at what we do to the animal industry; the latter examines what the animal industry does to us. Both interesting and eye opening, but be warned, not all that easy to digest.
In the spirit of a new challenge, I am attempting some vegan cuisine. An oxymoron, you say? Well then, challenge accepted! As I help myself to a second bowl-ful, check out this recipe for Vegan Minestrone:

Step One: Gather Your Ingredients (sorry no ingredient pictures here, but halfway through the recipe I decided to blog)
2 T olive oil
4 carrots
1 onion
4 stalks celery
2 zucchini
pinto beans (I cooked these from dry, but you can always use a drained can of pintos)
1 t garlic
fresh ginger (2 or 3 fingers worth - is that how you measure fresh ginger?)
salt & white pepper
1 - 28 oz can diced tomatoes (I used the fire roasted kind - delish!)
herbs of your choosing (I chose sage, basil, and oregano from the garden - you can use fresh or dried!)
1/2 lb pasta (whole wheat orecchiette if you want to be like me!)
water

Step Two: Saute the veggies and make broth at the same time
Most minestrone recipes call for broth of some sort (I even found a few that called for chicken broth - isn't Minestrone classically a vegetarian soup?) but I "just say no" to store-bought broths. They cost too much and trust me you don't want to consume the stuff anyway. Traditionally, you would steep veggies with salt and pepper in water to make a broth before straining and creating your soup. But I combined these two steps with successful results!

Dice 1/2 the onion, 2 carrots, and 2 stalks of celery. In a large pot over high heat, add olive oil, garlic, and diced veggies. Saute for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the remaining onion, and break the carrot and celery in two and add those as well. Add herbs, ginger (no need to peel or chop) and season pot with salt and white pepper.

Cover entire mixture with water (I used about 6 cups). Bring to a boil and reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, cook pasta in a separate pot and drain when al dente.

Remove large veggies, ginger, and any herbs still on the stalk. Add can of tomatoes, pinto beans, diced zucchini, and cooked pasta.

Orecchiette - In Italian it means "little ears." In my minestrone it means delicious!

Simmer an additional 20 minutes if you can stand it. Just make sure the zucchini's cooked. 

Now, I bought Parmesan cheese to go on top. But this was perfect as is. The fire roasted tomatoes and pinto beans give it a smoky flavor and you'll never miss the lack of meat. Enjoy!