Week nine of our vegan diet and so far it's going pretty well. I mean, I love the food I eat (a bit too much, maybe, but all my dietary choices have been like that), but it can be challenging to keep up in the kitchen. I don't feel like cooking every night, and neither does Laura. We really try not to eat a lot of highly processed food, so meal prep can be a time suck. I'm sure we'll learn lots of tricks and find recipes that are quick to make. But, this weekend I made these Smashed Bean Burgers and man, they took awhile. Partly because we don't use canned beans, though. A can of canned beans would make this recipe a cinch. More about the making of them below.
Smashed Bean Burger with Perogies
Sometimes You Just Want a Good Sandwich
Choices seem limited in these early days. You have to really switch gears because your old favorites probably need some serious tweaking. Sandwich? Brain comes up with: peanut butter, toasted tomato or cucumber and....umm...maybe...?...jam. Molasses? PB and molasses? I don't know. However, there are a lot of great sandwiches that look very appealing to me. A lot of them have sprouts on them so I think it's time we grew some more sprouts. I want to try this
Smashed White Bean & Avocado Club sandwich - looks delish to me. This
Mashed Chickpea Salad sandwich looks awesome too - just looks a bit on the time consuming side. A Sunday endeavor...
Kitchen Time
It's the weekend, so we're in the kitchen cooking. Today the menu is perogies and bean burgers. The burgers aren't the same as our beloved Butter Bean Burgers, but they're still awesome, with a similar flavor and texture to falafel. We're also going to be making corn chowder and biscuits. There should be enough food to freeze a couple meals to have for lunch and enjoy later in the week as well.
Preparing food at home rather than relying on ready made items allows you to:
- Make food that you really like, the way you like it best
- Skip or substitute ingredients you don't enjoy
- Avoid preservatives
- Eat fresher food
- Make way more for less money (usually)
Laura's Perogies
Laura made the perogies and they turned out fantastic - definitely worth documenting the recipe since she made it up so there's no record of it.
Laura's Perogies
Filling
Sauté:
1/2 small onion, finely diced
Once softened, add in:
4 oz white mushrooms, diced fine
4 oz portobello, diced fine
1-1/2 tsp salt
Mix sautéed mixture with:
5 potatoes, cooked and mashed
4 scallions, green parts, snipped
1 tbsp dried parsley
1 tbsp vegan butter (Earth Balance)
3 heaping tsp nootch
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
2 - 3 splashes almond milk
Perogie Filling
Reminder for next time: The filling could have used twice as many mushrooms.
Dough
Recipe here for
Perogie Dough. We substituted the vegetable oil with olive oil.
After the perogies were wrapped, Laura rolled about 18 of them and popped them into the freezer, leaving the rest of the filling in the fridge to wrap later. The dough is wrapped and resting in a bowl on the counter. We cooked a dozen of the frozen ones for lunch. First you boil them for two minutes, then fry them for four or five minutes on each side until brown and crispy and heated through. I fried them on medium low heat. They were fantastic, and completely dairy free!
Smashed Bean Burgers
This recipe came from the Thug Kitchen cookbook. I am not going to post the recipe here, but if you happen to have it and find the burgers aren't forming and are falling apart I'll share with you a tip I learned in this frustrating process. As stated above, we don't usually use canned beans, which are nice and mushy. I cooked mine from scratch and probably should have overcooked them, because they were difficult to mash and there were still a lot of whole beans in there. When I went to make the patties, they just kept falling apart. Here's what to do if you have the same problem: take at least half of your mixture and put it in the food processor for half a minute. It will make a formed ball of nice sticky dough. Then mix it in with the rest of the mixture and it will make beautiful patties that hold together very well.
Bean Burger Patties
I had tried to cook three of the patties before we came up with the amazing solution and when I flipped them they all just crumbled. But...they were still delicious. So, that mixture will be used in wraps tomorrow night, probably with some chopped cucumber, tomato, onion and tahini sauce. Looking forward to it...
Cooked Crumbled Bean Burger Mixture
Update: So, we totally had the wraps on Monday with a tahini sauce, and they were fabulous!
Bean Wraps
Freezer to Oven
On a good note, we now have 5 burgers to freeze and grab next time we don't feel like cooking. And, the perogies mixture will make about 4 dozen to freeze as well. This is the key to being able to eat freezer to oven, and still eat healthy whole foods. It requires a few hours of time on the weekend, but it is worth it to not have to cook every day during the week.
