Tag Archives: black bean burgers

What you can’t see right now is my happy dance. I’m doing it. It looks a lot like this..

or this…

Ok, so that second one might be one of those videos that entertains my son. It’s still similar.

The reason I’m gyrating wildly around my kitchen? I made a black bean burger that held. To a foodie, this is a little bit like finding Valhalla. Black beans don’t particularly care for holding burger form. In fact, they fall apart quicker than celebrity relationships. The fact that these held together tighter than a murderous bunch of teenagers in a 1990′s thriller? Well, I was so pleased, I text TWO people just to tell them. (Both people are foodies)

More on the burger patties that Odin blessed in a minute. (Odin and Valhalla are joint references, btw…if you need to, google it. It’s a fun story.)

I am not a vegetarian. I was. I didn’t eat any flesh for many, many years. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m not opposed to meat eating at all, I just prefer the meat of nuts….(you know that’s what the actual nut is called? nut meat? A 14 year old boy came up with the term, I’m sure.)

I do care about WHAT I put into my body, meat or vegetable. I want the food I eat to be healthy AND humane. I want the meat to be raised and slaughtered responsibly. (A little wine, a few roofies…) I want the vegetables to be grown with few chemicals, and environmentally friendly irrigation. As it is, most vegetables and meat you buy at the grocery store have` more chemicals in it than Darryl Strawberry’s urinalysis.

Well damnit if organic meat and vegetables isn’t expensive. This is another reason why I don’t eat that much meat. It’s friggen pricey! In the US, we have become SO accustomed to eating a lot cheap meat quite often, that we bristle at the idea of paying ranchers what they’re worth. We’ve been consuming sub-standard, subsidized meat and veg for decades, why would we want to eat less meat now, when we can continue eating $.99/lb chicken twice a day, with $3.00/lb bacon?

Because we aren’t all asshats. We’re smart, caring, responsible people. We don’t REALLY want to eat animals treated like crap, and we don’t want vegetables that poison our earth for our kids.

Think about it, the average price per pound for ground beef, which is currently the most popular meat sold in the United States, is $4.69/lb.

For that price I can buy:

I can purchase 2, 15.5 oz cans of organic beans

3, 2 lb bags of dried organic beans

2 pounds of organic tofu

18 organic, free-range, certified humanely raised eggs.

When on sale (which happens OFTEN, so BUY AND FREEZE) I can get 2, 12 oz bags of shredded organic cheese for $5.

1 lb container of organic greek yogurt

4 lbs dry, organic split peas

3 lbs dry, organic green lentils

3 cans of organic chick peas

1.5 lbs organic quinoa

2 lbs organic wheatberries

The list goes on and on, and on, and on…

Meat is delicious. I will give you that. Bacon is especially yummy, (especially, especially yummy..very yummy) but you don’t need meat 3x a day to live. Hell, you don’t even need it 2x a day to thrive and be happy. Several days a week, I don’t eat it at all. Meat takes a toll on our earth, and our bodies. Cows are big damn animals, and take a lot of resources. Lentils just make you sound like a hippie. You can totally survive that. Especially if you buy hemp milk for your cereal. Go with it, you can fight for your right to smoke pot at your Grandmother’s canasta game later. You know Grammie keeps all that candy in her purse for some reason…munchies.

This is why Meatless Monday will always be one of my favorite days of the week. I get to encourage others to think outside the cow, and come up with meals that are sans animals. Also? I get to eat what I reallllly love.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, I had a bean burger breakthrough. I’ve made eleventeen different bean burger recipes, all of them leaving me less than excited. Last night, I was CRAAAAVING a black bean burger. I needed one like Justin Bieber needs the screams of his followers to make him feel like he has chest hair.

I put in a little of this, a little of that, and VOILA! The PERFECT BLACK BEAN BURGER. IN TWO VERSIONS. One of them? VEGAN.

I put them inside lettuce wraps, with avocado, tomato, onion, and cilantro!