The Wheat Meat Story

Grandpa is a vegetarian.  He has been a vegetarian for many years.  It is a challenge to find pleasant foods to eat, since he really does not like vegetables.  A few months ago Jim and Mary B. gave me a wheat cookbook (Wheat Cooking Made Easy by Pam Crockett).

This cookbook has many, many good-sounding recipes.  The one that instantly caught my eye was the 'Wheat Meat' on page 245.  I am always looking for burger-like things to make.  There are really only three 'main' ingredients, plus the seasoning, so I thought I would give them a try.

The first batch I made were pretty good, but I did not have the seasoning mentioned in the book so I tried something else.  Having had disasters in the past while seasoning meals, I went a little gentle with the stuff.  Well, Bob thought they were not bad, and ate two of them.

Since that was so successful I made a second batch with more seasoning and processed a little more.  With this batch I also made some 'burger crumbles' to use in Shepherd's Pie and other dishes.

I decided to make some of the wheat meat at the kids' house.  They had a blender and a mini-food processor. These work really fine for their purposes, but wheat meat is not one of them.  Rather than burn out their equipment, I made the Shepherd's Pie with some semi-wheat meat.  Unsuccessfully.  Because the ingredients did not totally mush up together there were wheat berry balls that were too obviously not burger...so it was not a popular dish.  The old Gramster did not know that some of the children did not like corn-off-the-cob, which pretty much puts the kibosh on Shepherd's Pie.  Not one to offend easily and looking at this as a great learning experience for the grandkids:  I think they will be very happy when their mom recovers and is able to take over cooking their favorite things again.

Well, Grammie is not one to give up easily so--since Grandpa forgot to take his burgers with him on his trip to the temple this week, I felt justified in taking them to the share with the kids.

Not so successful there, either.  Jonathan thought they were "ok", the same thing his father said.  Caleb broke his up into pieces and then mostly just ate the delicious whole wheat bread Mary had brought.  Leah, on the other hand, totally unsuspectingly, took a large bite of her burger sandwich, started chewing up the burger, and almost immediately started gagging!  Gagging!  Can you believe it!!  She stuck her tongue out so far that I thought she was trying to hit her belly button, and she would not reel that tongue back in until her father had totally wiped the goo off it.  I had a hard time keeping a straight face, actually. 

SO--I brought the remaining burgers back home to eat here.  I had one on a bun with a little mayonnaise and lots of dill pickle chips.  Delicious!!  So there, unadventurous eaters!  If you want to try these delicious, healthy, vegetarian delicacies, here is the recipe.