Food Friday: Black Bean and Corn Burgers

Here are some burgers I made today.  They are not bad at all.  They hold together, unlike other vegan burgers I have made  before.


Black Bean and Corn Burgers

2 cups cooked black beans
1 can whole kernel corn, drained
1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats, blended into flour in a blender
1 teaspoon granulated garlic
1 teaspoon granulated onion
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place all the ingredients into a food processor bowl and process until mostly smooth.  Usually directions call for blending only a little.  That makes the burgers fall apart.  Process until smooth!

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. 

Lightly grease a Silpat sheet on a cookie sheet.

Using a portion scoop,  divide burgers into 6 piles on the Silpat sheet.  With dampened fingers, pat down a little bit.  Using a spray bottle of olive oil, spray a little bit on top of each burger.

Bake for 45 minutes.

These were patted out to about 3 inches or so wide.

These are pretty good, as I said before!  I have not run them by Dear One yet, since he had already helped himself to other food while I was reading.  I will make some hamburger buns tomorrow and serve them for lunch. I think they will go over well.

Munchie Monday: Quick and Easy Corn Pudding/Corn Bread

Corn bread is something many people love. I have not been notably fond of corn bread.  Usually it is dry and crumbly.  I do not like that unless I have some really good chili to actually crumble it into. 

We had company coming for lunch (the missionaries, both seniors and young elders).  I was making black bean chili and sweet potato soup...both new recipes.  So, why not try a new corn bread/corn pudding recipe.

The one I found was on I Wash, You Dry blog.  It turned out pretty good.

For myself, I have to say it is more corn bread than corn pudding because it was cooked in a 9 by 13 pan. I think if I make it again, I will use a 2-quart casserole.  Just for texture's sake.  Of course, it will need to cook longer at lower heat, I think, if I do it in that size dish.

This is a picture of the dish when it was just recently removed from the oven.  I pretty much had to try it to see if it was edible.  Since it was, we served it to the missionaries!

The ingredients are Jiffy Corn Bread Mix, eggs, drained whole kernel corn, creamed corn, melted butter, sour cream and shredded cheese. Very likely to clog up your arteries.... Since I made it virtually the same as the I Wash, You Dry folks, I refer you to them for the actual recipe.

The only thing I did differently was that I cooked it Saturday evening and let it cool overnight.  The next day I heated it in the oven while the 60 Minute Rolls were baking.  The pudding developed a more crispy exterior.   I think I would like it even crispier.  Still, it did taste good just as is.  It would probably be fabulous with bits of jalapeño in it.

Food Friday: Quick and Easy Black Bean and Corn Salad

Quick and Easy Black Bean and Corn Salad

Drain 3 15 ounce cans black beans and rinse them.

Drain 2 15 ounce cans of whole kernel sweet corn.

Place in a large bowl.

Chop half a red onion into fine dice and add to bowl.

Dice one orange bell pepper and add to bowl.

Chop one head of broccoli and add to bowl.

Pour on about one-half bottle of Vidalia Onion Dressing.

Gently toss then refrigerate for a couple of hours.

If you are smart, which I was not,  you will dice several celery stalks and a small jalapeño and add in. You might also want to add some chopped cilantro.

Serve in a pretty bowl with sweet cherry tomatoes as garnish.

It was actually edible as I made it, but would have been better with the mentioned amendments.

Gardening on a Mission!

We always had a garden at home.  When we found out where we were going to be living on our mission I was thrilled to see there was a balcony off our living room. Immediately I thought we would be able to raise lettuce and maybe a few herbs.  When we arrived we discovered that our balcony faces east so there would only be sun for a couple of hours in the morning.  That would not work for a garden.  Disappointing.

What to do, what to do?  Well,  a month or so ago I put us on a list of farms and gardens which sell to the public and/or have pick your own.  We get lots of notices, most of which are further away than we want to drive.  This week we received word that there were pick your own tomatoes!  Yay!!!  And I really mean YAY!!!  I love real tomatoes.  The tomatoes we buy in the store are totally tasteless and not at all juicy.  So I talked Dear One into a gardening trip.  The J's went with us, too.  So nice.

This is what we picked:

Dear One picked the berries.  Some of the tomatoes are Brandywine, which are very very flavorful.  The others (in the foreground) also taste wonderful.  I may be on tomato overload for a few days but since it only happens a few weeks a year, I don't mind the skin rash and tummy issues..  At least, not much...

Elder and Sister J gave us the Gravenstein apples, a new variety to me.  The corn is yellow and white, which is what we prefer.  My father always raised Butter and Sugar corn back in the old days when I was in my youth.  I personally picked hundreds of bushels of that wonderful corn to sell at the roadside stand, to sell at Tunbridge World's Fair (which is a September tradition), and for my father to peddle to the stores in our local area. 

Seeing that corn always brings back happy memories.  One of those memories being that our corn piece is where I met Dear One for the first time, when he came over to help my father with the corn picking.  True story.  May I say that he must have seen something there because as far as physical appearance, well at 5 o'clock in the morning, after walking through the wet cornfield, with pollen from the tassels, and "rain" from the cornstalks making all of us soaking wet, we were a sight to behold.  It was much more fun to pick corn at mid-day, but that was not the time we did it.  By 7 o'clock my father would have finished the milking chores and came down to pick us corn pickers up  to bring us back up on the hill for breakfast.  Often Mother would have made us hot chocolate.  Hot chocolate is a comfort food for me.  Thus renewed, we would go back for another few hours of picking.  Lots of bushels every day.

Munchie Monday: Quick and Easy Southwestern Salad

We plan to have a potluck lunch in the office the Wednesday after Transfers.  This is a nice idea.  We put the phone on answering machine for half an hour (unless SOMEONE forgets to turn it back on when lunch is over...it could happen....) and just enjoy each other's company and yummy food.

This time we had hot Costco pizza,  chicken pasta salad,  cut fruit, bagels with three kinds of cream cheese (have you ever had cinnamon and brown sugar?  Deathly...), a gorgeous red velvet cake with ganache and lovely flower decorations on top and dribbling down the sides, and Southwestern Salad.

This salad was basically a can of red beans, drained and rinsed, a can of whole kernel corn, drained and rinsed,  half a sweet onion very finely diced, and one red bell pepper, finely diced.

All these were put into a large bowl and covered with Southwestern Dressing.  To make this the quickest and easiest, you can buy that sort of salad dressing. 

Pour the dressing over the salad ingredients and let it marinate overnight.  When ready to serve, bring it to the table with a big bowl of chopped greens for people to put on their plates then put a scoop of the vegetable mixture on top, then more dressing, if desired.  It was pretty good salad.  Don't ask Dear One, though, because he though it was too iffy to try.  No problem.  More for the rest of us.

The dressing I made:

All these ingredients I added to our blender:
1 cup loosely packed cilantro, including stems
1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
2 cloves garlic
2 Tablespoons lime juice
2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
A little coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Fortunately I tasted it.  Not great, but I was committed to it since I was tired and did not want to go out to the store late at night--well, it was about 8 PM.  That is too late to go out to the store.  For me. 

Because I was unsure if there would be enough dressing, I added another half cup yogurt.  Because this was also so acidic I also added, horror of horrors, one Tablespoon of sugar.  Made all the difference.

It was good enough to take to the potluck.  People said nice things, but then, people always say nice things. Mostly.  I was not embarrassed by it, and because there were only six of us, there was leftover food to take home. I have enjoyed it!