Recipe #13: Chickpea-Brown Rice Burgers

Our first recipe was a burger made with quinoa and mushrooms and it was an easy transition for my newly meatless palate.  Now that I've become accustomed to the veggie ways we figured we should try another veggie burger recipe.

A veggie burger has now been my go-to meal when I go out with some of my friends to watch hockey games. As they chow down on their chicken wings (As I stare) I get the veggie burger with a side of deep fried pickles. Not a very healthy meal I know but I've become a veggie burger connoisseur of sorts. 

Although I now enjoy the veggie burgers, one of my biggest temptations is the BigMac. Ms. Boyardee's family sends me pictures of BigMacs and I am always tempted to go to the closest Mcdonalds and binge out. Luckily, I got a large bag of BigMac sauce for christmas this year and have been putting it on pretty much everything to crush my cravings...even cereal. The day before we made this recipe we got a Mcdonalds coupon book in the mail...2 for 1 BigMac meals...I told Ms. Boyardee we needed to make burgers the next night and buy a shredder or I was gonna give in. 

The recipe is simple enough, cook some brown rice, add some cooked chick peas, and mash them both together until they have the consistency of ground meat. We then add an egg, shallots, garlic and parsley. We then make tiny little "meat" patties and cook them on stovetop in some olive oil until golden brown. 

The recipe calls for lettuce leaf bus to make it healthier and I did't mind them but I think I would have much preferred a bun...more BigMac-like. We topped the burgers with red onion, roasted peppers and dijon mustard. The burgers were good but what made them GREAT was an addition of the BigMac sauce....even Ms. Boyardee was sold. The pictures are again magnificent, and I plan on smuggling in BigMac sauce wherever I go from this point on. 

A: 7/10

J: 7/10...8.5/10 with BigMac sauce

Recipe #12: [Big Quoty] Summer Rolls with Carrot-Ginger Dipping Sauce

What's better to make in the dead of winter than some nice summer rolls...probably anything...but Ms. Boyardee was feeling particularly asian-ish so we chose to make this simple recipe for all my viewers from the east. This website says I have FIVE views from South Korea....which is kind of ridiculous to me...but I am now 99% certain this blog would go viral in North Korea if Kim-Jong-Un wasn't blocking it from the viewers....nevertheless, we purchased some rice papers from the asian-pantry at the supermarket and went to work on our summer rolls.

Just a side note, I always thought these things were called spring rolls...and I am kind of confused as to which season I am eating.

The recipe is pretty easy and all it requires is rice paper, beats, carrots, bell peppers, radishes, and cucumber. The sauce is a mix of carrots, shallots, ginger, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil (we added peanut butter which was possibly the greatest idea ever).

The recipes says to cut all the vegetables into "matchsticks" which sounds way easier than it actually is. Maybe I was just really poor at it because Ms. Boyardee had all the cucumbers and beets done while I was widling away at my third baby carrot. What felt like forever later, all the matchsticks were complete (they look more like lighter consistency) and it was time for the rolling of the rice paper.

Unlike some of my friends and hippie's from the 70s, I don't have very much experience with rolling any type of paper, and rice paper is pretty much the worst material imaginable because it sticks to everything and rips if you breathe on it. Ms. Boyardee was rolling like a Cuban cigar factory worker and I finally finished one roll and placed it on the finished plate....it didn't make the cut. Ms. Boyardee told me it looked like a wet used condom.....how appetizing. I decided to put my efforts towards the sauce.

Compared to rolling, the sauce was a piece of cake. I just had to be careful not to use to much sesame oil as one drop to much pretty much ruined everything. We made one batch of sauce without peanut butter and one batch with peanut butter. We added what Ms. Boyardee calls my "icing sugar peanut butter" which is just a plain jar of skippy. The peanut butter really made the sauce unbelievable and we pretty much threw out the other sauce.

I hated eating these things because as soon as you dipped the roll in the sauce all the "matchsticks" would fall out and if you ate one of the ones that I rolled it would just fall apart in your hands. All in all, not a bad meal but next time I'll save it for summer.

Ms. B: 6.5/10
J: 5/10