Tag Archives: beans

Food, pulses, Uncategorized

Bean burgers

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Back to my plan of cooking through my clipped recipe file! I have been cooking, just not updating. So anyway, I remembered about the idea when looking through the old posts, and although a bit late today, I will jump right in. With tonight’s dinner, bean burgers.

These were printed off the internet, with no quantities to the ingredients. And I just changed what I did see to round it out more. They smell great, and I can’t wait to cook them and eat them! Trying to serve with polenta and a green salad and some sauteed cauliflower (it’s in the fridge).

Polenta is in the Instant Pot. I have been making a lot of polenta lately because I accidentally bought an extra package of cornmeal and am trying to eat through it. The Instant Pot makes polenta simple and hands off, so now I am making polenta all the time. 🙂

Here’s the recipe for the polenta, barley, and salt potatoes. 🙂

And an IP is here. I recommend it, if you like beans. [amazon_link asins=’B00FLYWNYQ’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’002′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’227c125e-ad77-11e8-81ea-b56f006ec6a3′]

I chopped up some celery, cauliflower and tomato to cook fast in some butter. The lemon and scallion is to finish it off the heat.

So tasty! I made these a few hours ago, and put them in the fridge as is. They held together well and flipped nicely. There is an egg in them so it’s not vegan. I bet aquafaba would work, but I went with the egg.

Oil is ready to cook in when it thinks out and shimmers. You want to leave space for the burgers to cook and not steam.

Those will go for 5min and then be flipped. Five more and then dressed on the plate.

That’s the spiced mayonnaise, and pickled cukes that go on top. It was a hit, although DH suggested the cucumber be chopped like a relish to make it easier to eat with the burgers. Or croquettes— coquettes are breaded and have a crispy outside nad a creamy inside. That’s way more what these are like than a ‘burger’.

And the recipe:

3 cloves garlic

1 cup cilantro leaves whir in processor (or chop?)

I used 3 cups of leftover beans from the Make Your Own Beans I posted earlier.

1 T soy sauce

1 T rice vinegar

1T dark sesame oil

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/4 tsp siracha

pinch salt

whir together until mixed but still chunky. add

1 egg (or 3 T bean juice) and whir until mixed. You do NOT want a paste.

put into a bowl and mix in ~ 3/4 cups of bread crumbs (until it holds together) Let sit while making the condiments. Then make into patties (I made 7), and bread with a mix of

1/3 cup breadcrumbs

3 T sesame seeds

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp cayenne powder

Refrigerate several hours. Heat oil in a pan on medium heat, add burgers, and fry on each side about 5 minutes, turning once until golden brown.

Serve topped with a dollop of mayo and spoonful of relish.

Relish:
1/2 diced cucumber (1/2 a medium sized one) with seeds removed

1 T rice vinegar

1/2 tsp brown sugar

a bit of lemon zest

pinch salt

let sit to cure

Mayonnaise

1/3 cup mayonaise

3 T cilantro, minced

1/2 tsp sesame oil

1/3 tsp siracha

mix well.

And for lunch today, a cold crumbled burger on green salad. Still good!

Food, pulses

Are pulses toxic?

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Well, if you are looking for a reason to avoid pulses, I am sure this will do. Beans are certainly, surprisingly, toxic. They are also surprisingly easy to make safe.

First, it’s mostly kidney and Lima beans that are toxic. Second, the toxins will make you moderately ill, at worst, unless you are eating your weight in beans. Third, it is laughably easy to make these beans safe.

Lima beans (also called butter beans when fresh) have linamarin in them, a compound that could potentially make you ill because of it’s similarity to cyanide. This toxin is broken up by cooking the beans, so the rule is to never eat raw Lima beans.

A different toxin, phytohaemagglutinin, a lectin, is also present in many beans. Red kidney beans are the worst culprit, however, and care should be given when making them. Again, cooking them will destroy the toxin. A hard boil for 10 minutes is enough to make the beans safe, but the FDA says 30 minutes just to be sure. The problem comes in slow cookers, which may not heat the beans high enough with low cooking temps. Pressure cookers, the range, and some slow cookers will be fine.

Again, these toxins are not fatal, and are easy to get rid of. And even if you do get sick, odds are it will last only a few hours. However, if you want to follow a ‘raw’ diet, pulses may not be your food of choice.

In addition, a small percentage of the population will potentially die from fava (broad) beans. These will only hurt you if you have a medical illness, but it is yet another way this incredibly healthy food can kill us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-gvnQfbrIA

So, if you really want to be a bummer at events and avoid eating beans at all costs, there you go. For the rest of us, let’s forge on!

(Lima beans are capitalized because they are named after Lima, Peru, where they have been cultivated for 6000+ years)

Food, health, pulses

WHO is saying to eat pulses?

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I’m so sorry. I will try to avoid that in the future. But yes, the WHO, the US and Canada are all pushing to eat more pulses. The UN actually made 2016 the ‘Year of the Pulse’ to try and get more people to eat them.

Yes, another post about how important it is to get more pulses into your diet. Because it simply can’t be emphasized enough that pulses are cheap, so affordable to everyone around the world, not just to trim a food budget; highly nutritious, so they can reduce malnutrition in poverty stricken countries, and add nutrition to the food rich but nutrition poor diets of many western countries; healthy, for digestive systems, hearts, blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, and many other lifestyle issues; good for the environment, because pulses add to the biodiversity of the soil they are grown in, contributing to healthier soil a healthier environment, and reducing the need for fertilizer; and good for the environment because they mitigate climate change and put less waste into our environment.

There are simply no reasons to not add pulses to your diet, or replace some proteins in your diet with them and many many reasons to do it. Of course, this is assuming you do not have one of the rare problems where you simply cannot digest pulses.

So you are sold, and you want to add more pulses to your diet? You are in luck, because one thing I have is a wide range of pulse meals to share.