Veggie burgers make the cut, but we're still eating beast and fowl
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 11, 2018
- 1618
“Today’s lunch was amazing,” my newly minted wife said. “I’m going to try and make something like it tomorrow night.” She’s probably a better cook than I, but that’s our little secret.
The thing she was raving about gave me great pause: a veggie burger. She’d picked one up at a BAM! Healthy Cuisine restaurant in Canton, and to my surprise, I liked it.
“It tasted oddly just like meat, not weird at all,” she said. “Trust me. I’ll find a decent recipe. You’ll like it. If you don’t, we’ll toss it all and grab a couple of real burgers right away.”
I have a great deal of respect for vegetarians. Frankly my own lifetime contribution to the unthinkable number of processed animals in the United States each year gives me enough guilt to always remember to say something about it in confession.
But I also remember that our species, generally speaking, has evolved for an omnivorous diet. More than that, I think it would be an unwise shock to my body to switch to all vegetables now; I also know I’d never stick to it.
The Atkins thing was hard enough, and that’s practically all meat. For me a balanced diet with carbs and meats and dairy and fats and wine with attempted moderation just works.
Still, it’s hard to resist someone saying they want you to eat something healthy with an eye toward keeping you around as long as possible. So we embarked on the vegetarian meal experiment.
I ask those of you who don’t eat meat and who have an extensive portfolio of recipes and experience to bear with me here. It was all new to us, though my wife avoided meat for several years at one point. After a good, solid try, she failed to thrive on it and began eating beast and fowl again.
Searching the internet for a likely starting point, we hit on trying a combination of carrots, mushrooms, kale, onions, garlic, chickpeas and black beans with spices and bread crumbs as binder.
Whizzing it all up together in a few pulses of the food processor, we fried the resulting patties, which held together nicely, in a cast-iron pan. I’m not ready to share an exact recipe as it was plain we’ll need to do some tweaking in both ingredients and technique. We made them too thick for one thing. But I have to say they were delicious, if squishy.
I immediately learned you can’t smash down the bun or the whole thing squeezes out the sides like too much hips for the Spanx. I added some cheese and Sriracha mayonnaise for extra zing. We’ll surely have them again. Your palate can actually be fooled into believing you’re eating meat if you get the flavors right. We’ll keep working on that.
The next evening we took advantage of the $1-per-ounce steak sale at the meat market nearby, confirming that we are in no way prepared to give up animal proteins. But we will at least add many more vegetables to our diet and reduce the meat bit.
All those images online of piglets and young goats running through the house having a grand time are starting to get to me, though no image of a chicken chasing kids is gonna dissuade me from wanting a big plate of wings. And seafood will always be a part of the menu.
My mind is open to a whole new area of the food galaxy. If it were possible to clap with hooves, I’m sure we’d hear the applause.