Sideways Recycled Bean Burgers

What do you do with leftover beans? Burg them!! Keep any leftover beans aside, even if they have veg and grain in them, and mash them up to make beans.

At the retreat, we continuously made bean burgers by adding chopped onion and carrot to the leftover beans, added bread crumbs, oat flakes, or even best - flour (we used fresh ground whole kamut). Play with the quantity of grain to get them tough enough to form balls in your hands - if they do, place them on a baking sheet (with parchment paper is best), and bake them at about 375F for 20 minutes or so, as per your desired firmness of burger. Pictured here, is a baking sheet for a giant oven, forced into our little home-sized oven - it worked just fine, but there were a few wonky burgers from it. Also - you can add seasonings to bring them to life, like ground cumin and black pepper - or curry powder etc. Easy as pie!.. actually, easy as bean burgers!

Random Veggie Burger

The picture doesn't do the burger justice - it was out of batteries, and I got in just one shot before the camera cakked out on me. So I have a picture of a tomato with a blurry burger in the foreground.

So it's time to go grocery shopping, very badly, the fridge is almost empty, but surely there's lots to eat in the house! So I took the following ingredients (without measuring! I'm very sorry! I just put things together and see what happens.. but food's food, so you really can't go wrong eating something that doesn't "work out"!)

First I ground up into a coarse flour:

-buckwheat groats (I'd say 1/2 cup?)
-lentils - about 1/4 cup

.. and added some salt, spelt flour (1/4 cup), thyme, black pepper

Then I diced up and then pureed in my grinder:

-remains of an eggplant

-zucchini

-carrot

-onion

Add the two together, wet your hands, and plop balls of this batter onto a buttery cookie sheet. I baked them at 350F for about 35 minutes, and they turned out delish!

We ate them with an Ezekiel brand hamburger bun, slice of tomato, slices of naturally fermented picks, and Grandma's homemade mustard!.. and Anna got to take some with her to lunch the next day! I bet these burgers cost a whopping $.50 cents to make, which is astonishing considering you pay almost $7 for good real-food (and whole food!) veg burgers in the health food store. I smell as business plan... and another batch of veg. burgers in my oven.