Veggie Burger Palooza!: Creating the Perfect Veggie Burger

Last night was Veggie Burger Palooza! here at the fANNEtastic food household! I had a bunch of the girls over with one mission: create the perfect veggie burger.

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For my Food Service Systems Management class, we have a big group project that continues throughout the semester. Our professor is the head of food service at UNC hospitals, so our project involves creating a new menu item for their hospital! Each group has to:

1. Come up with a recipe, either for patient menus or for one of their retail restaurants/ cafes (we chose retail). Scale to 20 portions.
2. At the hospital, go in and shadow a team to learn how to purchase, receive, and store the materials necessary for our recipe (and then do it!).
3. Using the kitchen and supplies at the hospital, prepare our recipe!

If they love our recipe, they will consider actually implementing it in the hospital! How cool would that be? 🙂 We also do a few other modules for the course, such as:

• Taste testing some of the patient trays (regular, low sodium, low fat, and puree diets) for quality evaluation
• Learning about safety and sanitation
• Planning a new kitchen layout and design including equipment specifications
• Learning accounting procedures

It should be an interesting class! ANYWAY! My group proposed veggie burgers since they don’t have any at the hospital right now, and our professor loved the idea. So last night I had my group (minus our friend Lauren who was busy) over to create the perfect veggie burger recipe! We had a blast! We used my Black Bean Spinach Burger recipe as inspiration, but tweaked it a little to make it even more awesome 🙂 Introducing… Homemade Mexican Black Bean Burgers! (vegan) (makes 2 patties) Ingredients:

• 3/4 C black beans (rinsed and drained)
• 1/2 C fresh spinach
• 1/4 C whole wheat flour
• 2 Tbsp. oats
• 1 Tbsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. olive oil
• 1/2 tsp. cumin
• 1/2 tsp. chili powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 small garlic clove

• Optional toppings: sliced tomato, avocado, fresh spinach, ketchup, mustard

Instructions: Toss it all into a food processor and whirl away! Once it’s mixed, form into two patties. Toss them onto a skillet coated with cooking oil/spray and cook on medium high for about 5 minutes, flipping at least once until they have a bit of a crust on them. Serve atop salad or on a whole wheat bun with toppings! They came out AWESOME — we were pumped! Great texture, stayed together perfectly, and nice flavor, too. Delish! We had sweet potato fries on the side, clearly 🙂 ROAR gross patty forming hands: Isn’t Elle is the cutest waitress ever? 🙂 We made two different versions, hence the half burgers for taste testing each of them! The first version was good but needed more spice since we had increased the flour and added oats to the original recipe. Round 2 was perfect! You know what’s not awesome, though? My scary food processor. It has gotten SO intensely scary and loud it’s ridiculous!!! I guess it’s worn out?! That is not an exaggeration! I literally have to process things with my left arm covering my ear and my right hand covering my other ear because it’s so loud it will blow your head off! The girls didn’t believe me until I turned it on, lol. I think the neighbors were probably scared for their lives. Thankfully Matt and I got a new one from his parents for Christmas — he’s hopefully going to bring it down with him this weekend (he’s finally coming back from Europe today!!!). I’m off to class — have a wonderful day 🙂