Sorry for the long hiatus; I was on vacation and didn’t find time to post anything, though you can find some pictures at my Flickr site (including of some good food we enjoyed). We got home last night and I was happy to be back in the kitchen this evening.
Now that the warm weather is upon us I will be more regularly doing the home version of a salad bar. We have a lovely Tupperware salad bowl that we got for our wedding all those years ago, and it does a great job of keeping lettuce fresh. We have adopted a habit of keeping the different salad ingredients in separate containers (so that when your cucumber goes bad in a few days — and it will — it doesn’t take the rest of the salad with it). So I tore up lettuce leaves and chopped up a few other items.
Then I got to work on Chili Burgers, a recipe from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. You start by sauteeing onions and garlic in olive oil, then adding shredded carrot, chili powder and cumin.
Meantime, you drain and rinse canned red kidney beans (1 30-ounce can or 2 15-ounce cans), though of course you could also use the equivalent quantity cooked from scratch and cooled.
You mash the beans with a potato masher, then add 2 tablespoons each of Dijon mustard, soy sauce and ketchup. Then mix in the sauteed vegetables.
Add 1 1/2 cups of rolled oats and mix well, then shape into 8 patties.
At this point in today’s cooking I wrapped four of the patties in wax paper and then aluminum foil and stuck them in the freezer; they cook wonderfully from frozen. I heated some olive oil in a pan and cooked the remaining four patties about 6 minutes on each side.
I rounded out the meal with salad and corn on the cob.
