Recipe Roundup

Last week I experimented with three new recipes.  All three were good, and two were instant favorites.

First up, Smashed Chickpea & Avocado Sandwich from Two Peas and Their Pod.  This is the sandwich that was so yummy, I chose it over grilled cheese.  I love the play of salt and lime juice with the avocado and chickpeas.  Not only was this a great sandwich spread, it made an awesome dip.  A very rare recipes for which I didn't and wouldn't change a single thing.   

Favorite of family and friends last week were my Star Wars Day dueling lightsaber cupcakes.  Give them a try (light sabers optional).  I got the recipe for 100% Whole Grain Chocolate Cupcakes from Texanerin Baking.  I chose to top them with a Nutella-style hazelnut chocolate spread instead of the espresso frosting.  The combination of hazelnut chocolate spread with these cupcakes was just too yummy.  Erin gives a couple variations in this recipe, I used whole wheat pastry flour, turbinado sugar (Sugar in the Raw), and canola oil.

Our house is anything but gluten-free, but I'm always on the lookout for a tasty cookie with no refined white flour or sugar, and for deserts that combine some worthwhile nutrition with the treat.  These Almond Butter Chocolate Chip Oat Cookies from Kneadtocook have no refined flours and are full of protein.  I followed the recipe as written, using almond butter, and the cookies turned out well.  Next time I would add 1/4 teaspoon of salt.  To get the best cookie taste, a pinch of salt to contrast the sugar would have really added some extra kick to the flavor.  I have a feeling most almond butters contain a little salt, but my almond butter had none, so check your almond butter before deciding whether or not to add salt.  Aside from needing that kiss of salt, a decent, chewy, gluten-free cookie.  The batter is very sticky- make sure to use Silpat or parchment paper as indicated!

This week's new recipes on the horizon include an interesting spice blend to roast and grind.  It will then become part of an intriguing new spiced cashew snack.  Should be fun!

Google nutrition labels referee his and hers sandwich faceoff: avocado vs. low fat cheese

Today at lunch I made a choice to eat a very yummy chickpea and avocado sandwich.  My husband enjoyed a grilled cheese sandwich.  Whose sandwich was healthier?  I know avocados have fat- but is it mostly "good fat" like polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat, or is an avocado full of saturated fat just like the cheese?

Produce doesn't come with a handy nutrition label like, say, a package of cheese.  You might think it would take a lot of research to figure out exactly what you're getting into with an avocado- how much fat, unsaturated vs. saturated, how much protein per serving?  But getting a nutrition label for an avocado, or an apple, or any produce is super easy.


A quick google search: "avocado nutrition" yields this handy nutrition label, right on the search results page:

I've used this handy Google Nutrition Label before.  The nutrition label is interactive- I love that I can specify different amounts, such as 1 cup, sliced, 100 grams, etc. 

I'll spare you the math and get to the conclusion: ounce per ounce avocado had about 5 times had less saturated fat than our reduced fat cheddar cheese.  Avocado has a whole bunch of healthy monounsaturated fat (the cheese had none).  Avocado also had bonus fiber (the cheese had none).  But the cheese wins hands down on protein, containing about 14 times more protein than avocado!

However, my delicious sandwich was a combo of avocado and chick peas.  So I analyzed our sandwich fillings as I prepared them.  

Here's the head to head on his and hers sandwiches:  I got about a third less saturated fat that my hubby did.  And he got three times more protein than me, though he missed out on monounsaturated fat and fiber.  

So long as we don't exceed hubby's saturated fat allotment for the day, I feel good about giving him the protein boost with the grilled cheese sandwich.  I feel equally good about the healthy fats I got- so long as I make sure to keep the protein coming throughout the day.  Healthy means taking into account an individual's unique nutrition needs in the context of what's eaten throughout the rest of the day.  I think consumed wisely, both sandwiches could be part of a healthy, balanced diet.  And both sandwiches were delicious!

If you'd like the recipe for the Smashed Chickpea & Avocado Sandwich I enjoyed for lunch today, check out the recipe on twopeasandtheirpod.com.  

How to get a vegetarian to eat you alive (adventures in home made veggie burgers)

There is something comforting about a sandwich.  Two fresh slices of bread cuddling a nice chunk of protein, maybe some fresh vegetables as well, with a little spread of mustard.  Yum.

Unfortunately for vegetarians the chunk of protein between those two slices of bread is all too often a heavily processed, salty, packaged, veggie burger.  So the idea of home made veggie burgers combined with my love of lentils, made this recipe for Vegan Lentil Burgers from forealslife.com seen quite attractive.

So attractive that I didn't even consider the dangers of making my own veggie burgers.

The recipe for Vegan Lentil Burgers didn't look too daunting.  It required me to cook some lentils, do some grinding in the food processor, shape the resulting dough into patties, and bake for 35 minutes.  I slated the recipe trial for a weeknight dinner and, armed with whole wheat bread I'd baked earlier that day and my favorite mustard, I felt confident about dinner.

However the dinner I embarked on making veggie burgers happened to coincide with one of our evening workouts.  I got a late start making dinner because of the workout, then went through the inevitably slower process of carefully reading and measuring ingredients for a brand new recipe.  By the time I had a dough ready to form into patties, my post-workout, ravenous hubby wanted to know why dinner was taking so long.  The starving glint in his eye threatened that if I didn't hurry he was going to eat me alive...

...or order pizza.

In a happy ending we both survived the late dinner.  My starving hubby thought the lentil burgers tasted fine (though he might have eaten an old shoe at that point), but I was less impressed.  In subsequent experiments I pan fried the veggie burgers in a little oil, once before baking, once after- and on both occasions the pan frying improved the texture so that no one had to be starving to enjoy them.

What I learned from this adventure (aside from not letting my husband get that hungry) was that part of the comfort of a sandwich is in the ease and speed of its preparation.  Sliding a frozen veggie burger out of its plastic wrap into a skillet or onto a cookie sheet, and having dinner ready in twenty minutes, is part of the innate comfort of the sandwich.  A sandwich is all about having your work done well ahead of mealtime- bread baked, condiments prepared (by you or the manufacturer), requiring at most the cooking of the protein and a quick slice of bread and tomato.

As suggested in the recipe, I froze leftovers of the lentil burger dough into patties to make them more convenient for the future.  Cooking these home made prepared veggie burgers still involves the foresight to thaw, the time to fry, and then the half hour to bake the burgers.  But having seen some improvement in texture with frying and decrease in prep time by freezing the patties, I plan to experiment with pre-frying and pre-baking the burgers before freezing so that I can get closer to the fast and easy convenience of the veggie burger as I've come to know and love it.

I'm also interested in changing out the oat flour used this recipe for lentil flour made in the Vitamix.  I think the protein chunk satisfaction would be even more satisfying if there was less grain in the sandwich and more lentil.

The idea to fry before baking the burger comes from Vegan Burgers Every Which Way by Lucas Volger.  Some of his recipes also incorporate chickpea (besan) flour, which was part of my inspiration to try making my own lentil flour.

Veggie Burgers Every Which Way

Assuming I can get dinner on the table before anyone eats me, I'll have some more adventures in making veggie burgers to share soon.

Plato and the Reuben Sandwich

At what point is my alternative sandwich no longer a Reuben?

The ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, is famous for a lot of things.  The Reuben sandwich is not one of them.

One of the things Plato is famous for is his theory of Forms.  Plato posited that there is an ideal Form, Form with a capital F, for everything we come across in everyday life.  The Reuben sandwich, the one we all mean when we say we want a Reuben sandwich, is the Form, the ideal.  The actual sandwich we eat is not.

When my native New Yorker husband says he's craving a Reuben sandwich, he has a Form in his mind that goes something like: buttered rye bread with Russian dressing, corned beef, Swiss cheese, and sauerkraut.  According to Plato, no sandwich I could make would possibly hold up to that ideal Form.

Big thanks to Plato for letting me off the hook.  Since I can't possibly make the ideal Reuben sandwich, then I'm free to make it lower in fat, vegetarian, and whole grain.

This is the Reuben sandwich I actually make, light years distant from the Form:

2 slices 100% whole grain spelt bread
1 t Earth Balance Spread
1 t Thousand Island dressing
2 slices Hickory Smoked Tofurky
2 T well-squeezed sauerkraut with caraway seeds
2 slices Swiss cheese

I butter the outside of the bread, put Thousand Island on the inside of the slice.  Then I sandwich the Tofurky and sauerkraut between the two slices of Swiss cheese.  I toast the sandwich on my panini press.

I tried to balance the fact that my spelt bread isn't rye bread by using probiotic sauerkraut with caraway seeds.  The smoked Tofurky is supposed to be giving the impression of corned beef.

You could even go further with the alternative Reuben sandwich.  Vegan Thousand Island and vegan cheeses are available for those who avoid dairy.  Gluten free bread could be substituted- who knows, maybe there's a gluten free deli rye out there somewhere!

But here's the one change I tried to make that didn't work:

In an effort to curtail the huge fat content of this sandwich, I tried to leave off the "butter" (Earth Balance) on the outside of the bread, thinking that the fat from the Swiss cheese and Thousand Island were far more characteristic to the sandwich than the butter.  My husband wouldn't buy it.  A Reuben sandwich that hasn't been greased on the outside with something, somehow, is apparently not a Reuben sandwich.

His refusal on this point brought me into deep thought about what, exactly, makes a Reuben sandwich a Reuben sandwich.  How far away from that Platonic ideal of the Reuben can we get, before the sandwich we've created is no longer even a shadow of that Form?  Apparently I can take away the corned beef and swap out the rye and still sort of have a Reuben.  But if I forsake buttering the outside of the bread I do not.  If I took out the dressing it would not be a Reuben.  If I took out the cheese it would not be a Reuben.  If I put in vegan cheese would it become a Reuben again?

And what about all these substitute foods?  Play foods, really, foods in costume designed to look and somewhat taste like something they are not.  Soy disguised as turkey, cashews disguised as cheese.  Are any of these products Food with a capital F?  And if they are not Food, then is it because they were processed and packaged in a factory?  Or if I had made my own vegan cheese at home, would vegan cheese qualify as Food?

The question of alternative food substitutes is fodder for another post.  In the meantime, I'm left wondering whether a Reuben with much of its artery-clogging properties removed is still a Reuben, and feeling very grateful that the Reuben craving only comes once or twice a year.