Buckwheat and Black Bean Veggie Patty

Happy New Year, readers!We’d like to start the new year by renewing the resolution to live well - that means working out more, sleeping better, and of course eating healthier! So, it’s only apt to start 2017 with a delicious and healthy recipe - something that you can make ahead and freeze, so you always have a nutritious option on hand whenever hungry. A veggie patty with buckwheat and black beans as a base has excellent texture and can be paired with any vegetables and seasoned with your favorite spices. I added most veggies that I had on hand - carrots, beets and mushrooms. I also added some boiled potatoes for extra binding instead of breadcrumbs/oats.

I’m sure you are aware of the amazing nutritional benefits of most of these ingredients, but in case you’re not into buckwheat yet, I’d strongly recommend trying it. The roasted buckwheat groats work best as they don’t get sticky when cooked (boiled, just like rice). They are hardy and have somewhat of a nutty flavor, they’re rich in minerals and a good source of fiber. More information can be found here.

Ingredients: (Makes ~20 patties)

1½ cups cooked buckwheat groats

2 Tbsp chopped pecans/walnuts

1½ cups cooked black beans (or one 15 oz can), mashed

2 medium red potatoes, boiled and chopped

2 medium beets, boiled/roasted, peeled and finely chopped

4 oz mushrooms (any variety), finely chopped

1-2 medium carrots, finely chopped

1” ginger, grated

2 cloves of garlic, minced

½ tsp turmeric powder

1 tsp paprika

Salt to taste

½ tsp coconut oil + more for pan frying the patties

Heat ½ tsp of coconut oil over medium heat. Add the ginger and garlic and stir for a few seconds until fragrant. Add mushrooms and carrots, add turmeric powder and season with salt. Cover and cook stirring occasionally until all the liquid released by the mushrooms has evaporated.

In a large bowl mix the cooked buckwheat, black beans, potatoes, beets, pecans and the carrot & mushroom mixture. Season with salt and paprika. Mix well until everything comes together. I find it best to mix by hand, mashing the ingredients as you go.

Make small patties about ½” thick by rolling the mixture between your palms, or roll out the mixture on a parchment covered cookie sheet and cut circles using a cookie cutter or a glass. Keep re-rolling the mixture and making patties until all of it is used.

The patties are now ready to be pan fried or frozen to be used later. To freeze the patties, arrange them in a single layer on a plate/cookie sheet covered with parchment paper or plastic wrap. Freeze them covered for an hour, and then transfer to an airtight container. The patties don’t need to be defrosted before cooking.

To cook the patties, add a couple drops of coconut oil to a nonstick pan over medium heat. Gently transfer a couple patties to the pan, cover and cook until browned on the bottom. Flip the patties (adding more oil if needed), and cook covered until the other side is browned. Although I haven't done this yet, if you're cooking a big batch, you could bake them on a greased baking pan at 375 F until browned, flipping them as necessary.

While these make excellent burgers, you can add them to any vegetarian dish such as pasta or salads as a delicious source of protein.

~Gayatri

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Chickpea Burger Patties

Making bean burgers might be the most fun way to use up small quantities of veggies you have left after making salads or other dishes. It’s completely customizable, extremely flavorful and nutrition packed with all the vegetables, and the bean base makes it a good source of vegetarian protein. You can even make a larger batch and freeze some for later - I like to cook them, wrap individually in plastic wrap, then keep them in airtight container in freezer. Making burger patties yourself gives you the advantage of using just the ingredients and quantities you think are good for you, skipping the non-essential fats, sugars, and flavor enhancers that some processed foods might have.

 

This version uses chickpeas, but any other beans could be used instead. The vegetables added to it can also be varied based on what you have or what you like. I love adding beets to burgers, and this time I also had some mini peppers, basil, and green onion on hand. I used an egg for binding, however you could eliminate that if needed by using a paste of flaxseed powder and water, or crumbling up a slice or two of bread moistened with water. Oats help with binding, too, and also add texture to the burgers. To enhance the flavor, you could add any spices/herbs of your choice, maybe even a spoonful of ketchup or pesto. Keep it as simple as you’d like, or go crazy with the add-ins - it will be delicious either way!

Ingredients: (~5-6 patties)

1 can of chickpeas - drained and rinsed

1/2 med onion (~1/4 cup finely chopped)

2-3 mini sweet peppers - chopped (~ 1/4 cup)

1 medium red beet - cooked and finely chopped

2 large basil leaves - finely chopped

1-2 sprigs of green onion (chopped)

1/2 tsp oregano

1 Tbsp honey mustard

1 tsp lemon juice

1 clove of garlic - minced (or 1 tsp garlic powder)

1-2 Tbsp flaxseed powder

Salt to taste

Paprika to taste

1/3 cup oats

1 egg - beaten

Oil/butter

 

Mash the chickpeas leaving them somewhat coarse (or pulse in a food processor). Add the remaining ingredients except for oil/butter and mix well until everything comes together.

 

Heat a pan on medium-low, and coat it with a very thin layer of oil/butter. Form a ½ inch thick patty with the chickpea mixture and gently place it in the pan. Cover and cook until the bottom is browned. Flip the burger and cook uncovered until the other side is browned.

 

If you like you could add a slice of cheese on top after flipping the burger once. It will get nice and melty while the other side cooks. The chickpea burger patties are great to snack on with ketchup for dipping, or can be chopped up and used in salads. But if you go the more traditional way and make a burger, you surely won’t miss the meat!

 

~Gayatri

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Spaghetti and Beet Balls

Who says spaghetti and meatballs is something only meat eaters can enjoy? You could always put a vegetarian twist on it and make a veggie patty into a sphere, or to really convince yourself that it’s indeed a comparable dish, you could make spinach and ricotta balls, give them a rhyming name and call them “no-meat” balls, or make “beet” balls with beets, black beans and cashews. Fine, it’s still not quite the same, but all puns aside, these delicious and moist beet balls are wonderful with spaghetti, salads, sandwiches, or just on their own as a snack.

Ingredients:

3 medium beets

¾ cup cooked black beans (or from a can)

½ cup packed spinach leaves

¼ cup raw cashews

2 Tbsp quick oats

1 clove of garlic

½ tsp grated ginger

1-2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp cumin powder

½ tsp paprika (adjust to taste)

Salt to taste

Wash the beets and cut into halves. Leave the skin on and steam for ~15 minutes until they’re tender. Peel off the skin. Alternately, you could boil or roast the beets in the oven.

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Add the steamed beets along with all other ingredients to a food processor and process until the mixture is well combined and starts to come together. Shape into 1” balls and arrange them on a parchment lined cookie sheet.

Bake in preheated oven for 5-7 minutes. Flip them over gently and bake for another 5-7 minutes until lightly browned and firm to touch.

Let cool and store in airtight container in the refrigerator. For a delicious healthy snack, serve the beet balls with yogurt (or sour cream) and paprika.

To pair the beet balls with spaghetti, make an avocado pesto sauce by blending together 1 Tbsp spinach walnut pesto, one mashed avocado, enough water to get a creamy sauce consistency and lemon juice, salt & pepper to taste. Mix the sauce with cooked spaghetti and enjoy with beautiful red beet balls.

~Gayatri

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Not your average spaghetti and meat balls! This vegetarian pasta dish uses beets for a delicious flair.http://cooksofcakeandkindness.blogspot.com/2015/12/spaghetti-and-beet-balls.html

Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Saturday, December 26, 2015

An Engineer's Guide to Baking Even Cake Layers (Celebrating 100 posts of Kindness!)

Happy 100th post to The Cooks of Cake and Kindness! Fellow readers, it has been a pleasure sharing our culinary experiences with you. Thank you for reading, supporting us here and on Facebook, and for trying out our recipes and giving us feedback. Here’s a delicious cake to celebrate this milestone!

 

Figure 1: Vanilla cake  with strawberries and beets; Cream cheese frosting dyed with beet juice;

Topped with sliced strawberries and chocolate lace

 

Given the title of the post and the “figure” notation, you might have noticed that this is not one of our typical recipe posts. Today we will share a technique instead of a recipe, along with the science behind it.  

The Problem

Figure 2: Chocolate cake with tall dome

 

Most cakes will rise into a dome shape as they bake, and it’s wonderful to see a beautiful dome when baking cupcakes. However when baking a sheet cake or any cake that needs frosting, it’s not the most ideal characteristic. Especially when making a layered cake, you’d want to have nice flat cake layers. Unless the cake comes out flat from the oven, you’ll have to trim the tops to get even layers. Even though it’s fun to munch on the top that is cut off, or turn it into these delicious cake truffles, it is a pain to cut evenly, and it also makes frosting a little bit challenging with all those loose crumbs. So how can you ensure nice level cakes straight from the oven?

The Science

To get to that answer, let’s first understand the physics behind that dome. You’ve mixed your baking powder and/or baking soda well with the flour and your batter is nice and even in the pan. We also expect the oven temperature to be fairly even in the horizontal plane (especially if the cake pan is centered horizontally). There’s one thing that is not being controlled though - the temperature of the pan surface.

As the pan heats up, it transmits that heat to the batter immediately adjacent to the surface. Hence the batter near the edges of is pan gets hotter than the center, until it all reaches equilibrium eventually. That leads to the batter at the edges to bake quickly and set faster while the batter in the center continues to bake at a slower rate, giving more time for the baking powder, soda, eggs etc. to do what they’re supposed to - help the cake rise and become nice and fluffy. While that happens, the edges that are already done baking keep getting harder and harder. Moist insides with crispy edges may be divine for cookies and brownies, but not so much for cakes.

 

 

Figure 3: The science behind uneven cakes

What we want is for that moist fluffy texture of the cake center to extend to the edges instead of having those hard edges and a dome in the middle. That means we have to figure out a way to dissipate the heat evenly, and not let the pan surface heat up quicker than the batter in the center.

 

The Solution

There’s actually a pretty simple remedy that results in flat, evenly baked cakes every single time. That means no more trimming hard edges or the dome!

 

All you need is some thick cotton fabric (that you don’t care too much about), and a couple safety pins. The idea is to attach wet strips of fabric to the outside edge of the baking pan so that the pan edges don’t heat up as quickly. There are some fancy ones that you can buy, but a homemade fix with the cotton fabric (maybe even old pillowcases) comes at hardly any cost. Simply fold the thick cotton fabric lengthwise until the height matches the height of the baking pan.

 

Wet these fabric strips and wring them out just enough so that they’re not dripping. Attach the wet strips to the outside of the pan. Use safety pins to attach the strips to each other such that they are snug enough to not fall off.

Figure 4: Baking pans with and without wet sleeve, ready to be transferred to the oven

 

Bake the cake with the strips on. You can take them off after 25-30 minutes if you want to - by that time they’ve done their job. We have baked leaving the strips on for the entire time, and also taking them out after a half hour. The difference is that the latter gives a nice golden brown crust (without it being hard), which is best for cakes that may not be frosted or only frosted on top.

It takes a couple extra minutes before you start baking to get these strips on, but saves a lot of trouble later, and you get cakes that are nice and soft not just in the middle, but all the way to the edges.

 

 

Figure 5: Cakes baked with and without wet sleeve.

Figure 5 shows photographs of mini cakes baked in 4” diameter pans, where the cake baked without the sleeve has a dome on top and the cake baked with the sleeve is flat on top. The dome phenomenon is much more prominent in larger baking pans (as seen in Figure 2), as the heat dissipation is more uneven. But, with this trick up your sleeve, now you can (more) easily construct creations like this! 

 

Figure 6: 100th blog post celebration cake

Happy baking!

~Gayatri & Karla

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An Engineer's Guide to Baking Even Cake Layers!If you've ever wondered how to bake nice and flat cake layers without a...
Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Tuesday, October 6, 2015