Quinoa Burgers

As promised, here's the first recipe from the mini dinner party: Quinoa Burgers!  We served them with Tsatziki sauce, but I have a feeling that they would be good with lots of different flavors- maybe a curry sauce?
I found the original recipe here and more or less followed the directions, although of course with just a few modifications.  The only real trouble I had was that a couple of the burgers fell apart while I was cooking them, but I think I might have been making them too thin or something.  A little extra flour fixed the problem.  Also, if you've never tried quinoa, do not be afraid!  It's one of those great superfoods that packs lots of protein, and has just a slightly nutty flavor.

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked quinoa*

3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1/2 cup cottage cheese

1 medium carrot, finely grated

3 eggs

2 or more tablespoons all purpose flour (start with 2, if it's still too crumbly add in more flour as necessary)

2 green onions, including white parts

1 /2 teaspoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

Olive oil for frying

*To cook quinoa: Boil 2 cups of salted water, then add quinoa and cover.  Cook on low for about 20 minutes, or until all the water is absorbed (like rice).  When cooked, the quinoa should be tender, almost clear, and you should be able to see the germ- the little white spirally thing.  Let it cool for a little bit before adding it to the burger mixture.

Directions:

1. Combine everything (except for the oil) in a bowl and mix it all together.  If it's not sticking together at all, add a little more flour.
2. Heat some oil in a pan over a medium heat.  Form the mixture into patties (about 1/2 inch thick would probably be good, I think mine were a little too thin and consequently fell apart a little) and then fry until golden brown on both sides- about 4 minutes on each side.
3. Yay! You're done.  Serve with some tsatziki sauce, or ketchup, or curry sauce, or whatever floats your boat.

Falafel with Tsatziki Sauce

After the dinner party the other night, where we made a modified Tsatziki sauce for Quinoa burgers (and yes, I know I still have to put up the recipe for that), I had some leftover ingredients and decided to make falafel with a slightly more complete Tsatziki than I had made the other night.  I made it super garlicky, like the kind of garlic thing that leaves your mouth burning for an hour after you're done eating, but it was oh-so-good.  As for the actual falafel, this was a modified, lazy version of falafel which was still quite tasty but not the super-authentic-straight-from-the-Middle-East kind of falafel.  So if you want real falafel, don't make this.  If you want a fast, falafel-ish meal, this is the place to look.  In case you're wondering, I browsed this site as well as this recipe from vegweb to get ideas for how to go about making the falafel and sauce.

By the way, if possible, make the Tsatziki sauce first so that the flavors have some time to meld together.

Tsatziki Ingredients:

1 small container (or about 6 oz) of plain Greek yogurt. You could use normal yogurt too, but the Greek yogurt is thicker and works better as a base for the sauce.
3 Tbs non-fat sour cream 
1/2 a cucumber, peeled and seeded, and cut into small chunks or grated.
1-4 cloves of garlic (finely chopped or put through a garlic press), depending on your love of garlic (taste and decide!)
2 Tbs finely chopped dill
1/2 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp olive oil (or more if you want)
Salt and pepper to taste 

Directions:

Mix all the ingredients together thoroughly.  Ideally let it sit for a little while to let the flavors blend together (but keep refrigerated).  Serve cold.


Falafel Ingredients:
1 smallish onion, chopped
1 (15 oz) can of chickpeas, drained, rinsed, and roughly mashed
1 1/2 Tbs parsley (more if it's fresh)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp olive oil
2 Tbs flour, or more if needed
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp coriander
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for frying

Note: I didn't have my ground flaxseeds at the time, but if I did I probably would have added some in to make the mixture more cohesive.  Some recipes called for egg, which I didn't add, so I think the flax would have worked out nicely.

Falafel Directions:
1.  Saute the onion in a pan with a little bit of olive oil, just enough so that they begin to soften and turn translucent.
2.  While the onion is cooking, throw the chickpeas in a bowl and roughly mash them- some chickpea lumps are ok!
3.  Throw in all the other ingredients (including the onions, once they're done) and mix together thoroughly.  Once it's all mixed, taste it to see if it needs anything else.  If it's not sticking together at all, add in a bit more flour.
4.  Put some olive oil in a pan (I'm lazy and used the same pan from the onions- it's one less dish to wash) and heat it on medium.   Form the mixture into small patties, and then fry in the pan until browned on both sides.  I left mine on the lighter side, but some people like theirs darker.  Either way is delicious.

Serve this falafel in a pita with some lettuce, tomato, and onion, and top with the tsatziki sauce.  Yum!

Cooking Confessions from my 2nd Dinner Party

I'm totally becoming an expert mini-dinner-party-thrower/cooker-person.  A few days ago I cooked dinner for my sister and two friends, but of course with a lot of help, and this time there was only a normal amount of excess food instead of a gigantic amount of excess.  I'm learning!

The menu included:
Appetizer: French bread toasted with olive oil and garlic, then topped with an artichoke tapenade (thanks Trader Joe's) and a mix of Parmesan and cheddar cheese.
Main course: Quinoa burgers topped with a simplified Tzatziki sauce.
Side Dish: Risotto with vegetables and Parmesan
Dessert: Chocolate chip cheesecake

Before I actually post the recipes and whatnot, though, I feel a need to confess some things.  Secrets like this will just weigh me down and eat at me from the inside, like how the priest guy in The Scarlet Letter has issues because his guilt about the whole adultery thing gives him actual physical health problems.  And then he finally cracks and shows the whole town how there's some horrible mark on his chest or something too, so it's like he had the same burden that Hester did except that he kept his hidden longer than her so it ate away at him. I think.  It's been a while since I read that book.  It's actually quite an unnecessary analogy anyway.  I just get carried away sometimes.  Sorry.  I digress.

My first confession, which is barely a confession considering that I wrote it out earlier in this posting, is that the appetizer was super easy because it wasn't made completely from scratch.  I used Trader Joe's Artichoke Antipasto, even though I could have easily chopped up some artichoke hearts and mixed them with some stuff.  For a girl who's stubborn enough to make multiple batches of garlic knots instead of giving in and buying pre-made dough, using this jarred artichoke stuff is slightly shameful.  I felt a little redeemed by the rest of the meal, though. So just in case you were wondering if I managed to validate myself or not by the time the meal was over, rest easy- I did.

My next confession is that I forgot to bring multiple ingredients to the kitchen where I was cooking, which resulted in some changes and substitutions being made to certain recipes.  The Tsatziki sauce especially suffered because I forgot cucumber, amongst other things (also because I put about 4 cloves of raw garlic in about 7 oz of the sauce, so it was quite garlicky to say the least).  Lesson learned- double check you have all the ingredients you need, or at least a suitable substitution for ingredients you need.  I even had a list and I still missed stuff.  Also, taste something before adding in massive amounts of garlic.  Not everyone likes being walking vampire repellent.

My final confession is that I did not thoroughly do my homework when I planned dessert.  I had been eyeing up a recipe for a polka dot cheesecake for the longest time, only to realize (when I was about to start making it) that it had to chill for at least 24 hours.  Luckily my sister came up with another, faster cheesecake that was delicious.  However, that served as a solid reminder that I should actually read all of the directions for something I am planning to make, instead of just drooling over pictures and glancing at the ingredients.

I will have recipes up soon for everything that was made for dinner.  Please don't let this post scare you with my apparent incompetence in the kitchen- some of the best things today have been created by mistake!  Chocolate chip cookies were an accident! Look it up if you don't believe me.  But could you imagine a world without chocolate chip cookies? 

Dinner Party 101

It's  been quite a while since I've posted.  I'm sorry for neglecting you, blog.  School ended but then I was surprisingly busy seeing friends and whatnot, and then moving out of my college house and back to my hometown.  Anyway, that's still no excuse. I was still cooking, just not as much.  And I forgot to take pictures of stuff.  But I digress.

I did a small dinner party with my sister yesterday, and due to a questionable series of events I ended up being basically in charge of all the food.  This meant that I planned the menu and cooked it all, but with a lot of help from a few other people in the kitchen (although, on a side note, I never realized how difficult it is to assign jobs to other people while cooking- I had to have all the recipes in my head at once and think about what the prep and next step was for each one at the same time.  More confusing than it seems.  Or maybe just for me.  Either way, the end result was that I frequently ended up standing in the middle of the kitchen with a blank expression on my face, trying to remember what was in the oven or how long onions had been cooking.)  I obviously cooked all vegetarian, but since a lot of the people in attendance were omnivores I tried to make sure that I didn't make anything which was too crazy-hippie-vegan which would scare them away.

After some musings about what to make (heh, pun totally intended as a joke between me and my blog name.... I'm really cool like that) the menu I ended up with was:

My caramelized pears and onions on lentil cakes with vinaigrette salad as an appetizer, slightly tweaked to use the ingredients on hand at my sister's house- it was a balsamic vinaigrette instead of raspberry, and there were walnuts instead of pecans.

The main course was broccoli stuffed shells, loosely based off of this recipe but also just kind of thrown together, but with homemade sauce (which I just learned how to make.... I always thought it was super difficult to make homemade sauce so I always used the stuff from the jar, but it was so easy and so delicious!  Once I attempt it without supervision I'll have to post it here.).

For side dishes we had roasted vegetables (cauliflower, green beans, and carrots) and garlic knots.  However, as usual when I cook with yeast, I had some technical difficulties.  The first batch of dough (so yes, this means I had to make another batch later) I made did not rise at all.  I'm sad to say that I used my recipe for garlic knots, and it just didn't work, unless you like very condensed and chewy knots. I'm convinced the yeast were on strike.  Instead of going out and buying dough at this point, though, I made another batch.  I'm stubborn like that.  I used Joy the Baker's recipe for whole wheat garlic knots, although I just used her directions for the dough and didn't make my knots the way she did.  Thankfully this time the yeast did their bubbling-and-rising thing and didn't make me look like a garlicky failure.  The knots actually rose a ton and were way larger than I usually make them. (sorry, I forgot to take pictures. I was frazzled.)  My problem with these is that they were too bready and not as dense as I like garlic knots, so I guess my search for the perfect garlic knot continues.  One day I'll just have to make a bunch of batches with different amounts of stuff until I get a good balance.  One day.

Finally, dessert was chocolate peanut butter brownies from Evil Shenanigans with homemade chocolate peanut butter sauce (peanut butter, melted chocolate, corn syrup, and milk) with vanilla ice cream.  The brownies were dense and a little sticky, but worked perfectly in a brownie sundae.

I had never done any cooking (at least where I was in charge) for more than about 3 people, and the end result was that I made enough food for about double the amount that I needed.  But I guess it's better to have too much than too little, right?  And leftovers are awesome.  Anyway, end of the story is dinner party success.  Next time maybe I'll even remember to take pictures.