It’s been a while since I’ve done much interesting cooking. Things have been quite busy for the foodgeek household with moving, new jobs, and getting back to daily life. We’ve got just about everything back in order, including joining a new CSA, Garden of Eden.

With CSAs in San Diego, you get lots of greens. It’s like we have eternal spring and the greens just keep on growing. This week, the winner was chard. We had a small bunch leftover from last week and got a new bunch of rainbow chard this week so something with chard was in order. Poking around on the internet I stumbled on this recipe

The recipe is pretty much everything you want in a quick-to-put-together weekday meal. The ingredient list is short, the pastry comes together without a fuss, and by the time it is cooked, the kitchen is clean. Big thanks to AppleSister for this recipe (which I shamelessly copied here).

Tourte Aux Blettes (Savory Swiss Chard Tart)

Pastry:
1 cup flour
¼ t. salt
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup water

Filling:
1 lb. swiss chard leaves
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 large eggs
1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine flour and salt; add water and then the oil, mixing until thoroughly blended. After kneading briefly, the dough will be very moist like cookie dough. Press dough into loose-bottomed metal tart pan.

Wash and dry the leafy portion of the chard and coarsely chop the leaves. Wilt the leaves in a skillet, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper. Heat until most of the water has evaporated.

Combine the eggs and grated cheese; add the chard and pour mixture into the pan.

Bake for about 40 minutes, until crust and filling are golden.

This recipe is one of the most popular FoodGeek posts I’ve ever made, and with good reason, these burgers are excellent. It always surprises me that a simple veggie burger can trump such things as macarons and the multitude of pastries on this website. For all the fans of the original recipe, here’s another look at the best.veggie.burgers.ever.

The first time I made these burgers I wasn’t sure what to expect. Oats and nuts with a little bit of spice and some eggs just doesn’t sound like much of a burger to me. Believe me when I say this, I was very wrong. The combination of oats and nuts, first fried, and then boiled, make one of the meatiest, non-meaty burger you will ever have.

There were many questions last time around, hopefully this post will answer all the questions. First off, here’s the recipe.

Walnut Oatmeal Burgers
Adapted from The New Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition

burger mixture:
2 cups walnut pieces
2 cups rolled oats
4 eggs
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

for cooking burgers:
oil to brown patties
3 cups vegetable stock or water

Grind walnuts in blender and combine with the rest of the burger mixture ingredients.

Let the mixture rest in refrigerator for about an hour to let the flavors meld together.

Form the mixture into patties. The entire mixture will make 8-12 burgers depending on the size patty formed. It is recommended to use half of the mixture now, and reserve the rest for use in another recipe or for more burgers later.

Brown patties on both sides in a lightly oiled skillet, then pour the stock into the skillet and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes.

Compared to the old recipe, I’ve made a few changes and was able to get the same results. This time around I skipped the breadcrumbs and the milk; I didn’t realize it until after I cooked them, but they came out great as well. I also settled on two cups of walnuts instead of a “cook’s choice” sort of recipe. I left out the sage, too, since you can take it or leave it. I left it out and they were still fantastic. I figure if there’s a spice you want in your burgers, you’re going to add it in anyways. Feel free to add whatever you’d like here; I think I used oregano this time and it worked nicely.

The recipe suggests first browning the patties on both sides and then simmering in veggie stock for another fifteen minutes. This is not a mistake and really does work. The burgers will hold shape and do not get soggy, wet, or fall apart. A few readers mentioned they just fried them and it worked well, too. I fried a bit by itself without steaming and I can confirm it works; the texture is slightly less meaty, but in a pinch it works like a charm.

I’ve yet to try a vegan version of this recipe but I believe you can substitue silken tofu for the eggs. It should work as a binder and have the added bonus of extra protein in the burger. You’ll have to change the name to Super-protein Walnut Oatmeal burgers though.

Has anyone else made these burgers? Have any suggestions? I’d love to see what everyone is doing with these burgers. Maybe we should have a veggie burger cook-off?

Nope.

It’s not all pastry and French food here, sometimes I want food and I want it quick. I know the lowly ramen isn’t what you would expect, but this is reality. Ramen is cheap, versatile, and easy to find.

There’s no reason to eat ramen just as it is: dried noodles with flavored broth package. With very little effort you can transform the paltry ramen into something you’d probably pay extra for outside of home. In fact, ramen doesn’t even need to be a soup, it can be transformed into anything from salad topping to what I have created here, yakiramen.

Yakiramen is my take on the Japanese dish, yakisoba. Yakirsoba is basically cooked soba and assorted vegetables stir fried. Replace the soba noodles with ramen and you get yakiramen. If you’re keeping score on the ramen, the noodles are fried, dried, boiled, and the fried once more. I guess you could call this refried ramen, but I don’t see that catching on anytime soon.

There’s not much of a recipe to this dish but here’s what’s in my creation. Ramen noodles (Top Ramen shown above), sliced carrots, green beans, cabbage. I used diced shallots and garlic for the aromatics and made a simple shoyu sauce (shoyu, vinegar, chile paste, water, and mirin). The sauce was thickened at the last minute with a small amount of corn starch slurry.

Here’s what the final dish looks like. Looks better than the picture on the package, eh?

The eater always tells me I make the best sandwiches. My formula for a good sandwich starts with good bread. Leave the Wonder bread for toast and find something good – something with a good crust, something with an unusal flavor, or something with a nice airy texture. I then try to match the ingredients in the sandwich with the bread. You can never say too much about good, fresh vegetables or top-quality deli-meats, don’t skimp here! Finally, to hold everything together, you need a good spread. Dry sandwiches just aren’t any good so find something to bind it all together and marry the flavors. To top everything off, garnish the sandwich with something fun, like olives, and pile on the potato chips…mmmmm, potato chips.

Here’s one I almost deleted and didn’t show everyone.

• Whole Foods focaccia bread
• Fresh mozzarella
• Homegrown sprouts
• Red leaf lettuce
• Ripe, hydroponic tomato (hey, it’s still winter in New England)
• Olive tapenade /mayo mix

It was a damn good sandwich, I can’t lie.

Last week, Sam over at Beck’s and Posh posed the question, “What does your unedited fridge look like?” I figured I’d take some pictures of the silver box and detail what is inside. While I generally don’t stock the sort of ingredients that Alice Q. or David Lebovitz does but here we go:

Starting with the door in no particular order:

Condiments, lots of boring American ones: ketchup, mustard, mayo, Japanese mayo, tabasco, worcestershire. A few Asian staples: mirin, sriracha, chili paste. Rounding it all out is milk, some water (tap, the best!), an opened bottle of wine, olives, capers, and cream.

On the top shelf there’s some cooked wheat berries, black beans, Trader Joe’s greek style yogurt, and some pita bread.

Pretty much the rest of the fridge is loaded with CSA fruits and veggies from Wednesday.

If you’re wondering what’s in the toothpaste tube, it is fancy dog treats.

Lately, we’ve been a little behind eating our vegetables. Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming having vegetables delivered to your house every Wednesday, whether you need them or not.
Here’s a little something I dug out of The Greens Cookbook that uses many of the vegetables that we’ve been stockpiling these days.

My main goal was to find a recipe that would use up the large bunch of chard I had sitting in the refrigerator from last week. I grabbed this veggie-centric cookbook and hoped for the best. Apparently some eater already got to this book and marked several recipes with post-it notes, this recipe being one of them. I think the note read something like, “Yummy! I want to eat this!” or something like that.

I quickly read the recipe and found that I had just about everything on hand except for the buckwheat linguine that the recipe suggested. I made the decision to make homemade egg pasta with white flour as a substitute; in the end it all worked out. If you do happen to have some fresh pasta on hand, this recipe would make for a nice quick and light dinner.

Linguine with french lentils carrots and chard
(Adapted from The Greens Cookbook)
2-3 carrots finely diced
6 leeks finely diced
1 bunch of chard chiffonard
3 cloves garlic

1 cup lentils picked over
2 bay leaves

1 lb fresh pasta
Shaved pecorino Romano cheese
Salt, pepper, olive oil

Place lentils, bay leaves, and 4 cups of water in a small pot and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 15 minutes or until lentils are tender but not falling apart. Drain immediately and toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Remove bay leaves.

Bring a large 6qt pot of water to a boil. (for the pasta)

In a large skillet saute leeks, carrots, and garlic until softened. Add the lentils, chard, and about one cup of water and lower heat to a simmer. Cook for about five minutes or until the chard is just wilted.

When the vegetables are almost done, cook pasta. Fresh pasta only takes about two to three minutes to fully cook. Drain pasta and add it to the vegetables along with several tablespoons of olive oil. Adjust seasoning and simmer for one minute to blend flavors.

Immediately turn out onto a serving dish and top with freshly shaved Romano cheese.

The other day, the foodie decided to dig through some of my vegetarian cookbooks for veggie burger recipes. After perusing a few he asked me “TVP or Walnut Oatmeal?” Although I do often really like the way textured vegetable protein works in recipes, walnut oatmeal just sounded too good to turn down. I hadn’t tried either recipe before, because despite my many recipe books, I really have never been much of a cook.

After a quick trip to the store for a few needed ingredients, the burger assembly began. When he got to the browning of the patties, I was amazed at how meaty the burgers smelled. The house filled up with their irresistible aroma and I couldn’t wait to try them.

I was definitely not disappointed when they were complete with these very flavorful burger and their nice meaty texture. They were nutty and delicious and the best veggie burgers I’ve had the pleasure to eat, which is saying quite a lot considering the many many varieties of veggie burgers I’ve eaten in the past. I hope to see this recipe again soon.

The leftover mixture got to make a second appearance as surprisingly convincing meatballs in a spaghetti and meatball dish a few days later.

Walnut Oatmeal Burgers
Adapted from The New Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition

burger mixture:
1½-3 cups walnut pieces
2 cups rolled oats
½ cup breadcrumbs
3 or 4 eggs, slightly beaten
½ cup skim milk
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sage
1 tsp salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste

for cooking burgers:
oil to brown patties
3 cups vegetable stock

for serving:
hamburger buns and any desired burger fixings

Grind walnuts in blender and combine with the rest of the burger mixture ingredients.

Let the mixture rest in refrigerator for about an hour to let the flavors meld together.

Form the mixture into patties. The entire mixture will make 8-12 burgers depending on the size patty formed. It is recommended to use half of the mixture now, and reserve the rest for use in another recipe or for more burgers later.

Brown patties on both sides in a lightly oiled skillet, then pour the stock into the skillet and bring to a boil.

Reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 25 minutes.

Serve on buns with all your burger fixings.