Day 28: Black bean eating in the dead of night

I should have incorporated terrible food-related Beatles puns into all of my blog titles! Oh well. Twenty-eight days and a dollar short, I guess.

Tonight's dinner was Spicy Corn & Black Bean Burgers. All you need to know before I get into the recipe is that we may or may have moved our giant flatscreen TV into the kitchen so I could watch the Packer game while prepping meals for the rest of the week. It was shamelessly awesome. When your TV takes up your entire kitchen table, it starts to feel like you're cooking dinner at an IMAX movie. Plus the Packers absolutely tromped the Browns, so that helped my mood as well.

Oh yeah, the burgers. These were seriously tasty, incredibly filling, and the food processor does all the heavy lifting, so I will definitely be making these again. And again. And again. It's currently 11 p.m., so I'm going to get straight to the point in this recipe. I'm sorry to deprive you of my inane elaborations of each step, but I promise I'll make it up to you one day.

This photo is from Eat, Live, Run, because it's much prettier than an image of
me perched on my chair with the burger in hand, snarling as I hiss "my precious."

Spicy Corn & Black Bean Burgers
(makes 6-8 burgers, depending on how big you make them)
Click here for a link to the recipe and ingredients list.

1. Roughly chop and seed 1 jalapeno. You bought a dozen of them for $1 at the farmer's market, so that made you feel super thrifty and local and vegan and awesome.
2. Add the jalapeno and 2 cloves of garlic to a food processor. Mince finely.
3. Add 1 can of rinsed black beans, 2 teaspoons cumin, and 1 teaspoon salt to the food processor. Process until it looks like a thick bean dip. Because that's exactly what it is at this point, so I suppose that makes sense.
4. In a small bowl, mix together 1 tablespoon of ground flax and 3 tablespoons of water. Then let it sit for 5 minutes. You're oddly intimidated by flax, but that's ok.
5. Transfer the bean mixture to a large bowl and stir in 1/2 cup Panko breadcrumbs, 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce, the softened flax mixture, and 1/2 cup corn. Stir well until everything is combined. 
6. Add another can of rinsed black beans and stir into the bowl. Resist the urge to sit down with a spoon and eat it all on the spot. Form the burgers into patties and settle for licking your fingers afterward.
7. Heat a little olive oil in a skillet on medium high and fry the patties for about 4 minutes per side or until golden and crusty. Because on rare occasion, crusty is a good thing.
8. Serve on a whole wheat bun with avocado, salsa, sriracha, ketchup, or whatever your heart desires. Feast. Once you start, you won't be able to stop, so prepare to feel like a much happier Veruca Salt.

Just like the rest of my favorite vegan foods thus far, this meal was incredibly tasty, very filling, and made me realize just how many delicious non-meat options there really are. Not to mention how cheap they are, especially when compared to the frozen store-bought kind or dinner at a restaurant. I'm having separation anxiety about these burgers as we speak, so I'm going to go stare longingly at the leftovers in the fridge now...