zenpawn

Considering I just purchased 25 lbs(!) of dried large lima beans, the main ingredient for these veggie burgers was decided. I have also been eating a lot of eggplant lately. Despite what Alton Brown says, they are not nutritional wastelands, but are actually rather good for you.

Feast your eyes on this beautiful and hearty tower of alternating eggplant, roasted onions, and lima bean burger layers, set atop romaine lettuce and topped with roasted garlic, tomatoes, tahini, and cilantro.

The tahini is not the only ingredient making this dish Lebanese. The lima bean burgers are jam-packed with the traditional spices of the region.

Layer eggplant, roasted onions, and burger on romaine lettuce. Repeat. Finish with garlic slices, tomatoes, tahini, and cilantro.

Get the recipe in Vegan Done Light.

Pictorial Storyboard:
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These pictures don’t do justice to this favorite. Raw collard greens are so delicious and make for sturdy wraps in place of the standard high-carb, grain-based options.

With all my recent trips to the farmers’ markets, I’ve really come to appreciate eggplant. I like to simply fry the rounds with onions, garlic, and peppers. For this wrap, I laid them out on the collard leaves and added scallions, basil (or is that sage?), tomatoes, and hot sauce. It looks like this particular incarnation also has tempeh and maybe mushrooms in there.

It is, it is tempeh! LOL. This one has chunks of mango instead of tomato. Other common fillings at my house include seitan and split pea curries, though with the latter romaine wraps work better, as they provide just that much more crispiness to offset the softer interior.

Just last month, over at The Feral Vegetarian Yahoo! group, we were discussing our favorite baked desserts. I offered up as mine: peanut butter or oatmeal cookies, both with chocolate chips; pecan pie; and, I lamented, prior to going vegan, the cheesecake brownies of my college days. Someone responded with the suggestion that I try to create my own vegan version using Tofutti cream cheese. As I do not use the prepared vegan cheeses, my creativity was stretched even further. Nevertheless, it sounded like a good and fun idea. So, here is my first attempt.

Brownies
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup raisins
4 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder*
1 teaspoon baking soda*
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

(*) I used sodium-free versions:
Hain Pure Foods, Featherweight Baking Powder
Ener-G Baking Soda

Hazelnut Cheese
30 grams hazelnuts
20 grams (1/4 cup) oats
3/4 – 1 cup water
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

First prepare hazelnut cheese by pureeing all its ingredients in a blender until smooth. Place over medium heat in a saucepan and cook until thickened to desired consistency. Cool in refrigerator. Preheat oven to 350°F.

Plump raisins in hot water for fifteen minutes. Sift together dry ingredients. Drain raisins and combine with maple syrup and vanilla in a blender. Process until smooth. Mix gently, but thoroughly into dry ingredients.

Pour chocolate batter into a well-oiled,, 9×9 baking pan. Drop blobs of hazelnut cheese over top and gently spread to create a marble effect. I used 1/2 the cheese and saved the rest. Next time, I’ll likely use more and add sweetener to the cheese itself as well, so the brownie part doesn’t have to perform these duties by itself.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. Makes 8, fudgy, servings.

I set these out at work with the “warning” that they were an experiment in veganizing a favorite. The responses were all positive, with several commenting that they were very chocolatey and one saying you could not tell there was no dairy.

Each serving, as shown here, is 140 calories, 2 g fat, 2 g fiber, 2 g protein, 31 g carb.

I hit up a different farmers’ market on Monday, taking advantage of the computers being down at work to take off a little early. And what a beautiful, seventy degree day it was. This one is in the middle of my old University stomping grounds. (You know you’re getting older when all the college students look like they’re fourteen!)

The yellow tomatoes are known as peach tomatoes and indeed have a fuzzy exterior. Most of the striped ones are called, appropriately enough, zebra tomatoes. There’s another kind there too, but I forget what he said it was.

Then there’s a Japanese eggplant, some pattypan squash, and other varieties. (Nothing so simple as a baby summer squash, as I had guessed. Sorry, their names elude me too.)

Let’s see, we have leeks, which I had actually never tried before, a mesclun blend, beets, red potatoes, broccoli, yellow and red onions, hot peppers, a huge bunch of basil with roots attached (sadly, on its way out), and a couple corn on the cob.

Eggplant with a half peck of apples. Those are McIntosh apples in the back and two Cortlands up front.