Filed under: Cooking
Everyday Food is still the reigning cookbook of choice. Saturday nite we cooked dinner for J&R and laid out the following dishes.
Lentil Walnut Burgers. We’ve made them a couple different times and this may have been the best yet. Even with substitutions!!! We didn’t have enough walnuts, so we used pecans for additional nuttage. Also, they seemed really moist so I added an additional 1/3 cup of bread crumbs to the mix. I think the added moisture came from the fact that we had leftover lentils in the freezer which were defrosted just prior to being used. They had more water content than fresh cooked ones would have. And this is part of what I’m going to say helped!!! In previous versions, the patties have been drier and at times, difficult to flip in the pan, for fear of crumbling apart. This mix was much more moist and hung together better while they were frying. I want them back on the menu sooner than later. I hate to call them veggie burgers, because as a meat beef eater, a veggie burger sounds like it is just trying to imitate a burger for people who don’t want to eat meat. This is way better than any “veggie burger” in that regard, in that I love a juicy beef burger, but I love a good lentil walnut burger, so veggie or not, you need to try these!!!
Spinach salad with Shittake Mushrooms and Quinoa. This is a super tasty very easy salad to throw together. The mushrooms get cooked on the broiler, while the quinoa cooks on the stovetop while you wash and prepare the spinach. Where it all comes together in the end is a tasty salad mix. While we did use this as a side salad it can also be featured as a main course, as Martha notes quinoa contains protein and helps balance out the nutrients in this meal.
Sweet Potato Fries. Okay, these aren’t actually Martha they’re Bon-Appetit, but they were quite tasty. Tip to making good sweet potato fries seems to be 1. Keeping the fries thin. The recipe says 1/2 inch, ours were more like 1/4 inch
2. Spreading them out on the cookie sheet. Don’t crowd them together, so they each have plenty of room to be tossed.
3. High heat. These suckers cooked at 500 degrees!!!
And we weren’t the only ones eating dinner that nite. Emerson just started eating Rice Cereal!!! Solids!!! Bravo 🙂
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Mmm... Food 
omg! what a beautiful child! and such skill in her gumming of the spoon and in almost swallowing its contents. brilliant!
dinner was fabulous! thanks, again. i photo-copied the lentil walnut “burger” recipe for (near) future use!
Comment by jennifer February 23, 2009 @ 12:40 pm