Sometimes you feel like a nut...

...and sometimes you feel like making a nut burger! I have been wanting to try my hand at veggie burgers for a while now, but of course before we started this blog, cooking was not something I did for fun. I'm proud to announce that I am starting to enjoy cooking and I get excited about the new recipes we try each week. However, I definitely felt like a nut this week, especially when I came VERY close to ruining the whole mixture of nuts and rice. Yep. Just when I thought I was making progress with my cooking skills, something goes awry. Perhaps I was getting too full of myself since the last two recipes went so smoothly. I thought, "I got this. A nut burger. Just mix it all up and squish it together in a patty. What could be hard about that?" But leave it to me. I start pouring the whole can of tomato sauce into the bowl of nuts and rice. The directions said to add the tomoto sauce little bits at a time and so I pour a clump in, then another clump. Then, I look back at the recipe. Two tablespoons? Shoot! How much did I just pour in?? I better stop where I am and hope for the best. Although the thought did cross my mind to completely start over and make a whole new batch of rice and grind up more nuts. By that time it was almost 8pm at night and starting over seemed like an even nuttier idea. I decided to just continue on and hope that the burgers didn't taste overwhelmingly tomato. And if they did? Well, then I'd have an even more entertaining blog post! Thankfully though, the nut burgers tasted delicious, whether there was too much tomato sauce or not. I do recommend reading the whole recipe before you start dumping things in a bowl. Good thing this time it worked out alright. But who's to say next time I make something I don't pour in a little too much hot sauce when it really should be tomato sauce. Then we might just have a blog post written straight from the emergency room. I can see the headline now.....

Yikes! I think I better concentrate a bit more when cooking!

"What?"

"You're making what for dinner?"

This, and other statements with similar skeptical inflections, are often what greet me when I announce my latest recipe discoveries to my husband. Well, I should qualify that. These are the reactions that I get for the "weird" recipes. Anything with tofu or tempeh or a vegetarian-esque flair usually garners one of these responses. After three and a half years of marriage, however, I now know that these seemingly half-hearted responses are almost completely for show and done in an effort at shameless teasing. Deep down, I think he's excited to try all the concoctions I throw his way. He just pretends to be a traditionalist and a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. But I know the truth.

So, when I mentioned Nut Burgers and got the typical response, I knew not to fret. "You'll love them," I stated with confidence. Now, part of this confidence comes from our track record. In the 5+ years that we've known each other, I've only made two meals that he refused to eat: Pumpkin Bisque and Soba Noodle Salad. The Pumpkin Bisque disaster of 2006 occurred too early on in our relationship for me to have known that the guy just doesn't like pumpkin...and that he certainly doesn't like it mixed with a bunch of sweet-ish spices and blended into a soup. So, on that one I feign ignorance. The Soba Noodle Salad, however, was most definitely a lapse in judgement on my part. My 100% Italian husband doesn't like spaghetti. Go figure. So, why, why, why did I think he'd go for soba noodles, which are even more slippery than spaghetti noodles? (His dislike of spaghetti is mostly a texture thing, you see. Other pasta shapes are doable. Spaghetti, and most certainly angel hair, are out.) In any case, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking, but one thing I do know for sure: I ate a lot of soba noodle salad that week.

I assured myself that the Nut Burgers would be a different story, however. I did not want a third rejected meal to mar our record. And while I was pretty sure of myself, I still waited with slightly bated breath as Dan took his first bite. A swallow... a smile... a success! We both thought that these nontraditional burgers made for a fabulous (even unexpectedly good) dinner. So, if you present Nut Burgers to your family and find them turning up their noses at the very thought, just wait for that first bite, swallow, and smile.

The Recipe: Nut Burgers

from "Feeding the Whole Family" by Cynthia Lair

¾ cup sunflower seeds
¾ cup walnuts
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
1/8 teaspoon cayenne
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 ½ cups cooked brown rice
1 small carrot (or ½ of a large one), grated finely
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
1-2 teaspoons butter
4 whole grain buns

Grind nuts and seeds to a fine meal in a small grinder or food processor. Place ground nuts in a bowl and add cumin, oregano, cayenne, garlic and salt; mix well. Fold in cooked brown rice and grated carrots. Add tomato sauce a little at a time until you get a stiff, but workable texture. Form mixture into patties with moist hands.

Refrigerate patties for a few hours if possible. Lightly coat a skillet with butter and brown patties on both sides. Serve on whole grain buns with your favorite fixin's.

Preparation time: 15-20 minutes (without refrigeration time)
Makes 4 burgers