Friday, August 31, 2012

Recipe Alert! Tonight's dinner.

I was thumbing through Fitness Magazine this morning and ran across a recipe for what they titled, "Patty Svelte."  Here she is:

Black Bean "Nacho" Burgers

Makes:  4 burgers
Prep time:  25 minutes plus 30 minutes chilling
Cook time:  12 minutes or a little better

1 15-ounce can black beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup finely crushed tortilla chips (preferably blue corn)
1/3 cup salsa, plus additional for serving
1/2 cup 50% reduced fat cheddar shreds or 1/2 cup cheddar Rice Dream shreds (what I used)
1 large egg, slightly beaten
1 scallion, white and green part, finely chopped or a half of a lil garden onion finely chopped (what I used.)
1/4 teaspoon black pepper or about 10 grinds of the pepper mill (what I used)
4 hamburger buns or 4 whole wheat sandwich thins (what I used)
2 t vegetable oil (I skipped this)
4 butter lettuce leaves (I skipped this because I didn't have it)

1.  Use a food processor or a potato maser to smash beans until chunky, leaving some partly whole.  Stir in crushed chips, salsa, cheddarish cheese, egg, scallionish onion and black pepper.  They say to shape into 4 patties, but I didn't until I plunked them in the pan.
2.  Refrigerate mixture for 30 minutes.
3.  Preheat pan (I used a grill pan with a little bit of Pam in place of a standard pan with oil) and place or form mixture into patties.  Cook until golden brown on one side, 6ish minutes.  Flip and continue to cook until golden brown.  Serve up on buns and with lettuce and a dash of salsa just for extra flavor.

We had blue corn chips and salsa with a side of corn.  Yum!
Voila! 

Smiles in my day:
-  I bought myself a Baby Cakes Rotating Cake Pop maker with birthday money I had.  I was gifted a Kohl's gift certificate and some cash, received a coupon for an additional 15% off, so now K- and I will be venturing into that great world of cake pops.  We had them last week at the wedding reception and loved them.  Yum!
-  It probably shouldn't make me smile, but it did.  Hubs got so mad at the caulk and his caulking gun (bad, wrong caulk that caused the caulk gun to blow), and he pitched it (not his style) across the front lawn.  I came home to the caulk gun near the sidewalk and knew what happened.  He discovered a 4" section of swell on our one sill in the living room.  He took off 1/2 the woodwork around the window, cut out a section of the drywall and found the non-expanding foam to be sopping wet.  He continued to dig and discovered that there was a hairline crack in the caulk of the window which allowed water to seep in.  Since we are expecting Isaac to make landfall for us sometime tomorrow, Hubs was concerned because, "THERE'S A HURRICANE COMING," and the window was exposed.  He has everything sealed up, but will have to go back through and rework all of his work after Isaac has left us.  Still, the caulking gun straddling the sidewalk line was hilarious.
-  A friend gave me a Ghirardelli Dark and Caramel bar (Carmel or caramel for you?  For us, it is car-mel.)  It is calling my name. 

A bath. That is calling my name as well.  Enjoy the tasty burgers!  They were absolutely lovely.

Have a great weekend!

2 comments:

Nicole said...

These look yummy! I think I'm going to make them this week:) Thanks for sharing.

ChupieandJ'smama (Janeen) said...

Sounds good. You had me until the egg. Can't use that and they probably won't stay together without it :( I'm having the hardest time finding wheat free, egg free veggie burgers. I'm the only one who eats them, but I can't put wheat or egg on the grill or it will contaminate it for J. I can find safe ones at the "Seed" but I don't always have time to go there. Maybe I'll try these without the egg and hope for the best.