In a veggie 'burger' aren't you already talking about just bun, stuff, bun anyways? But yes, burgers should be bun, burger, stuff, bun.
Should be bun-stuff-patty-stuff-bun
I put them together bun, burger, stuff, bun -- but then I eat them upside down.
1: There's a patty in most veggie burgers I've eaten. Its placement matters, I submit.
2: What goes under the patty?
3 hints at why the stuff-under-patty arrangement may be getting more popular: the bottom bun is invariably too thin to support a typical greasy burger and is thus prone to disintegration. Putting a buffer of stuff in between reduces this risk.
With a meat burger, I put mayo on the bottom bun, below the burger. The drippings combine with mayo just wonderfully. The rest of the toppings (mustard, pickle, onion) go on top of the burger.
7: I just cannot eat a raw tomato. My life would be incomplete without cooked tomato (half-Italian), but I've never enjoyed a raw tomato.
Bun(-condiments)-patty(-condiments)-stuff-bun is generally what I've seen, with condiments usually in one or the other location.
I know some sandwich places won't put the condiments on the bread unless asked for because things will get soggy quickly that way if you don't eat the sandwich right away.
8 was a bit over the top. I can eat a raw tomato and will in certain settings where picking apart a pre-made sandwich seems too conspicuous. But, I've never sought a raw tomato.
The greasy spoon near me is bun, stuff, patty, stuff, bun, I forget which stuffs.
10: Do you like uncooked tomatoes in white vinegar?
I love raw tomatoes. Cooked tomatoes are ok in sauces and stuff, but I'm not a big fan.
Both cooked and uncooked tomatoes are a-okay by me.
3 is the one true way to eat a burger.
Also, I don't care about the order of most things, but I try to keep something between tomatoes and bread in sandwiches and burgers. (Sometimes to the extent of packing the tomatoes separately if I'm making a sandwich I won't eat for hours.)
I eat burgers however Jonathan Safran Foer tells me to.
I like to put tomato paste on hamburgers. It has a much better tomato flavor than any fresh tomato that you aren't paying exorbitant prices for (or 8 months out of the year, any tomato at all), and it doesn't drip out of the burger and down your sleeve, or slide out of the sandwich and come to rest on your plate.
Hey, someone recommend brands of veggie burger, with attention to both taste and nutritional value? I never eat the things, but I'm getting a little flustered with trying to figure out what my newly minted vegetarian will eat beyond bread and cheese. She's turned up her nose at black beans and at eggplant parmesan, and there's a limit to how much pasta anyone can eat (particularly given that Newt won't eat pasta.)
I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french-fried potato. Big kosher pickle and a one-eyed deer. Now good god almighty which way do I cook my steer for this perfect burger?
18: hmm. Interesting. Of course, a reasonable amount of ketchup accomplishes the same thing and adds the bite of vinegar. I guess it is the additional sweetness that irks people about ketchup?
Bun, stuff, patty, stuff, bun.
Did someone already say that?
Fuck! On preview, pwned at 2!
It's what irks me. Plus, ketchup is kind of liquid and drippy too, and it tastes a lot like cloves and cinnamon and not very much like tomato. Have you tried banana ketchup? Eerily similar flavor.
19: She's turned up her nose at black beans and at eggplant parmesan
Oh, dear. You're going to have a project on your hands. Or rather, she is. Her vegetarianism is ... premature. (She's gonna have to investigate beans.)
19: Hmm! One of the standard Gristedes-available companies makes a veggie burger with black beans in them that is both super yummy and not bad for you. I also like the Boca ones with cheddar in them. The Boca ones are fake-meaty. Veggie burgers fall into two categories: fake meaty and beans-n-grainsy. I like both!
Morningstar veggie burgers smell ungodly foul when you microwave them, as my mom does.
The black bean ones are good. There's a spicy black bean one that goes really well with goat cheese and tomato.
24: Well, I can leave her to eat bread and cheese and make her take vitamins and eat apples and oranges -- she shouldn't die from it. But yeah, I was hoping for a more adventurous approach to being a vegetarian, mostly because that would involve dinners I like but the kids have made difficult to serve.
I use the Morningstar Farm black bean burgers regularly. As often as making an actual burger, I'll crumble 'em up in other dishes, like for taco "meat" or whatever. If she's anti-bean, I'm not sure the vegetarianism will last. Does she like other beans?
Ooh, what about hummus? Hummus and carrots, for instance?
I think I could live on bread and cheese, actually. In college I lived on bread and spaghetti sauce.
28: Yeah. Why is she being a vegetarian? Ethical reasons? This is *not* to criticize her, I realize she's a young girl, but if she wants to be a vegetarian she has to also realize that she needs to investigate non-meat foods with more nutritional value.
On the veggie burgers, the black-bean ones are good, but if that's a no-go, I'd say Boca Burgers, which are pretty good at the meaty approach. Toothy mouth-feel thing. More fatty.
How does she feel about lentils? And about cooking on her own? Making your own lentil burgers can be fun (make 'em basically the way you'd make old-fashioned meatloaf).
You could use this as an opportunity to up her street cred by getting her into all those crazy spicy Asian foods (Szechuan cuisine and the like). There are a ton of great vegetarian dishes to be made in that realm.
Further to 33: god, I'm partially pwned all over the place tonight. Lentils? Anyone say lentils? Etc.
When I first became a vegetarian, LB, I didn't eat salad or eggs or a lot of other things that are standard veg fare, but I really loved middle-eastern, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Ethiopian. I ate a lot of noodle soups, couscous with lentils, rice dishes, etc. But there are a lot of good veggie-patty-type things out there if you're looking for something to heat up alongside the family meal. Fake chicken can be pretty good. I went through a phase with spicy "chicken" patties.
Also: frying tofu the Thai way is really easy and delicious. In a 1-qt saucepan, heat up about 3/4" of vegetable oil until it's very hot. Meanwhile, open up one of those pint containers of fresh firm tofu (usually two semi-ovoid rectangles floating in water) and cut each of them into 16 cubes and drain. Throw them in the hot oil, stirring gently for the first minute to keep it from sticking. The oil should bubble up around it. Just let it fry until you have golden crispy cubes, about ten minutes, and then drain them on a paper towel or paper bag. Salt them or serve with soy sauce. Protein snack! They keep pretty well, too, and hold up in sauces.
but if she wants to be a vegetarian she has to also realize that she needs to investigate non-meat foods with more nutritional value.
Absolutely. None of this slouching around with delinquent foods will be tolerated in this household. Young lady.
I'm getting bloodwork done on Tuesday because I think I'm nutritionally challenged right now, have been fainting, etc. I told my mother about this plan, and she suggested that I should get an HIV test. Thanks, Mom. I appreciate that no matter how paranoid I am about my own health, my mom thinks I probably have HIV.
CA became a vegetarian as a kid (teenager, not kid-kid) before he would eat any vegetables (more or less) and subsisted on fried tofu and cheese sandwiches.
37: Hey, I tried to control that tone in my voice. I failed. I don't know what it's like to be a parent to a -- what's Sally, 10? year old. I think of her as older, and precocious. Is she 12?
Cripe, my brother would eat nothing but hot dogs when he was 10.
40: Oh, I was just amused at the stern "needs to realize". I've never been a parent to a Sally, either.
I have noticed an annoying tendency to serve a hamburger with the burger on the top bun rather than on the bottom bun.
She's 10. I'm a little unsure of myself around tofu -- I'll eat it but usually don't cook it. I breaded and panfried slices of firm tofu, and gave it to her last week with a quick peanut sauce. I liked it, she was unenthused. But I'll try the Thai method.
And hummus is well liked -- she can eat lots of hummus.
Peas. They're an underappreciated source of protein.
Mostly though, I'd let her eat whatever the hell she wants, as long as it's not pure junk. Lots of bread and cheese won't do any harm in the short term. She'll either figure out things she likes to eat, or she'll decide this whole vegetarian business isn't worth the trouble. She certainly won't starve. Even "making" her take vitamins seems a bit much, really, unless you already make everyone in the family take vitamins anyway. There's no reason she'd be getting fewer vitamins just because she doesn't eat meat.
LB - Try this in Sloppy Joes, lasagna, pasta sauce, chili, cous-cous, anything you make with ground beef. If the kids like Indian food, you can make curry using tofu and/or lentils and tofu stir-fries quite well for Chinese dishes. Yves also makes fake chicken; my vegetarian stepson has liked that in flavorful dishes.
Quiches, bean soups, risottos, cheese, veggie pasta dishes. Extra easy if you can convince her that (meat) broths aren't _really_ a violation of her vegetarian principles.
Is spinach okay for her? Throw some hummus and spinach on those bread-and-cheese combos, and you're well on the way to adequately healthy, based on the formula I just made up just now.
Re: Burgers: We had some for lunch today. Mine was stacked bun, pickles, relish, onion, burger, mustard, lettuce, bun. I removed the pickles; as I had already asked them to 86 the mayo and tomato, I thought I was pushing my luck to have the pickles omitted. I then added ketchup, on top of the lettuce, which was shredded and so intermixed with the mustard that it clung to the burger, not the bun. Oh, and they really toasted the bun, which I adore, given that I like my toast just short of blackened.
47: I make risotto all the time with veggie broth. It doesn't actually make stirring more difficult!
What veggies does Sally like, LB?
I basically agree with Brock.
Also, if she added steamed broccoli to the bread and cheese, it'd basically be a well-balanced diet. At least in my world.
On the bun front: bun? I don't even like buns! Firm bread, toasted, please, or dense rolls (a section of french bread?). The term "bun" in connection with burgers, meat or veggie, makes me fearful.
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I should trade you for veggie recipes, but I'm too self-absorbed at the moment.
Could someone please tell me if Rhubarb Pie is broken on your screens too? I'll think of kid-accessible veggie suggestions while I wait.
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53: RP's formatting looks wonky for me.
Oh dear, it is wonky. To the html at once, Megan!
Further: looks good in Safari, bad in Firefox.
Who doesn't look good in Safari?
Veggie melt sandwiches are a good staple, too. Instead of just making a grilled cheese, add some sauteed mushrooms, onions, broccoli, or whatever veggies she likes. Cut back on the cheese a bit, gradually, or use hummus or a thin coat of cream cheese to make it stick together.
When I'm really lazy, I'll throw a piece of bread with thin-sliced zucchini, mushrooms, and tomato in the toaster oven, and the other slice with a bit of cheese. It's long enough to cook the veggies a little bit. Then slap a bit of hummus in the middle, cut into cute squares. Alfalfa or broccoli sprouts are delicious to add at the end, too.
Thanks.
Um. Veggie chili, if she liked regular chili.
Baked potatoes with cheesy sauce.
If you're worried about bread, corn-tortilla quesadillas are your friend.
Who doesn't look good in Safari?
The British Empire?
AWB and I have wildly different notions of lazy in the kitchen.
59 gets it completely right.
Veggie sandwich, man, not just for lazy times! You can put any combination of zucchini, yellow summer squash, tomato, onion (red is best), cucumber, thinly-sliced peppers (green, red, whatever), maybe olives for those special times, basil leaves for extra special, parsley if you feel that way, and just something to glue it together.
I'm all excited: Sally should do this! It's possible to make them open-faced as well, on a halved french roll or some such -- then you're approaching a veggie pizza of sorts.
Which leads to homemade veggie pizza for Sally as well.
If you add broccoli to the potatoes and cheese-y sauce, you've at least got some green on the plate.
Egg salad. Frittatas.
RP looks fine in my Firefox, Chrome, and even the dreaded IE.
Good lord, does 64 ever get it right. We've swerved into mostly vegetarianism, and it's making lunch difficult for me.
On the veggie burger front, the whole family really enjoys Amy's "All-American" patties, and I'm really picky about veggie burgers.
Thanks, guys. I started over. Think it is better now.
I liked these veggie burgers better than most, which I should, since they're pricey. (Wildwood, sold in packets of two.)
Let's have a lazy-off!
Sometimes I eat soup from the can, cold, because I'm too lazy to dirty a bowl and heat it up. Sometimes I eat cereal from the bag because I'm too lazy to pour milk and dirty a bowl and spoon.
Your turn!
71: My bandmate who's allergic to nuts has Campbell's Chunky Soup cold as his typical gig meal. It's sort of a running joke.
I'd never eat cold soup, because I believe that all food has a god-given proper temperature, but cereal out of the bag is a regular breakfast routine.
Sometimes, if there isn't a clean spoon, instead of washing one, I just won't eat.
Your move.
For sandwiches the veggie idea is good. Just add a little bit of either a hard sheep milk cheese or some mozarella, plus some good olive oil or homemade mayo.
For quick easy dinners do pasta dishes, e.g. feta spinach, hot peppers with a tiny bit of cream, or stir fried veggies and garlic in olive oil with some smoked mozarella or good ricotta. If you're feeling ambitious and want stuff that you can eat over a good number of days try an spinach or chard based veggie lasagna, just remember that you really want to do that one with bechamel rather than ricotta otherwise it will be too wet. For really quick dinners, go over to Greenpoint and pick up some porcini/sauerkraut or cheese/onion (ruskie) pierogi and serve with sour cream.
Could someone please tell me if Rhubarb Pie is broken on your screens too?
It's rendering just fine on Firefox for the Mac. Also, I may steal your pancake breakfast idea.
Re: vegetarian food. Quorn makes a lot of interesting stuff. If you can get past the psychological block of "but these little fungi haven't been well-studied and might have health consequences in 40 years," their "chicken tenders" and "ground beef" can be easily swapped in for the meat versions in stir-fry, tacos, casseroles, etc. I find the meatballs repulsive (something about the texture), but a friend swears by them.
The Flexitarian Table cookbook is a bit fussy, but flipping through it and browsing the pictures can give you some good ideas for easily substitutable recipes, including the kind where you make a whole dinner and come out with two almost-identical entries (e.g. lemon-thyme chicken breast/tofu cakes.)
Those big white blocks of tofu are harder to make appetizing; pressing tofu can make it much more pleasant to stir-fry. Stick it on a cookie sheet, cover it with a cloth, put another sheet and some heavy stuff on top, wait, drain, and cook.
Sometimes I feel like unfogged is just repeating itself endlessly.
I don't know the recipes, but there's all kinds of things you can do with blocks of tofu. Of course, in my family, those generally involve meat at some point, so recipes would be of no help. On the other hand, just cooked tofu cubes and sauce can be good (to me), so it's also a matter of taste. I haven't had much tofu-for-vegetarian-purposes; it usually looks pretty off-putting to me, but hey, it might be great.
Lazy: alternating handfuls of cashews and raisins. Divine!
Getting back to the topic of the post, I often like eating my burgers without bread, just buttered garlic rice on the side. Also good: steak tartare where the stuff is inside the patty, with the toast on the side.
78: I do that with peanuts, and I say "Peanut butter and jelly!" as I do.
Boggle. Bun, avacado, baby spinach, tomato, patty, melted mccheese, if there's a sauce it goes on the mccheese, onion, put an option on the mushrooms and/or pickles, bun.
Lazy. Eating slices of sweet potato pound cake instead of heating up the squash soup in the fridge, or spooning out some beet salad. Or making myself some quesadillas with the already grated cheese and already-made cilantro pesto. So, even though I have abundant food on hand, I'm too lazy to take advantage of my prior hard work.
Sometimes when we keep repeating ourselves here, pellets arrive!
Pancake breakfast was well-received, and a pretty mellow way to host. Either way, I can't emphasize enough how good those oatmeal pancakes are.
Sometimes I think I'm going to have canned soup, salad (with lettuce/mix from a bag, pre-cut carrots, and maybe a tomato), and a sandwich and it ends up being canned soup and toast plus snacks later in the day.
Lazy: subsisting on Halloween candy for the past week. On Halloween I got irritated because the (little kid) party we attended featured pretzels and dum-dums. Please! Pretzels and dum-dums is like the weakest Halloween haul ever.
So we went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of the good stuff, and we are nearly done with it.
Oh my god! They should put RAISINS in Reese's Peanut Butter Cups!
Maybe I'll try that right now. I'll report back in one minute.
76 Nah, old school unfogged would have spent most of it's commenting on the low hanging fruit of this post.
I went veg around 16, but from conversations with nutritionists over the years my understanding is that the two things they worry about with still growing folks are iron and protein. The protein thing is pretty easily solve if she's still doing eggs & dairy and the complementarity stuff takes care of itself if you have a varied diet. The iron thing can be more of a problem if she's not doing beans or dark green vegetables, but as long as she's not allegeric to peanuts she should be OK.
On tofu, baked is even easier, if not faster than fried. Toss cubed tofu (it'll shrink) with 1.5 T sesame oil and some salt and bake at 375 for about 25 mins, stirring occasionally. They'll be tasty and not so spattery.
On burgers, I'm with parismon on the bread front, but would prefer something multi-grain.
76 Sometimes I feel like unfogged is just repeating itself endlessly.
My goal in life is to be Pierre Menard, author of Unfogged.
Oh, that was completely unintentional.
Sometimes I feel like unfogged is just repeating itself endlessly.
It could be that *I* am the laziest person in the kitchen, but I really do like plain, uncooked, superfirm tofu, cut into tiny little cubes, with soy sauce. I can absentmindedly go through a package of tofu in about half an hour, no heating.
LB, when I was tending vegetarian-without-liking-vegetables, my mother snuck a whole bunch of spinach souffle into my diet. All eggy and cheesy and poofy, you don't even notice the pound of spinach in there.
In more carnivorous news, I just roasted an entire half-shoulder of pork, for myself. Burp.
It's ridiculous! A wee thing of pork chops costs the same as an entire boulder of pork shoulder!
Who eats the wee thing off a pig?
Sometimes I put a few cans of soup in the microwave and turn it on. I eat whichever one bursts first.
How did you make the pork shoulder?
Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Jane.
She wants a drink of water.
So she waits and waits and waits and waits and waits for it to rain.
I have two words for this thread: Pop Tarts. Tear package, optionally heat.
103 sounds like it should be a pun.
Shoaled her? I didn't even reef her.
Pop Tarts always leave me unsatisfied. The bread portion is just weird and too crumbly. The inside is too hot, or too sweet, or too messy. The icing on the outside is too hard and crackly.
108: Rats! Beat down by insufferable food snobbery inherent in the blog once again!
Lazy Jane can't be all that lazy, running miles in some boy's jumper.
Garlic, salt, balsamic vinegar, oregano mashed up and speared into the meat. 325 degrees for about 3 hours. Served with its juice over red potatoes. There really should have been something green in the meal (since now I feel like I was hit by a train), but I was too damn hungry to futz around.
108: Agreed. Poptarts always seemed like eating sawdust mixed with sugar, with optional sterno filling. Coworkers were advocating for this gourmet healthfood version of a poptart which they were pitching as "No, this is like a good version of a poptart." It's possible that this could be a real thing, but to me it sounded like, "No, this is like delicious gravel."
95 sounds unspeakably vile. 97, much better.
95 sounds like it could be ok, if you add some chopped green onion, and if it were drained right and not too cold.
You have to drain the tofu, absolutely!
If you have the time then raw tofu marinated with lots of hot pepper , scallions, garlic, and fish sauce is quite good.
I only find tofu appetizing in the form of fresh tofu straight from the farmer's market tofu maker. Like a fresh raw snow pea or something. As an ingredient I am hoping that cultivating a desire for mushrooms will then be a bridge to cultivating a desire for bean urds.
I'd eat gravel if it as delicious.
12: No. My dad loves them that way. I think he puts some onion in there and some salt and pepper, but not much else.
Veggie fun!
Veggie lasagne: aubergine, courgette, capsicum, and a boatload of ricotta from some proteiny goodness!
Tofu: baked is easy. Cut into thin rectangle, marinate in stuff, put in oven (or under grill) till it starts to crisp
Curry: put stuff in a pot. Cook. Eat! You can hide lots of beans or lentils in one of these.
Stew: it's just like a curry, but with less flavour!
TVP: your penance for going veggie.
I'm disappointed to realise young Gusty's preference for bland food is not just a momentary quirk but likely to be a ten year ordeal.
I'd eat Walt if I thought he wouldn't be all tough and gamey.
She does like curry. This really isn't an emergency, everyone saying bread and cheese is a reasonably adequate diet is right. I was just all pleased by the idea of the family being about to sit down to big bowls of bean soups and such, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen; instead, I'm going to have to expand my cooking vocabulary to more Asian/Indian stuff. Which I love eating, but I don't have all that much experience cooking.
Would she eat kik alicha? It's made with split peas, but they get all mushed up (like hummus!) and it's exotic. It's super-easy to make and the leftovers are yum.
I used to cook for my roommates in Cleveland (they did dishes--it was lovely), and one of them didn't eat beans unless they were mashed, something about the bean-as-bean that freaked her out. I gradually mashed them up less and less (half mashed, half stirred in, etc.) until she decided she likes beans just fine.
I would be the world's most annoying mom.
125. If you're not used to cooking south Asian veggie stuff, get this. It's not the most exciting cook book in the world, but it's simple, quick and foolproof.
On the veggie front, I just had a cow-orker react with utter surprise that I am (and have been since the age of sixteen) surviving on a diet of just eggs, dairy, and vegetables. "Really?!? No meat at all? Not even chicken or fish?"
Uh. Yes. Really. It's a thing that many people do. There's a word for it and everything.
On beans: One possibility is trying types of beans other than black beans. We're currently eating a lot of adzuki beans, which we've found survive the canning process in better shape (less mushy) than black beans do. If she likes hummus, garbanzo beans might also be a good way to sneak additional non-cheese protein in. Also, edamame, which you can buy shelled or which kids might enjoy eating out of the pod.
On veggie burgers: For soy-based, Gimme Lean is our favorite (comes in tubes, not patties, but of course that makes it easier to adjust portion size). They also have an "sausage" version that I like better than the "ground beef" version. Sunshine is a relatively recent discovery. My (very young) daughter likes the Southwest variety. Not quite as much protein, though, because it's not soy-based.
Another thing to consider as a non-pasta option: Mexican can be pretty easy to do and beans might be less threatening in that context (you can find healthy vegetarian refried beans in a can, though you do need to check the label). Plus, it's easy to make meat separately for those who are eating it and then combine at the last step (especially if everyone is assembling their own taco / fajita / whatever).
I have the "Essential Asian Cookbook" and it rocks like a pickup on a dirt track. It gives the greatest hits for each cuisine, and enough other recipes to give a reasonable idea of the main themes.
AWB, you're awesome.
Kik alicha looks easy, with only one spice I don't have at home. Maybe I'll try that next week.
Homemade pizza is a good meal for the family that can be made both vegetarian and very healthy. Take out pizza, especially fast food pizza, tends to go light on the tomato sauce, which is really the most healthy ingredient. But you can buy pre-made crusts at the grocery store and load them down with all sorts off good vegies, tailoring different parts of the pie for different family members.
If you are more ambitious, you can make your own crust. When molly makes the crust, she usually also smuggles in some flax seed or other super-good-for-you magic hippie faerie dust. Everyone in the house loves it.
You know what's really delicious and even vegan? Ratatouille. Since it is physically impossible to make a moderate quantity of ratatouille, you should just embrace the leftover bounty. The first couple nights, serve it hot over rice (saffron optional). Then add it to omelets! Then serve it lukewarm as a side dish. You can even add it to pasta as a sauce.
134: Dude, only rodents make that stuff. Haven't you seen the movie?
with only one spice I don't have at home
This reminds me, if you haven't followed through on this idea yet, you really should.
I love ratatouille, but I suspect it is generally not the first choice of vegetable-averse youths.