Black Bean Brownies

I like to bake.  I like to eat sweets, so that is a big reason I like to bake, but when I was single I still baked a lot, I just gave most of it away.  (I worked with mostly guys, so it was easy, and fast)

Once we get this vegetarian thing second nature I am going to start to tackle baking vegan style.  I am slowly stocking up on alternative baking supplies and trying to use up all the on-sale butter I have hoarded in the freezer.

One thing I have noticed while forever perusing pinterest is that black bean brownies are all the rage.  Now I love brownies so I checked out a bunch of the recipes, but they seem to either have coffee in them (ew) or a lot of alternative baking supplies which I don't have.  (mostly all those alternatives to sugar).  I decided since I love my own brownie recipe I'll just slowly replace one item at a time.  Easy right?

Well, first step tonight was to substitute the black beans for the flour.  Not a big deal really, unless you are me, and lazy, and trying to mix them up quick before you put your kid to sleep.  (so I can pig out on them when she's in bed).  The real "problem" was that our food processor is this big Indian "mix-y" my MIL sent my husband from India.  It's fantastic and can grind dal (lentils) to powder and chop up curries into chutney like a breeze, but it's big, hard to clean the containers, and because it came from India, also has a 15lb transformer attached to it.  Needless to say it's a job in itself to drag it out of the closet, so I opted to use the wimpy baby bullet.

The baby bullet is wimpy. (did I say that, cause it's really wimpy.  great for things you can mash with a fork, but that's about it.)  I ended up having to pour my hot melted chocolate into the black beans to get them to sorta grind because I didn't want to add liquid to the beans as I was using them to replace flour.  Because the bullet is so small I had a bunch of different measuring cups half full of black beans ground to various levels of smooth, some being "not smooth at all" and also melted chocolate dripping all over the counter top.  All while trying to find the other ingredients and get them into a bowl to mix with my chocolate-y beans.  As you can tell, I'm not a set everything out before you bake, but a quick get it in the oven, "oh look I don't have enough eggs, what can I add to make this look like batter", kind of baker.


For your benefit I will force myself to test them now while they are still piping hot.  Oh, I'm so kind...

Okay, so the outside "crust" is a little chewier, they are a little darker, and the inside a little more mooshy, but they taste pretty good and surprisingly more similar to the regular brownies than I thought.  I think next time I could put more beans in to make them less mooshy and not compromise the taste.  The recipe called for one cup of flour and I tried for one cup of ground beans, but because it was mixed with the chocolate, I'm not sure how much beans I put in, but I did have left overs from the can.  When using ingredients from a can or something in my baking I prefer to use them all up instead of having 1/2 cup of something random in my fridge, so next time I'm going to push it all in and see how they turn out.

As a little bonus, I'll add a link to a cool substitute this for that blog posting I found that I will be using in the future.

 http://www.picklee.com/2012/08/01/recipe-substitutions/

BBQ

So on the weekend we went up to Cow country for a family BBQ.  I sourced out veggie burgers from my friends on Facebook and the suggestions were:

PC - Portobello Swiss Burgers
Lick's - Nature Burger
Sol Cuisine -  Black Bean Burger
Field Roast - Sausages

Having the most recommendations we went with Lick's Nature Burger.  For us it was $7.99 for 4 paddies so we got 8, cooked them all up and had two each (munchkin wasn't a fan) and came home with one paddy.  Which means we weren't the only ones that liked them.

First off, I do have to admit they were not as good as a tasty tasty murder burger, but I did eat them and would eat them again.  Although they were softer and mushier than beef, they were firm enough to avoid my yucky mushy food category.  They had a dark/deep favor and my Aunt (one of the paddy theifs) said they had a bite similar to the regular Lick's paddies.

While shopping on the weekend I picked up some Sol Cuisine paddies I have yet to try.  I got the regular ones instead of black bean because so far we have had no problem implementing black beans into our cooking, so I don't want to overdose on them.  I will let you know how they go.

Also, one of the greatest things I love in life is sausages.  For real.  So I will also have to try the Field Roast at some point.  I tried to buy them this weekend, but everything from Field Roast was completely sold out of the store, so I'm taking that as a sign they are really really good.

Spicy Black Bean Burger

Spicy Black Bean Burger

The Neglected Post

So I guess I've been forgetting to update my blog.  There isn't too much excitement going on on the veggie front.  I did have a great conversation about Tofu with the stock boy at the no-frills near my place, and I also discover that the best cilantro is hiding there.

I confessed to my beef country parents that we went veggie.  Mostly because we are visiting them this weekend and I didn't want them to spend their money buying the standard large hunk of peameal bacon they use our visits as an excuse to buy.  So now I have to find some kind of veggie burger paddy to eat this weekend, from what I understand this is a real hit or miss item.  Good thing there will be other items at the BBQ.*

I do have to admit I constantly feel hungry.  I don't know if it's the emotional woe of running out of work, or the fact that I'm not eating meat.  I still don't really miss or crave meat, but I just don't feel quite satisfied.  I think the introduction to tofu is helping, but I need to put some of my recipe research into play.  Hubs is not noticing the same thing, so I'm leaning towards woe.  Good thing I have a job interview next week.

Hubs is also very proud of himself for ordering vegetarian yesterday when the office ordered Swiss Chalet.  I think the concept that we still CAN have meat out makes us okay to NOT have meat.  I find when you totally ban something from your life it's all you can think of eating.  Like stating "I'm never going to eat chocolate again!" pretty much guarantees I'll be eating it by the end of the day.

So this weekend will be our first weekend out of house, it should be interesting to see how we handle the possible lack of options.  The reality is that my husband and kid will be okay, it's just that I will probably just eat potato chips all weekend and ew ew ew at the casserole-like salads I don't like (like potato salad).  Note to self, forget the dessert I'm to bring and bring a side...


*side note to above.  Apparently I have more veggie facebook friends than I thought and in the time it took to write this blog I have 3-4 good suggestions for veggie burgers.

More Beans!

So this weekend has been about realizations.

The first one was over the definition of being an "at home" vegetarian.  Hubs and I were out and about and on the drive home talked about what to do for lunch.  We had decided to not impose our new meat-free eating on dinning-out (or at relatives houses and such), but we had to hash out the semantics of "take out".  Hubs wanted Haka and so justified it (everything we love has meat in it) because it was bought at a restaurant.  My, ehem, winning argument was that because the Haka place was only takeout we would have to take it home and thus it wouldn't work with our new rules.  I did compromise by saying we could go to a random park or something to eat the food, but Mr. Hermit declined.

Rasam

The other realizations this weekend mostly came around tonight's dinner. Being father's day I wanted to make Hub's favorite foods, but opted out of the chicken wings part and made him Rasam, a South Indian "soup" I prefer to call "fire water", one of my new vegetarian fall backs.  The problem was what to serve with it other than rice.  We went with okra as our side and Hubs also added spicy pickle to his fire water.  Two hours later, I have now realize while being tasty, it really wasn't enough to keep my tummy full.  This also made me realize that one can of black beans, and one can of chickpeas, really isn't enough to sustain 2 - 1/2 people for a week of meat-free eating.

Okra and Rice with Rasam

Perhaps I should have made some lentils as well, but when I made them this week the pressure cooker blew up cascading boiling hot lentil water all down the stove and under the elements and blew out the pilot light on the burners, so I was a little hesitant.

Oh, and I also realized that I surprisingly don't really miss meat, which I am sure would soon change if you set me down at a BBQ, but right at this moment I don't miss it...

The Supermarket Stroll

So last night was the first grocery shopping night since our decision to take a long (long, long) journey to becoming Vegan.  With the exception of my 2 year old daughter unsuccessfully trying to help by putting a glass bottle of stinky vinegar on the conveyer belt, the shopping was pretty uneventful.

I stayed with the same grocery store we usually use so the only real difference in this week's shopping trip was the planning and writing of the grocery list.  I had to put off the shopping for a day so I could spend an entire night scanning pinterest for new recipes.

My biggest issue with going vegetarian has always been the issue of a balance diet.  This is kinda funny as my current diet is far from balanced and I have a large weakness for potato chips and deem it acceptable to eat them for breakfast.  I have always hated the idea of just dropping meat from your diet.  Secretly enraged by those "vegetarians" that look down their nose at meat eaters over the usual plate of frozen corn and mash potatoes, and sometimes even meat gravy on those potatoes. 

So to me, dropping meat = bad, replacing meat = good.  This meant I need to research a few recipes with legumes.  Yeah pinterest!

As a side note I do have to say that I am very lucky to have married and Indian guy that cooks Indian food, and I have had some tutorials from my MIL.  I am confident I would not even consider becoming a vegetarian without this exposure.  Indian cooking has been my first exposure to legumes.  Previously my only exposure being the can of pork and beans my dad would "cook" us as kids, often resulting in us eating up the cut up wieners in it and leaving half the beans. 

In the years since getting married I have learned about various lentils.  This is perhaps a whole post on it's own, as there is various recipes that will save us in the coming months.  I believe that if I can cook it (and eat it), most people can. 

This is perhaps where I disclose I am a picky eater.  I am a silent "ew, ew, ew-er" and will choose to starve over eating things I persevere as gross, which is apparently many things.

I digress, seems too hard to talk about my uneventful grocery run.  So as I started saying, my cart really didn't look too different than usual.  It definitely held more veggies than usual (hmm, maybe a 1/3 more?), obviously no meat, and I had to add in some beans and seeds to help with the protein factor.

Tonight we are starting with something simple (http://www.endlesssimmer.com/2012/04/04/cornerstone-cooking-crunchy-black-bean-tacos/#more-33746) that will have evil dairy (cheese) in it to help with the bean taste...

Get Vegucated

So I'm just a girl that grew up in small town beef country Ontario, my husband and I like to watch all sorts of conspiracy theory documentaries, but I have always purposely avoided any of those crazy movies that show you what the food industry is really like.  Made a point to avoid them until I casually happened to watch one today.  Ooopsy Poopsy.

So while sorting, scanning and shredding documents today I so cavalierly watched this movie (http://www.getvegucated.com/) recommended on my netflix account.  Well next thing I know I am texting my husband deciding we should make an attempt at becoming vegans or at least vegetarians.

It's not totally out of nowhere, my husband has been considering it for many years and is a member of WSPCA.  My meat intake has been reduced since moving out of my parents house 15 years ago due to exposure to new flavors and foods as well as the fact that I have to pay for my own groceries.  Recently Hubs has been told to cut down his cholesterol and against my opinion he's opted for the drug solution, I'd like to change that.  Also, there is so much debate over food; sugar, wheat, meat, etc that I constantly feel our diet could use some sprucing up, but feel overwhelmed by the cult like following to each opinion.  The movie today made it seem less like a cult and more like a realistic goal.

So, here is the first step on the road to becoming a vegan!  Well, I'll be taking the road one baby step at a time.  Today's step decided over our dinner of sausages was to start the journey.  Our next tiny baby step is to stop bringing meat products into our home.  We are going to limit our new vegetarianism to at home dining only to start.  Don't worry, we don't eat out too often....