"B" is for bean burgers!

Just another romantic and elegant candle-lit dinner chez Aurora

 I confess I had more enthusiasm for writing this post close to a week ago, when these photos were taken, but one way or another it's been a busy stretch, and it's only today, as I am taking a "French Day," reading a trashy mystery and baking gingerbread to take my mind off the world's troubles, that I actually have time and focus to write this fascinating account of The First Time I Made Black Bean Burgers. It's likely to be heavy on photos and light on text.

The recipe is accurately if possibly immodestly called "Best Black Bean Burger" and it's from the Love and Lemons site where I've been finding a number of bean-based recipes. I started this one by cooking dried beans more or less according to that site's directions and then I mostly followed its recipe for the burgers.

The not-entirely-tidy preparation area at the outset

I opted to use some of the bread crumbs I already had rather than buying new panko crumbs and we had used up the last of the tamari sauce a few days earlier so I went without that entirely. I also discovered that grating onions--and then squeezing out the excess moisture--guarantees a lot of weeping. It was good preparation for the second half of the book I was reading.

I'm always a sucker for heaped-up ingredient shots.

The chipotle peppers in adobo sauce are hella-hot; I followed a suggestion in the recipe's comments section and scraped out and discarded the seeds before chopping them. In the final burgers, the heat was fine, even for us wimps. The plastic cutting board I used is still stained orange, however. 

Another thing I'm a sucker for: mashing anything

As noted in the caption, I love to mash stuff so I've been happy to find that more than one bean-related recipe calls for the masher. 

Formed burger patties

The recipe notes that you may need to chill the mixture to get it firm enough to form patties; that was definitely the case for me--and that was without the tablespoon of tamari. I couldn't/didn't so much drain the beans since most of the liquid had cooked out so maybe that was the source of the excess moisture. Regardless, after a half hour of so in the refrigerator, it was solid enough to be patted into eight reasonably sized patties.

Burgers on the grill!

We put four patties into the freezer and the other four onto the grill.  Scott brushed either the grill or the burgers with a bit of oil, as suggested in the recipe, to prevent sticking. It was pretty successful, though I'm not saying I didn't retouch the photo above a bit to make the patties look a little tidier here.

The glorious finale

I'm hungry all over again just looking at this beauty. It was pretty darned delicious--as was the spare burger I reheated the next day.