People of blogland; I’m on a quest.  I’m on a quest to devise a really good, cheap, quickish, easily replicable bean burger.  Which is vegan, and gluten free, as this suits most of the frequent diners chez Usfun.

My old recipe was a Rose Elliott one from Vegan Feasts which involved vegetable shredded and mixed with mashed beans and mashed bread. Definitely tasty, but always seemed quite time consuming. I’m keen to keep my wheat intake in check, so was keen to find another recipe and ideally one which doesn’t involve the food processor, which always seems like a lot of effort.

So last night, with the able assistance of my best friend, we sauteed some finely chopped shallot, and added an indecent amount of crushed and chopped garlic.  We shredded a small carrot and parsnip and added that while searching determinedly for some tomato puree.  A slight smell of burning heralded the realisation we didn’t have any tomato puree and we went back to the frying pan with some Cajun spice paste and a jar of thyme, added both and mixed the contents with some two cans of roughly mashed cannelloni* beans. I feel sure that were she still here she would wish to make comment on the fact that the masher was rather style over substance, but, she’s not, so bless her she’ll have to just think it. Seasoning was then applied, they were shaped with wet hands and fried in a hot pan and, well, we’re on our way.  Still a tad dry; but nothing that a heap of piccalilli and some tomato ketchup didn’t fix.

Yum!

*always looks spelled wrong. They are the white ones. Look a bit like white kidney beans.