Hold on to Your Hats

... because I HAVE BEEN COOKING.

I always scroll right through other people's food posts, so please feel free to do the same here.

On Saturday, I made apple burgers.

Right, so first you need a buttload of ingredients. I bought mine the same day I bought my rabid food processor. One thing I've never bought before is ginger root. Apparently, it is not a common purchase, as the cashier had to consult her vegetable chart in order to ring it up. Did you know WalMart has LAMINATED PICTURE CHARTS for their cashiers? Shoot, when I worked there, I just said, "Could you tell me what this is, please?" and then found it on my alphabetized, non-illustrated, printed-on-plain-old-copy-paper list.



It always helps when you pull everything out ahead of time, I've found ... in my five days of cooking experience.

After mixing everything together--and with no further food processing mishaps--the whole concoction looks like this:



And you know what? You can totally do a taste test! BEFORE COOKING. You can't do that with meat items. Also, one of the things I hate most about cooking is putting my hands on the food. For example, the mixture had to be formed into patties so they could be cooked, and with regular hamburgers, my hands would have gotten greasy and disgusting. Ugh, and I hate the squishy noise and gooey feeling of hamburger meat being manipulated.


Because of my injury and my prior knowledge of making burgers, I still used rubber gloves, I won't lie. But I didn't really need them.

The directions in the recipe said to form four patties, so I did. But they were GIANT.



I probably could have made six or more, but I followed the directions like a good girl.

With all this healthy cooking, I also made a well-balanced meal. I hardly ever eat a meal. Well. Unless it's a frozen meal, but that shouldn't count. But I was so inspired that I put together an honest-to-goodness DINNER.


I've been meat-free for six days, and it's not been bad at all.

Here's some other stuff I made:

mushroom calzones


vegetarian chili



I'll stop with the pictures, mostly because I haven't taken any more. BUT! I've had homemade fruit smoothies every morning for breakfast, and I've been eating apples and carrots as snacks.

The only bad meal I've had was tonight's Hamburger Helper. No, I didn't use ground beef; I found this stuff at Wild Oats--protein crumbles. They're not quite tofu, but they're certainly not meat. I thought substituting them in an HH meal would be fine, but IT WAS NOT. I don't necessarily think it was the meatless stuff, either; I think it was that I've been eating fresh foods for almost a week, and I've forgotten what a processed meal tastes like.

I don't mind being a vegetarian--I haven't been tempted to eat meat this week, and I can see myself continuing this whole cooking thing (at least until school starts, then what am I gonna do?).