Long time no see, as usual. I’m guilty. I didn’t have time for Kitchen Impromptu, and I didn’t care because I wasn’t in my writing mood after all. Yet, I think that’s OK because 1) I’m not a full-time blogger, 2) I don’t have to write in predetermined frequencies and 3) I don’t believe in forced blogging, because I do it for fun. But I really like to talk, so  for me, blogging is simply not talking out loud, but talking to my keyboard. That’s how I managed to write 30+ posts over the past 1.5 years. But let’s face the facts: keyboards aren’t human, and since I don’t have thousands of readers who leave 200 comments per post, I don’t feel the pressure to write. Is it good to be by yourself, being free to write anything anytime, or is it good to have thousands of readers and feeling pressure? I can discuss this for hours and come up with no solution..

No, we are off-topic right now. Today I want to talk about my latest obsession: mini veggie burgers, or MVBs. Now, I have to indicate that I’m a burger lover,  I like to look at AHT during my office breaks, which makes me think about burgers everyday. So I get burger cravings very often. However, eating blobs of animal fat doesn’t always seem appealing all the time. Veggie burgers rescue me in those times. They are little, heavenly patties made of chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils or more. Moreover, veggie burger has a very simple base recipe, which leads to millions of variations.

Here’s a mini lentil burger I made for work.

And here’s my previous Saturday&Sunday lunch:

I ate my mini burger with oven fries, a lot of ketchup (I’m a Heinz addict) and a glass of kefir. Yes, kefir. If you don’t know what kefir is, it’s a fermented drink made of milk, and it’s both delicious and healthy for you. You can either buy it, or ferment your own. It’s like the milk version of kombucha. Since I can easily find kefir in Turkey, I didn’t bother making my own. By the way, I really want to try kombucha, but I don’t want to make it at home, because apparently it’s a very time-consuming job! But I couldn’t find any brand in Turkey that sells kombucha, although a lot of people sell the mushroom for home-fermenting. It’s really sad not to have a brand like Synergy Drinks in Turkey:(

Veggie Burger Recipe:

Ingredients:

• 3 cups desired legume (kidney beans, lentils, chickpeas, black beans, peas, etc.), cooked
• 1/2 cup desired nuts (hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, etc.)
• 1/2 cup oats
• 1 egg (or 1 tablespoon ground flaxseed, soaked 15 minutes in water)
• desired spices (curry, dried thyme, pepper, chilli, etc.)
• salt
• optional: 1-2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (use if you don’t like the burgers dry)

Directions:

Process everything in a blender. If you don’t have a blender, use your food processor, process the nuts first, then oats, and then the other ingredients.

Form 5 cm (2 inch) patties. Store in the freezer or eat immediately by cooking in the oven or in a lightly greased pan.

Assemble your burgers in any way you want to. I highly recommend using Smitten Kitchen’s Light Brioche Burger Buns (I changed the recipe and used honey instead of sugar, reduced the amount of butter and used whole-wheat flour). Also, I like to make mini burger buns for my mini burgers.

For oven fries, I simply drizzle 6 potatoes (cut into strips) with 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil and spices (salt, pepper, dried thyme and chilli). This time, I also sprinkled some grated parmesan cheese. Yum yum yum! Bake the potatoes for 30-40 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees C (390 degrees F).

Last Monday, Kitchen Impromptu turned one, which means I’ve been blogging for one year. Unbelievable! I was planning to celebrate my blog’s birthday with a fancy cake that writes “1” on it. But no, I didn’t have time for that.  Besides, it may seem funny to you to celebrate the blog’s birthday like it’s a hugely-read blog, since only like ten people follow the blog, and all of them are the friends & family. But, I don’t really care how many people read it. I write it for myself, and I feel good to share my recipes, even if nobody cares. And yes, I’ll still make some carrot cupcakes with “1” decorations, don’t worry. I started the blog with my famous carrot cake, and I’ll celebrate its first year with some more carrot cakes.

I also made some decisions on my first year. First of all, I’ll start my blog also in Turkish, under a Turkish name (“Oh well, now all your family and friends will start to follow the Turkish one, and nobody will follow your dear Kitchen Impromptu”). But it will have a slightly different purpose. It will be more focused on healthy eating and healthier alternatives to that greasy comfort food.

The other news is, I’ll start putting up guest posts every month. I asked my friends, and they accepted to share their gastronomical experiences all around the world.

I also made some decisions about my life, my eating habits. I decided to eat only cruelty-free and free-range meat and dairy products. I call them “happy animals’ happy products”. This is because I recently discovered that I feel uncomfortable when I eat some meat and found myself telling: “God knows how this cow lived in a dark, uncomfortable barn, fed with unhealthy food, injected with hormones and died in agony and fear.” Luckily, we can buy all these products from some farms we know, and therefore I can eat meat and dairy products at home. However, I know that 99.9% of the foods I consume outside are “guilty” products, so I decided not to eat them.

Being a vegetarian outside is not hard, since you can always eat some pizza margherita, Mediterranean salad, grilled vegetables, or pasta. However, being a vegan outside is the hardest thing. In fact, there’s simply nothing for you to eat, because everything has cheese or eggs in it. You can only eat grilled vegetables, but eating a dish without proteins is not healthy. So, it was easy for me to be a vegetarian outside, but I couldn’t manage to be a vegan outside yet. Maybe I can bring my own cheese to the restaurants and manage to eat them quickly before the waiter notices and stares at me like I’m mad (Because it’s something mad! I’ve seen many vegetarians in Turkey, including my mom, but I’ve never seen a vegan!).

And lastly, I want to give a quick vegetable and chicken pot recipe that uses leftover free-range chicken. It has a cream cheese mix that I like to use both in baked vegetables and in salads.

First I made that sauce by mixing one tablespoon low fat Turkish cream cheese called “labne” (you can use half tablespoon yogurt + half tablespoon cream cheese instead), ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard, drop of balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon olive oil. Then I mixed the sauce with some sliced vegetables (onion, eggplant and zucchini) and the leftover chicken and put them into four small pots. I cooked them for 30 minutes in the oven. Before taking the pots out of the oven, sprinkle with any cheese that can melt. And that’s it! As I said, that sauce goes well with salads too (but with only ¼ teaspoon mustard).

So, that’s it for today, and I’ll post the pictures of my celebration cupcakes ASAP.

Happy Birthday Kitchen Impromptu!!!!

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/kitchen-impromptu-turns-1-a-quick-vegetable-pot-recipe/feed/ 2 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chickpea-madness-leblebi-and-chickpea-burgers/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chickpea-madness-leblebi-and-chickpea-burgers/#comments Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:44:02 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=584

I’m recently obsessed with chickpeas. I always find myself eating something that is made of chickpeas. One example is hummus. The other one is leblebi. And now I have my own homemade leblebi, which was easier to make than I expected.

Leblebi is a Turkish snack, and it’s simply roasted chickpeas. It’s traditionally made by roasting the chickpeas two or three times and resting it after each time for days, which is a complicated process, so you basically buy it from your grocery. But there are two easy ways to make it in your home: using the oven or using the pan. I tried the latter one. I boiled some chickpeas, and I put them in a pan with oil, sea salt and black pepper. Than I sauteed them for about an hour in low heat, and I got some crispy leblebi, which are different from the storebought ones, since they are roasted in special ovens. But if you want to have your leblebi that taste closer to storebought ones, you can roast them in your oven for an hour.

Sauteeing the chickpeas:

Finished:

You may notice in the photos that I FORGOT to peel off the chickpea skins. That’s no problem for me, but you can sure peel them off..

Storebought leblebi:

Comparison:

And what about the leftover chickpeas? I made some chickpea burgers, similar to the ones that I made last year. This time, I processed two cups of chickpeas with 1 teaspoon of tomato paste, couple of walnuts, 2 tablespoons of wheatberries, some sea salt, some black pepper and some nigella seeds. Then I made patties and covered them with some whole-wheat flour..

… and I made a delicious sandwich! You cannot see it in the photo, but I also drizzled some aceto balsamico over the top. Yummy!

Wow, is that my blog? When’s the last time I posted here??

After my epic macaron fail, I’d been denying to post any recipes and that wasn’t the only reason. I was so busy with my finals (I graduated by the way!) and then my getaway to Bodrum -such a nice vacation!. Then I started to work and I’ve been trying to adapt this crazy lifestyle since then. I wake up at 7 am. YEAH 7!! Now you may say “What’s wrong about 7? We all wake up at 7.” But remember, for the past 4 years, I was a college student, and I was trying to schedule my classes no earlier than 10 am . If I had to take a class at 9:30 am, I was usually skipping it. Well, things have changed. Now I don’t have the excuse to “skip” the work, obviously. So, I wake up at 7, go to work and come back home at 7 pm, which means I have little time to eat my dinner, do some other things and finally cook for the blog. Actually, I don’t have time to cook. Then I decided to plan my days and I think I’ll cook for the blog 2 days a week, because I really want to improve this blog. The thing is, I don’t really plan the recipes (that’s why it is kitchen “impromptu”) and I don’t bother much about the photos. I just take them, without using any setting, which makes the photos, I think, poor. See, I’m quite lazy..

I’m planning to go on like this for now, but I definitely have some future plans about this blog. In the future (who knows when), the blog will surely remain “impromptu”, but not that much. At least, I will try to pay more attention to the photos.

Anyways, there are two recipes I made during the past couple of months, but I’ll post them soon because I can’t find their photos. But today I’ll give something different.

I’m lately obsessed with those “raw food” and “vegan” food blogs. Not that I’m a vegan (I love meat!!) or a raw food eater, but I like to (and try to) eat healthier. I try to use less sugar and fat in my recipes, avoid white flour, etc. Then I saw these beautiful fat-free vegan mini-donuts!!! Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? But it requires soy milk as the dairy substitute, and I have to say that I HATE soy milk, tofu or other soy-related products. Also in Turkey, you cannot really find non-GMO soy products, and even they’re non-GMO, there’s a lot of controversy about soy out there. So, I decided to make the cutest little donuts with almond milk.

Nut milks are very good alternatives to soy milk, they are proven to be healthy (no controversial issues) and they also taste good. I decided to start with almond milk, and save some of them for the donuts.

You can find the recipe here, and the blog has really cool recipes. I added some of the raw food blogs in my “Links” bar, so you can check them out. I added almond milk instead of soy milk. Since these donuts are fat-free, they taste different than classic donuts, but in the photos they look like cupcakes, which is also not true, because they definitely don’t taste like cupcakes. Actually, they do have a really unique taste closer to donuts. Also, don’t mind my hole-less donuts, I just don’t have donut molds. Well, to be honest, nobody can say these are actually donuts by looking at the photos. Sorry :/

And the almond milk? It’s the easiest thing to make. Soak 1 cup of fresh almonds for a few hours or safely, overnight. Then, blend it in the food processor along with 3 cups of water  (2 for a thicker, creamy milk). By the way, you don’t need to peel off the skins. Finally, get rid of the almond particles using a fine mesh strainer and ta-ta! You have 3 cups of fresh almond milk! If you think it’s tasteless, you can add a tablespoon of honey. You can make this milk with any nuts, or make some mixed nut milks which is what I plan to do next.