Tonight we ventured out to a wonderful old picture house in Leeds to watch the film Planeat which was showing as part of The UK Green Film Festival. The documentary presents a convincing case for the re-examination of the heavily laden meat and dairy diet of the West in the light of the work of the scientists and doctors featured in the film. It's message is three-fold, firstly people need to adopt a more plant based diet; secondly, businesses should start to put plant based meals on the menu and thirdly, governments should start supporting small scale organic farming as opposed to factory farming. The film certainly struck a chord with me.
We eat a plant based diet and beans make up a huge part of it, we love them and because we regularly make bean burgers without a recipe, I made a point of writing this one down.
Spicy Bean Burgers GF SCD
2 cartons organic kidney beans in water OR 460g cooked kidney beans
1 large onion
1 medium sized carrot
1/2 green pepper
2 green chilli peppers
140g mushrooms
2 large cloves of garlic crushed
3 tsps dried oregano
2 tsps ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
salt and pepper
100/120g ground almonds (almond flour)
extra virgin olive oil
- Heat a tablespoon of oil in the frying pan.
- Dice the onion, carrot, green pepper and mushrooms.
- Finely chop the green chilli.
- Fry the onion for about 5 minutes over a medium heat until transparent.
- Tip in the carrot, cumin, paprika and oregano and cook on a low heat stirring regularly for about 10 minutes.
- Add the chopped green pepper, crushed garlic and green chilli and cook for a further 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
- Add the chopped mushrooms to the pan and cook for a further 3 to 5 minutes or until all the vegetables are soft.
- Rinse the kidney beans well then mash or pulse them in a food processor a few times until the beans are partly broken up, the mixture will be quite mushy with bits of beans still visible.
- Season the cooked vegetables with salt and freshly ground black pepper, tip into the beans and add a couple of tablespoons of ground almonds.
- Pulse a few times until all the vegetables are combined but not puréed.
- Add some more ground almonds if the mixture is too wet.
- Tip the rest of the ground almonds into a shallow bowl and using an ice cream scoop, take a scoop of the mix and drop it into the ground almonds. Coat the burger and press down gently to give a burger shape, this recipe makes 8 burgers.
- Chill in the fridge until ready to cook.
- Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry gently for 15 to 20 minutes turning half way through.
