Grown-up rice crispy treats

Hey, we're back! March was a trying month and we ate a lot of comfort food. Sophisticated comfort food. For grown-ups (and kids with mature palates). Like these brown rice crispy treats.

Sara over at Sprouted Kitchen created this clever recipe that subs in brown rice syrup for the traditional marshmallow creme, swaps white rice crispies for healthier brown rice cereal, and opts for almond butter instead of boring old peanut butter. We made them vegan by using margarine instead of butter, but I suspect coconut oil would be even better.

A note about brown rice syrup: Go buy some now! It has a mildly sweet, toasted flavor. I keep it around for making frequent batches of my favorite fat-free granola (recipe here).

Beet and black bean burgers

Beet burgers were Kristen's idea. Apparently she had them at this little hippie retreat on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala (jealous). So she found a recipe that looked promising and bought the ingredients and left them both conspicuously laying around the kitchen for when I got home from Colorado.

These little babies were/are delicious. They are approximately equal parts beets, black beans, and brown rice with a little parsley, lemon juice, and spices. I loved the sweetness of the beets, but they were not at all overpowering.

The recipe from The Kitchn is really well written, and I didn't change anything, so no need to reproduce it here. I did cook them in a non-stick pan, which was not recommended but it worked ok. It is kind of ridiculous that we only have non-stick pans, health-conscious, progressive liberal foodies that we imagine ourselves to be (anodized aluminum skillet is on the List right after pizza stone and above pressure cooker)

Unlike every other veggie burger I've made, these didn't need to go through the food processor -- you just mash the beans and little bit with a fork and then mix it all together. This is one of those "less is more situations" -- it really would have been a shame to lose the textures of all the different components. I'm definitely going to try it this way on the next batch of chickpea burgers

Photography note to self: natural light is amazing, cook in the afternoon more.

Lentil loaf

This is going to have a little bit of a learning curve, I can already tell. My goal is to put up pictures of delicious things that I liked eating and not to like impart my encyclopedic cooking knowledge to the world, but I am still a little embarrassed about pulling two recipes from the same blog two days in a row.

In any case, last night's dinner (and today's lunch and probably tonight's dinner too) was this. Since I only had regular lentils and not French lentils (going to have to admit ignorance on this one?) I paid heed to Carolyn's comment at the bottom and cooked them down a little more than I normally would. Everything tasted great, but it really took a day in the fridge for it to congeal into a properly sliceable "loaf". I would say you could substitute for almost anything except the cumin which was absolutely critical, and I don't even love cumin that much.

Since I don't really eat french fries anymore, I so rarely have an excuse to have ketchup... mmmm