Hello friends.

Following along with The Masters coverage? If not, sorry about the Jim Nance drop.

I’m a regular Masters viewer and have no issue sharing that information. Hell I watch all of the tournaments if the better players are involved. Surprisingly it really works for viewing while I’m in the Sunday Gravy Test Kitchen, with one quick caveat: On Sunday, especially as the match is winding down the network will absolutely fucking DESTROY you with the commercial breaks. No fucking lie, it’s like every 3 minutes.

Now they’re doing that bullshit fucking thing that they call “Playing through.” What that means is they continue to show the golf but they shrink the golf window on the screen to less than half the size of the ad window and they play the sound for the ads instead of for the golf.

Know what I think of that?

FUCK YOU SIMPLE FUCKING PINHEADS for coming up with this. 

Know what I do?

I record the entire thing specifically so I can fast forward through this shit.

Fuck you CBS. Fuck you very much for this.

Anyway I’ll be watching later today.

 

Moving on now.

Not everything has gone flawlessly during my ongoing vegetarian experiment – now entering its 7th week – and boy howdy am I ever going to demonstrate that today.

I thought I would give you a couple of posts, one showing what really worked during this very unusual vegetarian experiment but first of all I’m going to share with you what most definitely DID NOT work.

The failed experiments.

This way if you do want to try this vegetarian thing yourself it will allow you to avoid some of the pitfalls that I stepped blindly into.

Funny thing though; this dish wasn’t really a failure at all. It produced a quality food stuff.

The failure was my anticipation of what I thought this meal would be and the fact that it wasn’t even fucking close to matching that anticipation. Like, not even in the same fucking ballpark as my expectations. So keep that in mind.

Today we share the story of the “Sad Burger.”

I made this one a couple of weeks back so it was still a little early in the veggie experiment. This should give you a better idea of my mindset.

My brain was really, really wanting a goddamn cheeseburger and I thought I could experiment with a non-meat alternative. 

Yes, I should have used the “Impossible meat.” I know that now. Besides we will be featuring the Impossible Meat prominently next week.

Not sure what show it was but one day while watching the Food Network I remember somebody making a black bean veggie burger. I love me some black beans now. My brain filed this information away in the “future idea” file.

Brain takes out the file and says, let’s make one of those motherfuckers.

We did.

Black bean veggie burger!

recipe courtesy of loveandlemons.com

3 cups cooked black beans, drained and rinsed

⅓ cup grated yellow onion (about 1/2 medium onion)

2-3 garlic cloves, minced

2 chipotle peppers from a can of chipotles in adobo, diced, plus 2 tablespoons adobo sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1 teaspoon cumin

½ teaspoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

1 egg

1 cup panko bread crumbs

2 tablespoons Canola oil for cooking

Hamburger buns and desired fixings, for serving

 

It starts innocuously enough with a simple overnight soaking of our black beans.

Then the next day, give the beans a thorough rinse and add some additional onion, garlic, salt and pepper and cook them little fuckers.

These will cook for about 2 hours or so.

When they’re done cooking we give them a thorough draining.

You’ll see some of the ingredients for one of my week day soup recipes in the background. These were for the Pasta Fazool that I shared last week.

Since we’re looking for a specific texture today we will be grating the onion.

This will keep the burger mixture from having big pieces of onion in it.

Next we have an item that I think is brand new to Sunday Gravy.

Chipotles in adobo. I’ve used these for years but I don’t recall using them for a Sunday Gravy episode. These have a wonderful deep, smoky heat and almost a barbecue type flavor in the adobo sauce. You can do many, many delightful things with these.

Next we have an item that you’ve seen many times before.

Some lovely balsamic vinegar. Yet another ingredient with a deep, smoky, earthy type flavor. I hope you can see by now how my expectations for this bastard were pretty sky-high. We’ve got some good shit in there!

Add everything except the egg and the panko to a bowl or pot and mash together real good. We want to leave some of the beans still chunky so you can tell that there are indeed black beans in this fucker.

Now we give it a mix.

Yeah, it was at this point I thought I started hearing the warning sirens.

Add in the egg and mix again.

Now add in the panko.

Then mix again for the last time.

Yeah.

Patty it up.

You’ll see the moisture level is spot on and the patty shapes up exactly like it’s supposed to.

Get out the cast iron skillet, add the canola oil and get it over a medium heat.

Let the skillet get nice and hot.

Now slap that burger thing down!

At this point pretend you’re cooking a regular-ass burger and season with salt and pepper. Cook for about 5 minutes per side to develop a good crust. When both sides have cooked put some cheese on that bad boy!

That is indeed real dairy, real cheese. I ain’t gonna deprive myself completely over here.

Now dome it up with a lid to aid with the melt-i-fication. Just a couple of minutes should do.

Prepare the bun for the burger landing. Being a pretty basic burger purist and for “first effort” type experimentation I went with a simple dollop of spicy brown mustard and a shot of ketchup on top.

Looks like we’re about ready.

Not too bad, right? That cheese is perfectly melted. The patty maintained its structural integrity. It even has a fairly enticing aroma due to it’s abundance of savory ingredients.

Plate it up.

Add some chips. These are kettle cooked salt and black pepper chips. Quite a tasty chip indeed.

Get a big ol’ bite.

/sigh

I had built up my anticipation to an unobtainable degree. You know what this burger wasn’t? It wasn’t a goddamn burger.

Everybody who has had a burger knows what a good burger is supposed to do. It’s supposed to deliver a big, juicy bite of fatty deliciousness.

This was not my beautiful burger.

It had no fat, obviously, so it failed to deliver on the very exact fundamental promise that only a juicy burger can bring.

It was also drier than a prairie dog fart.

The bean mixture thing was actually quite delicious. Brother Taj said it was killer when added to some diced up chicken along with some salsa and made into a burrito. I tried it with a couple of scrambled eggs and it was very tasty.

It was NOT a cheeseburger though and that made me pretty goddamned sad.

At least clean up was easy.

One of my lessons from this was to just let the vegetarian thing stand on it’s own. In other words don’t try to use the veggies as a substitute or replacement for a meat item. Let them be their own fucking thing. That’s part of why I love the soups I’ve been making so much because they are meant to be vegetarian soups and not something else.

Lesson motherfucking learned.

Here are a couple of additional things that did not turn out exactly as I had hoped.

I order from Domino’s maybe 3 times a year and had had pretty good luck with our local store but this was sad as FUCK.

Flavor-wise it worked but look at that fucking thing. It was cold and hard and dry. The order was for mushrooms, garlic and feta cheese on crispy thin crust, usually a banging combo but this fucking pie, man.

My favorite part of this order was following the delivery process. I get a notification that it’s “Been delivered.” Check by the front door, nope. Nobody in the driveway. The fuck?

Dude shows up like 10 minutes later with this thing.

I’ve since deleted their app and unsubscribed from their emails.

This was an unforgiveable failure. Especially since it was the first thing that I consumed that I hadn’t personally cooked in like 6 fucking weeks.

Somebody else was finally doing the cooking and this is what you give me?

Bastards!

One final failed experiment for you.

Anybody else out there ever tried this stuff?

It’s a soft cheese, almost a farmer’s cheese that’s been flavored with herbs and seasonings. In addition to Boursin, Rondele and Alouette make it too. I usually love the stuff but, take a closer look at that photo, just underneath the “boursin” name.

Yep, it says “dairy free.”

This was NOT delicious.

You could get a hint of the flavors but the texture was fucked up all to hell. Almost like a hardened toothpaste. I have not been going intentionally dairy free during this long experiment as evidenced by the very real cheddar cheese up there on the “Sad Burger” but I thought I would give this a shot when I saw it in the “Vegan” section at my grocery store.

This will be the only time I experiment with this shit.

Since I started doing Sunday Gravy way-the-fuck back when I’ve always prided myself on sharing the failures along with the successes. It’s exactly how a cook learns.

You want a life time lesson? Fuck something up real good and you’ll remember that much more than getting something right the first time.

Life in a nutshell.

I appreciate you good folks, truly.

Always good to have you here.

Stop in next week and I’ll give you some actual very good reasons to maybe try the vegetarian thing once in awhile.

A couple of those recipes are fucking showstoppers. 

Until next week, have a great Sunday and be safe out there.

PEACE!