Magazine Mondays - Carrot & Bean Patties

Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice, a blog I love reading, runs an event called Magazine Mondays. The idea is to actually use some of your stash of foodie magazines by choosing a recipe every week and cooking it. My magazine stash is getting way out of hand (bit like my cookbook collection, really) so I thought this was a great idea!

The magazine I'm cooking from is Cook Vegetarian. Now we are definitely not vegetarian, but one of my new year's resolutions was to eat less meat for various reasons (being poor, only buying free range meat, trying to be healthier) and I've been borrowing vegetarian cookbooks from the library and I bought this magazine because it had a free veggie curries booklet :) It's actually a really nice magazine, full of recipes you'd actually like to cook and eat and not feel deprived because they didn't contain half a cow.

So the recipe I chose was carrot and bean patties, the idea being that I could serve them like burgers with the sesame buns I made yesterday. I adapted the recipe only slightly.

Ingredients:
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for brushing
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
450g carrots, roughly chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
200ml vegetable stock (I use Marigold bouillon powder, much nicer than stock cubes)
salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 can of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
75g breadcrumbs
3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander (see note below)


Heat the olive oil in a large pan, add the onion, garlic and spices and fry over a lowish heat for a few minutes. Add the carrots and fry for another minute. Add the stock and seasoning, bring to the boil, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes until the carrots are tender. Drain and leave to cool.

Mash the carrots and onions with a potato masher. Then add the kidney beans and mash again. Add the breadcrumbs and coriander, mix well and check the seasoning.


Divide the mixture into six and shape into round burger-like patties. It's easier if you wet your hands. I used a steel chef's ring to make mine perfectly round.

At this point you can freeze them, or chill them for later, but if you're going to cook them, brush them on both sides with olive oil (I use an oil pump spray, which I fill with olive oil), place them on a baking sheet and bake at 220ºC for about 20 minutes.



I made some baked potato wedges to go with the patties, and served them in the sesame burger buns with a bit of rocket salad and some sweet chilli mayonnaise (just made by mixing mayo and sweet chilli sauce).


I just want to show you two of my favourite shortcut ingredients. As I live in a village, I often find it difficult to get hold of fresh coriander and don't always fancy driving a 12 mile round trip to the nearest big supermarket, and I can't seem to keep a growing plant alive for more than a week, so I keep this Gourmet Garden coriander paste in the fridge. It's great stuff, definitely the next best thing.


And the breadcrumbs... well, I never throw bread away. The stale bits go into the blender to be turned into breadcrumbs, which then go in the freezer, so I always have fresh breadcrumbs. And there's no need to defrost them before using. I have no idea why people buy breadcrumbs!