Yum.

Since becoming a vegetarian again, I wanted to be able to have a burger alternative when my family is cooking out. I love black bean burgers, and Gardenburger makes a pretty yummy one, but they are quite expensive. I saw this post over at Food Coma, and thought, NOW is the time to finally learn how to make these! (p.s. I LOVE Emma's blog, she has pretty pictures and yummy recipes, plus I think she is HILARIOUS.)

So I went to allrecipes.com, thats usually where I head when I need a recipe, and found this one. The only thing is I didn't really want to use eggs in it, and I didn't have a few of the spices. So I kind of went with what I DID have and came up a tweaked recipe, all my own. :)

I didn't measure anything so I can't give you exact amounts of everything. I followed the basic structure of the recipe, but changed these things:

A squirt of ketchup instead of an egg, yellow and orange peppers instead of green, garlic salt and pepper instead of chili powder. I also made my own breadcrumbs with leftover hot dog buns by toasting them and then throwing them in my food processor with some thyme, pepper, and salt. A BIG thing is to really dry the beans after you rinse them. That made it much easier to mush everything together and for the patties to hold their shape. I just used my bare hands to form them, and it made 5 good-sized patties. :)

This was super easy to make, and REALLY cheap. The can of black beans was maybe 75 cents, at most. Score.

Being a vegetarian is cheap. I think that its a common misconception that the lifestyle is expensive. If you search around on the internet, you can find TONS of recipes, there is even the site http://vegweb.com/. Check it out if you are interested, they have over 15,000 recipes!

Happy Eating!
xo, Jenna