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

Hello Hello, its a Cupcake post!

I can't believe its almost been a month since I blogged! Wow. Time is flying by like craziness!

My daughter turned 1 at the beginning of the month. This past year has gone by way too insanely fast for me. Now that little gal is attempting to pull up and cruise on every piece of furniture in the house. My gosh. She needs to SLOW DOWN. Right now! :) I wanted to share the recipe I made for her birthday cupcakes. I decided to make them from scratch, and wanted them to be a little more fun than just vanilla or chocolate. No offense to vanilla or chocolate (I still love you!), just sometimes I like to mix it up a little bit.. So I made....

Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes!

My brother came up to me after eating his and declared "This is the BEST cupcake I have ever eaten!". Hooray! That made me feel so good. :) I found the recipe for the cupcakes here. The only thing was I wanted to make a sweeter frosting for the top, because cream cheese didn't sound so great to me to top them with. So I used this recipe for its "lemonade" frosting. (It's just like buttercream but you add fresh squeezed lemon juice.) Um, can I just say YUM! We had a lot leftover and the hubby and I just kept sneaking licks of it out of the fridge the next week. I used it to ice some sugar cookies as well and that was really delicious too! :)

My daughters party was fun, we had family over and Barry set up a tent in our backyard. He also grilled hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken. I became a vegetarian (again) the week before and totally forgot to get something for me to eat, so I ate a lot of chips, veggies and fruit. Haha, oh well :)

What did it for me this time (going back to being a vegetarian) was I was eating some venison and kept thinking about it being an actual deer, and it grossed me out so much that I threw it away and vowed to never eat meat AGAIN. This time its for good. :) I did it for quite awhile before (approx. 5 years) and I know I will be able to easily continue for the rest of my life. I will feel so much better health-wise and conscious-wise. I don't bash anyone who eats meat, I promise. I was telling my son about my decision and I said "I like animals, I don't want to eat them", to which he replied "I don't like animals, I want to eat them"... And I started laughing so much. I knew my husband would LOVE that he said that. :) hehehe.

But enough about all that. :) I just wanted to share another cupcake recipe because its been awhile.

Hope your weekend was great!

xo, Jenna