Homemade Black Bean Burgers

Dude. So last night for dinner I was going to try and make a chick pea and black bean salad since I have seen many recipes where you can combine those types of beans and add some olive oil and seasoning of some sort and normal people get this super healthy, protein packed salad that has tons of flavors. Yeah well when I tried it all that happened was I ran out of all my ingredients I needed to make a vinaigrette and was too lazy to go to the grocery store again so all that happened was I got a bowl of some chick peas and black beans with olive oil on them and turns out that's not very good at all.

So to try and avoid having to just toss the whole thing, I utilized my creativity to figure out what else I could possibly do with those ingredients.  The chick peas will have to just chill in my fridge until I make hummus or something, but as for the black beans, I had the perfect thing - black bean burgers.

Based on inspiration from this fella, I substituted some other ingredients and changed the amounts of stuff to just eyeball it, but in the end made some burgers that were TOTALLY DELICIOUS and let's be real a can of black beans is like 60 cents so I'm definitely going to start living off these bad boys.

Modified Black Bean Burgers based on the ingredients I actually had:

Started with half a can of black beans, mashed them with a fork to make a paste of sorts.

Added a generous spoonful of garlic paste (because I love garlic more than I love people).

Chopped up in my food processor maybe 1/6 of an onion (could have gotten away with more but I was lazy and 1/6 of it was already cut off the onion in a bag for me so I just threw it in), along with a roasted red pepper slice I got out of a jar.

Added the onion and pepper to my mix

Then added in some hot sauce (half a tbsp?)

Added about half an egg (was afraid a full egg would be too much, so I first scrambled it in a bowl and only poured in half knowing I could always add more later)

Added some red pepper flakes (since I don't have cumin or chili powder or other exciting spices) but still wanted to add some heat

Then breadcrumbs!  Just kept sprinkling them in until it actually looked the way hamburger meat consistency usually looks...turned out there was probably a generous amount of bread crumbs that went into it.

And I mixed it all together, formed about 3 patties from it, sprayed a frying pan with some cooking spray and let em go.

Sooooooo good! Seriously. Melted some cheese on them after I flipped the first side, toasted up some bread, added a slice of lettuce and all the condiments, and it was amazing.

Only issue is I have no idea how to thoroughly cook them all the way through so the inside isn't like...raw? I mean the only thing that really has to be cooked here is the egg anyway, but still maybe if I cover the frying pan next time or put them in the oven.

But I think I like them regular than normal burgers which I usually feel get dried out easily. Seriously, super in love with this one.

Here I am: 22, a recent college graduate, living in an apartment in Albany. Living the post-grad life, it has gotten to the point where I have a desperate need when it comes to food to a) not spend a lot of money b) not eat absolute trash and c) cook.

So where all this has brought me are to many a recipe pages, many a really gross concoctions being made, as well as FORTUNATELY many actually decent, delicious new foods.

Here is where I will probably only post about the successes of my new recipes (unless the failures turn out to be too funny to pass up writing about). And hopefully I will result in a collection of really good, cheap, healthy meals I can make so I don't have to continue to simply live off ramen and mac and cheese and pbj but can actually be a real person who eats real foods.