Muffins and Bean Patties

Today was a full day for us.  Lots of playing, library trips, playing, house hunting, and more playing.  We added in some baking and a lovely end-of-day story from Jacqui's former teachers and Aji's new teachers.  Great day, but I'm officially exhausted.  Vacation is hard work.

Pumpkin muffins

I know that I have my own recipe for pumpkin muffins, but I recently treated myself to Let Them Eat Vegan by Dreena Burton, and could not resist trying her pumpkin muffin recipe.  

I hadn't made them yet, despite the girls' requests for muffins, because the recipe calls for oat flour and I didn't have any.  A few nights ago, I realized that I could just make my own!  I put 1.5 cups of rolled oats into my food processor (I wanted to make sure I had 1 cup of flour) and processed on high until it looked sufficiently flour-like.  This made more than the 1 cup I needed, but I will use the rest at some point. ;-)  

I also couldn't find my nutmeg, so I subbed that for another of the lovely fall/winter spices and used the 1/4 tsp ground ginger suggested for adults.

The muffins turned out well.  The recipe made 17 muffins for us (my tins are really on the small side and I tend to underfill rather than overfill).

The girls worked very hard on these and we only ended up with a little bit of sugar on the floor.  We ate these as part of our dinner tonight.

Bean cakes/patties

For the main part of dinner, I had in my head to use up leftovers and make a bean burger or bean ball.  Into my food processor went ~1 cup of leftover steamed veggies and kidney beans, ~1 cup of leftover rice, ~1/2 tsp sea salt, ~1/2 T nutritional yeast, ~1/2 tsp organic seasoning, and ~2-4 T oat flour (see, I'm already using the extra!).  Process on high until everything is mixed together well.  Unfortunately, this was much wetter and stickier than I has expected, so I added panko to thicken it up and make it possible to form some sort of ball.  When I transferred the balls to the frying pan, the transfer process did not work out.  I ended up flattening the balls and breaking them into smaller pieces to fry.  That worked out well and they ended up with a nice brown patina.  We ate them with organic ketchup for dinner.

Aji ate her portion right up.  Jacqui exclaimed how wonderful it was, but then stopped eating halfway through and decided she didn't like it anymore.  I think she got to a thicker area of the patty that was not as crispy.  Next time: thinner, smaller patties so that everything gets nice and crispy.