Veggie burgers: A first attempt

So I'm a vegetarian. Have been for all my life. Also, I like to eat burgers. Not hamburgers, obviously, but veggie burgers. These come in all shapes and sizes: travelling through the USA I was surprised at how inventive and tasty some of these burgers can be; sweet potato burgers, bean burgers, but also soy burgers with nice spice or texture mixes added. In The Netherlands, the amount of veggie burgers on offer is growing steadily; if you're lucky, you'll get one from the 'Vegetarian Butcher', a big meat-replacement producer. If you're even luckier, you'll get a homemade burger.
Now I don't really eat shop-bought veggie burgers at home, because burgers aren't really healthy and the few evenings I spend at home during a week I actually want to eat something that's good for me. Lots of veggies. Lots of protein. Not a lot of fat or carbs.
But wait a minute. Doesn't the term 'veggie burger' actually tell you these are made of vegetables? And if you leave out the fries and the fatty sauces, add in a salade, isn't that actually a pretty decent meal? Am I now just deluding myself because I smell a new project coming and want to dive straight into it? All true!

So I've decided I'm going to try and make some veggie burgers myself. From scratch. I'll get a meat eater to join me every time I make one for dinner, just so I can get the opinion of someone who hasn't been that used to eating veggie burgers. I'll make a little project out of this, no idea how long this will be, but we'll see.
I made my first burgers yesterday evening. I have a cookbook called The Fat Vegetarian in Dutch, not because you get fat (at least I hope so) but because it has over 2,000 vegetarian recipes. It's by American food journalist Mark Bittman, the English title is a pretty boring How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (you probably don't sell many books in the USA if you put the word 'fat' on the cover). Mark covers all kinds vegetarian burgers and burger-like recipes; meatballs, meatloaves, schnitzels, whatever you want (also a ton of other recipes, as you probably wouldn't fill a cookbook with 2,000 veggie burger recipes). The only downside to this cookbook is that it has hardly any pictures. Also, it's pretty heavy. On the upside, it has a reading ribbon, which is one of my favourite things in the world.

Anyway, I decided to start simple, with the 'simplest pulse burger' (I'm translating back from Dutch here, so it may well be called differently in English). The recipe is supposed to cover 4 people, but we were hungry so we had two burgers each. I'll share the recipe with you here, for anyone crazy enough to follow me on my veggie burger journey.

Ingredients:
- 250 cooked beans, or a 400 g can, drained. Can be any type of bean: black, red, kidney, or even chickpeas, lentils, whatever you want. I used a can of kidney beans.
- 1 onion, quartered
- 40 g oats (not instant)
- spices: I used pepper, chili pepper, ground garlic and paprika
- 1 egg
Mark tells us to add extra liquid if we need it, but I didn't.

You need a food processor to make this. Basically dump all the ingredients in the food processor and pulse a couple of times until you have some sort of a mixture. Don't make it too smooth, Mark tells us. I probably made it a bit too smooth. Leave to settle for a while.
With wet hands, shape 4 - 6 burgers out of the mixture. Leave to settle again.
Pour some oil in a frying pan and let it heat for about 1 minute. Put the burgers into the pan and heat for about 5 minutes on each side. Serve any way you like.

Now, doesn't that sound simple? Easy breezy!
Just a couple of things:
- oats? What am I, a horse? Also; oats are corse and grainy, what are they going to make my burger taste like?
- why can't my mixture be smooth? What's it going to do?
- wet hands? Really?
- how is this wet mess of things ever going to resemble a burger?
- how is letting things settle going to change anything?
- how is this wet mess of things with chunks of onion and egg ever going to be tasty?

But lo and behold. It actually worked out fine.

The mixture pre-settlement. Do I spot an oat?

So it does look a bit like a weird mess at first. But if you let it settle for a while, the oats seem to soak up some of the moisture, and also the egg does some sort of binding magic. No idea what happens, but the mixture felt pretty nice and consistent. Almost like how I imagine minced meat to feel (not that I'd ever thought about that before).
The 'shape with wet hands' works like a charm, too. The burgers don't stick to your hands but do stick to themselves. Neat!

The burgers a-baking.

Then when you bake them, you should actually turn the heat up pretty high, and add lots of oil. To someone used to baking burgers this probably sounds pretty logical, but for me it was one of the first times, so my burgers became a bit dry as I had to fry them for longer to get them to brown. Also, a couple fell apart upon turning, probably because they hadn't browned/bonded enough on the bottom. But they came out pretty well.

I like big burgers and I cannot lie...

Okay, so the taste was not super. It was fine, but somewhat lacking in taste. You couldn't taste the onion that much, nor the oats at all (luckily). Will have to add higher amount of spices next time to get some flavour. Because they were pretty dry, we added a pretty big amount of chili sauce to get some sort of taste out of them, and also add some moisture. Funnily enough, the meat eater enjoyed the taste of the plain burger more than I did. The texture was good, again a bit dry, but not unpleasant. All in all, a pretty good first attempt, I would say!

So this was my first try; it's also one of the easiest burgers in the book. I may have another go with a different type of pulse, or I may upgrade to a whole other kind of burger altogether. Mark lists loads more options, and beside him there must be loads of other veggie burger recipes out there. I'll keep you posted!

Conversations with friends

Wow, Sally Rooney. Just wow.

I considered leaving this post at that, but then you really would be none the wiser, so I let my thoughts settle for a moment. So I read Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney's first novel. This was one of those novels that I came to live with, of which I read a chapter each day, no more no less, to keep it in my mind but not to rush through it. And then today I finished it in one go.
I loved Normal People, but I love this novel even more. I can see elements from Normal People in this novel, characteristics, events, plot devices. It almost feels as if the two protagonists from Normal People, Connell and Marianne, together make up the protagonist of this novel, Frances. Partly because Frances is so much more complex than they are, and partly because she has so many sides to her personality that they hardly fit in one person. But in a good way.
So, what's it about? Well, the title mentions conversations with friends, and Frances has a lot of conversations with her one friend, Bobbi, but we never really get to read those conversations. They're about politics or feminism or capitalism or something like that, but those are described in one sentence; then we talked a lot about [insert something]. The conversations they do have are not really about something concrete, but they are very realistic. This is how people actually talk.
Frances and Bobbi have been friends since secondary school, which is also when they were lovers. Bobbi broke up with Frances, but they remained friends and now perform spoken word together. Through this, they meet Melissa and her husband Nick and they become friends.  Frances and Bobbi are still students in their early twenties, whereas Nick and Melissa are early and mid thirties. Melissa is a wealthy writer, Nick is a somewhat failed actor. They make an unlikely combination with the communist students, but it works. After a while, Frances and Nick start an affair. It is unclear whether Bobbi and Melissa also have an affair; the novel is written in the first person and Frances looks up to Bobbi too much to ask her directly about that kind of thing, but it is implied that they do.
We soon discover that Frances comes from a difficult home situation, which has taught her to keep her emotions under control. The conversations that the title alludes to felt to me more like the conversations she has in her head with herself, about behaving and thinking and feeling the way she should, the way people will like here. Things start to spiral out of control when Frances and Nick both are unable to confess that they actually feel more for each other than they are supposed to.
I won't give away too much, but the last couple of pages I almost held my breath. In Normal People the ending spoiled it for me, but here it is perfect. It contains the same doubt, the swinging between emotions and outcomes, which is portrayed so realistically throughout the whole novel These are characters I felt I really knew, and I rooted for them all the way through.
There's lots more to the novel, again the class and gender boundaries, the dialogue is written without quotation marks, but it's all extra. The core of this novel is a beautiful, gripping story about a very interesting set of characters.

Milkman

I seem to have a little tradition going with the first novel I finish in a year being the Man Booker prize winner of the previous year. In 2018, Anna Burns won the Man Booker for Milkman (I have an older print run of the novel which mentions it being 'shortlisted'). I really wanted to read this novel even before it won the Man Booker, because it looks beautiful (yes, I fall for a good cover image) and because the blurb text made me curious. But then I read Normal People by Sally Rooney, which is about a couple living in Ireland trying to make it work despite social differences. I thought Milkman was more of the same; a Northern Irish story about a girl trying to make a relationship work in difficult times. So I set it aside for a short while, because I didn't want to mix the two novels up in my head.
Well, I needn't have troubled myself. Milkman is completely different from Normal People, in terms of plot, style, characters or themes. It is so much darker, more complicated, but at the same time lighter and more joyous. The story is set during the Troubles, with the protagonist living in an unnamed Northern Irish town, trying to make things work while she is besieged by political and social issues on the one side, and her family trying to get her married and more normal on the other. We never find out her name. We hardly know anybody's name, come to that. People are 'first sister' or 'longest friend' or 'real milkman'. Then there are 'the renouncers' and 'the country over the water'; the references to the Troubles are rife, but the military actions are not described as something horrible or even especially out of the ordinary. They are part of life; people know how to deal with them, they stick together in their very tight-knit community, and sometimes someone dies. Actually, a lot of people die. But this is a fact of life, in the seventies, in this Northern Irish city.
There is hardly any dialogue in the novel. The pages are filled from top to bottom and from left to right with text, big blocks of text that seem daunting at first. But when you start to read, when you get into them, you find that these long flowing sentences actually make up a pretty good story, are logically connected, and that even though they are long, they make sense in their own way, sense because of the comma's that have you come up for breath and sense because after a while you get into the mindset of this main character, this unknown girl that is telling us her story. See what I did there? The whole novel is like that. It reminded me of Ulysses, the difference being that this novel is actually readable.
So what actually happens? Not all that much, really. The protagonist tries to keep her life going, all the while telling us what that life is like. She is being followed, amongst others, by Milkman, one of the top renouncers. Gossip starts up that she is actually his lover, while in fact she is dating 'maybe-boyfriend' from another district. This is a conservative, religious community, and she should be properly married at this ripe old age of 18. But it is not the gossip that gets her down, she isn't really interested much in what anyone thinks of her. In the end, the constant fear of being followed by Milkman, of having him appearing and disappearing suddenly, makes her stumble and fall. This breakdown is described beautifully, with the narration following the main character's mental state. The creeping, sliding suspicion that someone is always watching you, following you, finding out everything about you gets into your pores after a while.
But then, as I said, this story is lighter and more joyous than Normal People. Anna Burns doesn't make it heavy, she doesn't dwell on the hard stuff. She manages to show the absurdity of the whole Irish conflict, but also of the social conventions and out-dated ideas about dating and marriage, without being outright ironic or demeaning. In a sense, this novel is the epitome of mindfulness; stuff happens, just let it flow by.
In my opinion, this is a very deserved Man Booker winner. It is a lot to get through, it took me almost a month to read, but in the end, it is a very rewarding experience. This is literature, experimental as it is, and the story is timeless and unique. I didn't agree with the 2016 and 2017 Booker winners, but I have to agree with the judges here; Milkman is one of the best novels I've read in a long time.