Veggie burgers: Spring veg burger

After my first attempt at a home-made veggie burger, I was in the mood for more. In The Fat Vegetarian (I'll stick with that name for now), Mark Bittman lists a one per season of the year. Officially it is still winter, but with the balmy 16 degrees we've had last week, it felt more like spring to me. So I decided to skip the 'robust winter veg' burger in favour of the 'spring burger with fresh veg' (again; I'm translating back from Dutch so the actual title in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is probably different). The actual recipe calls for green asparagus, which I thought was a bit too early, so I replaced those with green beans.

Ingredients:
450 g potatoes, in small cubes
salt
3-4 tablespoons of butter (tablespoons is a weird quantity to use for butter)
100 g green asparagus/green beans/snow peas/etc
150 g peas (can be frozen, defrost before use)
30 g mixed herbs (parsley, mint, chives, etc)
pepper

Right, so I forgot to buy fresh herbs. I had some very sad parsley that survived the winter, so I used that, but it was closer to 3 g than 30. You can do without, but I do think the burgers are probably a lot better with the actual amount of fresh herbs.

Boil the potatoes with a little salt for 20 minutes.
Melt one tablespoon of butter in a pan and bake the asparagus/green beans/what have you for a couple of minutes. Add the peas and herbs (if you have them), sprinkle in some salt and bake until hot. Put into a big bowl.
Add the potatoes and mash together. You can leave in some bigger chunks but make sure everything is well combined (this sounds to me like the 'fine breadcrumbs' stage of pastry making; something that works on the page but you can never be sure is actually happening in real life). Sprinkle in some pepper and salt. Leave to set for a couple of minutes.
Shape 4-6 burgers out of the mixture (you don't need wet hands for these, shaping went pretty easy). Melt two tablespoons of butter in a pan, add the burgers and bake for about 5 minutes on each side. They should be browned and stick together properly. Serve any way you like.

So this recipe basically lets you make mashed potato with herbs, and then makes burgers out of that. Sounds a bit weird, but works surprisingly well.

Veg baking and potato boiling in process.

Baking the mashed potato lumps.

 Okay, so this looks pretty weird. It is literally mashed potato, beans and peas baking. Also, I set the fire too low again, which meant two of the burgers were nice and brown but the other two were sad and soggy and kept falling apart. I should really keep in mind to keep the fire burning higher when I bake burgers. In this case, they could hardly dry out as the potato mixture kept everything pretty moist.

The end result.

So, weird as they may look, they actually tasted really really good. The beans were probably not the best addition, as they didn't add anything taste-wise and were still a bit hard, but the potato/pea mixture was great. My meat eater fellow diner agreed; these were a lot better than the first attempt, but also better than some of the burgers you find in restaurants (although I ate a sweet potato burger the next day that was divine). Also, they are actually pretty healthy. If you leave out the sauces (you don't actually need to add any sauce) you're basically eating your two veg a day. Not a lot of protein though, which is kind of the thing vegetarians need to get from burgers. In that respect the bean burger was the better choice.
I do wonder what these taste like when you actually add the proper amount of herbs, so I will be making these again to find out. Probably without the green beans, as they don't really add anything, but then again you could make these with loads of different kinds of veg and still come out with a pretty decent burger.

Next up (unless I change my mind): nut burgers!