Veggie burgers: Sweet potato and goat's cheese burger

So I thought it was time for me to let go of Mark Bittman's burger advice, and strike out on my own. I had a couple of burgers in mind, and then the recipe guide of the Albert Heijn also made some suggestions for spring burgers, but in the end I stuck with the first thing that came to mind when I thought about making my own burgers from scratch: sweet potato burgers. With some kind of cheese, preferably goat's cheese.
I Googled a couple of recipes and checked out my own previous work, and all of this combined I came to the following recipe:

Ingredients
400 g sweet potato, peeled and rasped
100 g goat's cheese, in small pieces
1 onion
2 toes garlic
2 eggs
3 tablespoons oats
chives
parsley
pepper

Chop the onion and garlic and combine with the sweet potato. Add all the other ingredients and combine to a mixture with your hands (this will turn your hands a nice bright orange, which was just in time for King's Day today). Leave to rest for about 10 minutes.
Then shape 4-6 burgers out of the mixture. Heat sunflower oil (or any other kind) in a frying pan and bake for 5-8 minutes on both sides. Serve any way you like.

Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, a couple of things didn't really go as planned.

Pre-burger mixture. Looks like I was making a carrot cake burger.

At first, I added only the one egg, but this didn't really work. The mixture was a) too wet and b) not in any way coming together as burgers. So I added another egg (which made two in total, as stated above) to help with the combining issues, and then I added more oats to help with the moisture. This all helped somewhat to get a proper burger mixture.

Carrot cake burgers a-baking.

Then for the burgers: I made four, as I was joined by my trusty burger tester, but they were way to thick. This meant that both sides were baking nicely, but the middle part was still pretty wet. Also, it made turning them pretty impossible. If I'd made six (or even eight) burgers out of the mixture, it would have worked out easier. The amounts were okay for two people, although maybe you could tone it down to 300 g sweet potatoes for two people (I only add a salad, nothing like chips or potatoes or anything). They were pretty unsteady to begin with, and their size didn't help, so these were the least consistent burgers I've made so far.

Sweet potato burger mess.

So they looked pretty messy. But what about the taste? Well, they tasted really really good. The overall taste was sweet (what can you expect, with sweet potato?), but not too sweet. The sweet potato came through nicely, as did the goat's cheese. The herbs were not that prominent, but they added something.  The texture was also really nice: crispy on the outside and quite moist on the inside. Very, very far removed from any meat burger you'll ever eat, but that's the whole point of vegetarian burgers!

I'd call this a burger success, although as with all my previous burgers, there are some points of improvement. But that's why we call it an experiment! Can't wait to try some of my other ideas.

Alias Grace

So, Margaret Atwood. I may have mentioned before that she is a great author. Recently series producers have also discovered this, so The Handmaid's Tale is now a famous thing. Which is good. I loved that novel, and I like the series too, now that it's drifted away from the plot of the novel a bit. It is a universe that can stand on its own. Also, she is apparently publishing a sequel, The Testaments, later this year.
Another of her novels that made it to the screen is Alias Grace. Now I haven't seen the series, but the novel has been on my bookshelf for quite a while, and I decided this was the time to read it. I knew nothing about it beforehand, except that it was about a murder case from the 1840, in which Grace Marks was convicted for killing her employer and fellow maid at the age of 15. She was not executed, but remained imprisoned for most of her life.
Without going into too much detail about the plot; I loved this novel. It is typical Atwood; we have a smart, independent female protagonist who finds her way in the world. She talks about herself and her history in such a way that you can never be fully sure that she is telling the truth, or even that she knows what the truth actually is. She has her flaws, but that makes her human.
The other characters in the novel are not as fleshed-out. I thought Simon Jones would become another conflicted, complex character he turned out to be quite conventional and predictable. But the novel is about Grace, and she is engaging, the story is engaging, nothing much happens and still you keep on wanting to read more. Everything that annoyed me about The Heart goes Last was done right here. Also, the novel contains poems, witness accounts, all kinds of other materials that give it substance and context.
In the end, Atwood let's us decide for ourselves whether Grace actually committed the murders. The historical accounts don't fully convince either way, and I feel she fictionalised them very neutrally. At 500+ pages it is a pretty heavy tome, which is one of the few downsides. It took me a while to get through this novel, not because it was difficult, but because it was a lot to take in.
Next up in Atwood land are more of her earlier novels, since I somehow seem to be working backwards through her works. I hope they are just as good, and maybe a little bit thinner!