For over five years Christie has suffered from a severe, life-affecting cough. She’s seen several doctors, had all kinds of tests, and taken several different medications, but nothing really has solved the cough. This year we changed physicians and our new one immediately started doing several tests for food allergies and sensitivities that could be causing systemic inflammation, affecting her lungs.
We were pretty worried it would turn out to be something we really loved, like soy (miso, tofu, tempeh, Soy Curls…) or tree nuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, etc. When the results came back the culprit was gluten. Another round of tests was ordered to rule out Celiac, which thankfully came back clear, leaving only the signs of systemic inflammation severely affecting the lungs. We were hugely relieved and felt like removing gluten was something we could do. Honestly, after so many years it feels good to have anything we can do.
I set about to rid our house of gluten-y goods, giving everything away to friends so that at home Christie would know she could eat most things (I am still getting one of my favorite cold cereal indulgences, Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins, which Christie hates and therefore won’t mistakenly eat). What it quickly brought to our attention was how often our “easy dinners” were centered around several products that contained gluten. Tasty things and easy on a busy night, but honestly not so great for either of us.
While I’ve been doing some creative things with tofu (two new recipes coming soon!), and we have several go-to legume recipes, I wanted to start experimenting with veggie burgers and cutlets. Hearty, healthy legume & grain dishes that I can make up in large batches, cook, and freeze servings of for quick dinners.
One of the first things I’m trying out is my now, newly made gluten-free, Marvelous Quinoa Nut Loaf. A generous slice is in the freezer to see how well it does reheated.
Next up was the lovely looking Scarborough Fair Burger from Joni Marie Newman’s cookbook, The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet. We’d been meaning to try making it for ages, but now we’re extra motivated since the recipe is already gluten-free.
When I got all the ingredients together I felt the mix was a little wet and added an extra 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast to help bind it and also because I’d forgot to make the TVP with broth!
After baking for the full time the burgers still hadn’t formed up fully. So I set our oven on convection and cooked them an additional 5 minutes, which helped a lot. They came out looking very tasty.
We served them on Happy Campers Gluten-Free Wild Buns and they dressed up beautifully!
Next week there will be another Burger Experiment to report on! Please post your suggestions for great gluten-free burgers and cutlets in the comments.
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