Day 9 - Veggie Burgers

As you'll see in Kelly's post, we saw a Red Stag in the woods last night and wandered a little off the raw food highway. In my defense, I ordered collard greens, something I never would have done ten days ago.

But, back to this raw thing. Kelly found two great recipes that have saved me over the last few days. I've continued to be not-quite-lucid and yes-quite-irritable, but these substantial foods have brought some much needed moments of after dinner contentedness.

ONION BREAD (modified from a post by Pansy on RFT)

Ingredients:
- One and 1/2 large sweet onions, peeled
- 1/2 cup ground sunflower seeds
- 1/2 cup ground golden flax seeds
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1 oz. Nama Shoyu

Procedure:
1) I used the Vita-Mix on the 10 variable setting to grind the sunflower and golden flax separately. It helps to put enough in that the blade is completely covered and the tamper can be used to constantly press down the seeds. If you grind too long, the product will heat up and begin to be less fluffy, so take care.

2) Chop the onions in your blender or food processor. You want small peices rather than puree.

3) Mix it all together in a bowl until the dry ingredients turn to a consistent paste.

4) Use a spatula to smooth it out onto some parchment paper, and put it in the dehydrator. I simply overlapped some parchment paper on the plastic dehydrator sheet and made sure it was secure so it wouldn't flap around. My mixture was about 1/4 inch thick, but a thinner spread will result in dryer bread, which I would probably prefer.



5) Dehydrate on 105 degrees in an Excalibur Dehydrator for 24 hours. At some point in the middle of this process, flip the bread over and remove the parchment paper. You may want to adjust temperature setting and time duration to get the result you prefer. This "bread" seems to remain a bit gooey if you don't dehydrate the snot out of it.

SUNBURGER (modified from source)

Ingredients:
- 2 celery stalks
- 1/2 cup yellow onion
- 1 medium red bell pepper
- 1 TSP sea salt
- 2 TSP dried oregano
- 1 cup ground sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup ground flax seeds
- 1/4 cup sesame seeds (we substituted this for hemp seeds)
- 1/2 cup filtered water

Procedure:
1) Generally chop everything up, put it in a bowl and add the water last. Stir it well and transfer everything into your blender.

2) Using the tamper to constantly press down the mixture, I ran our Vita-Mix at a relatively high variable setting, long enough to get everything blended, but not so long that it became a puree. It's a matter of personal taste, so do what you want.



3) Like you are making cookies, create patties on a parchment-paper-lined dehydrator sheet. Vary the size to personal taste, but remember that they will shrink in the dehydrator. I've ultimately learned to prefer making about six with this amount of mixture.





4) Dehydrate at 105 degrees overnight, flip in the morning and remove the parchment paper, then continue dehydrating until you are ready to eat that afternoon. Note that the original recipe suggested only four hours of dehydrating time. Again, consistency is just a matter of preference.



-Nathan

[more photos to follow]