#easydining

Hey tumblr.

So it’s your turn to make dinner for your roommates but you’re like me and you’re terrible at preparation, but great at projecting your flaws and insecurities onto others. What you need is an easy meal that’s vegan so you can post about it on your blog but is still good enough that your picky roommate will eat the entire thing. I’ve got just the recipe:

Trader Joe’s Vegan Burgers!

There’s a Trader Joe’s a ten minute walk from my house, and it accounts for solidly 90% of my grocery shopping. Maybe Trader Joe himself will one day thank me for all the free advertising he’s getting on my tiny, tiny blog. Aside from their deceptive cheeses, they’re pretty vegan-friendly, which means they’ll be featured on here a lot.

For this recipe, you’ll need:

Dr. Praeger's California Burgers

Vegan buns (I think most buns are vegan?)

Condiments of your choice (ketchup, mustard, dill relish for me)

Cheeze of your choice (if you spell it with a Z, it means it’s not made with dairy!)

Additional toppings of your choice (I used onions and romaine lettuce)

Trader Joe’s Zucchini Fries! (I don’t have a picture of these, but imagine breaded zucchini, because it’s breaded zucchini - there’s no egg in the breading though)

(the ingredients together - pretend i didn’t take this picture afterward, and that there are zucchini fries and buns in there)

My first step when making anything for my roommates is to put it off for a week. I have a picky roommate and a roommate who loves vegetables and enjoys the idea of meatless dishes some of the time, but the picky roommate (we’ll call him George) has heavy influence on whether or not I cook. If you don’t have a roommate to talk you out of cooking tonight, please let me help you.

“Hey, wanna order pizza instead?”

“We’re going out for dinner tonight.”

“Hey, wanna order chinese?”

Feel free to repeat any of those as many times as you need. It only takes until the first syllable of “pizza” to get me to abandon my plans to cook.

Now that you’ve put off making these burgers until you’re concerned for the buns you’ve bought, it’s time to stop procrastinating, buckle down, and get cookin’! Start by preheating the oven to 400 and pulling out your zucchini fries. Briefly consider spraying the pan down with some spray-can oil, but decide against it. After all, it’s probably fine, and if it isn’t, your stress and self-deprecating remarks later will guilt your roommates into complimenting your food! Once the oven is preheated, put your zucchini fries in, set the timer for 15 minutes, and stop cooking.

This dish has no preparation, which is basically the best part about it! You can actually spend the entire fifteen minutes here worrying that you aren’t going to finish making dinner by the time you have to leave, or worrying that dinner will be finished too quickly and will be done before your second roommate gets home from work. Ideally you’ll have something on either end of the clock to worry about that leaves you with a narrow window in which to cook and eat. If you’re not stressed out, are you truly cooking?

Continue to worry until the timer beeps. The first alarm reminds you to flip the zucchini fries. Simple enough, pull them out of the oven, grab a spatula and try to flip them by sectors. If you followed my instructions above, this should be a real struggle, because you didn’t spray oil on the pan. As it turns out, it wasn’t fine, and a lot of the bigger pieces are kind of gooey on the inside while the bottom sticks to the pan. Press onward, however, and do your best to flip all of them. Put them back in the oven, sigh deeply and rub your hair a little bit, and set the timer for 7 more minutes.

An important step here is for your roommate to arrive home early. Her early arrival means you could have started cooking earlier and you’d have more time to finish cooking and eating. Make sure to check the clock because you’re actually somehow eight minutes behind schedule even though you’re using an oven timer that counted down fifteen minutes and you started at 7:30.

Once both roommates are home you can ask (we’ll call her Sally) Sally if you can borrow part of the onion she bought. What Sally doesn’t know is that you’re never going to return the onion, but she is a kind-hearted woman, so she’ll give it to you anyway. While the time ticks down to the next alarm, slice the onion a couple times and break off some romaine lettuce, or do whatever you need to prepare your condiments. You can also take this time to slice any cheeze you have, assuming you’re stuck living in the past and don’t have pre-sliced cheeze. I’m stuck living in the past, so I paused here for a moment to reflect on my middle school years, where I thought “staring” was a synonym for “flirting.”

Keep staring into the distance until the timer brings you back to reality. Finish slicing the cheeze, then reset the timer for eight more minutes. Pull out a non-stick pan big enough to cook one burger for each person eating with you, get it warmed up to medium heat, then place in your patties. Ideally, all of this will be achieved in 60 seconds, but nothing has ever lived up to your ideals, so it will take more like 3 minutes and you’ll question whether or not the cooking guide you’re reading is really the best way to learn to cook.

Four minutes left on the clock leaves you with three extra minutes after the timer’s run. You’ll have to estimate and count yourself. Thankfully, these patties don’t take any real interaction, so you can keep time by Mississippis to one-hundred-eighty Mississippis as you unload the zucchini fries. Count out loud so your roommates can question your sanity.

Once you’ve reached one-hundred-fifty Mississippis, you’ll want to start doubting that you’re keeping an accurate count. Let this doubt overrun you around one-hundred-seventy Mississippis, and flip your patties. My motto is “it’s probably fine,” and I’ve found that if you repeat that enough, it’ll probably be fine. Turn the timer on for five more minutes to break the spell of counting, and gently set your cheese slices atop each burger. Be sure to note that one is cooked better than the other two, which you can correctly attribute to uneven pan heating and poor patty placement. Shift them all into the middle, but not that close, because you don’t want the different cheezes touching. Haha, that would be disgusting, and you’re cooking for others today.

This is probably the hardest part of the recipe. Earlier, Sally asked you if the vegan cheezes get melty, to which you confidently replied “Yeah, I made grilled cheeze the other day.” You know George isn’t going to really care for the meal, but you actually kind of want Sally to like it and say encouraging things to you, so now you need to stare at her patty and will her cheeze to melt. It won’t help. You sliced it too thick. Why doesn’t Daiya come presliced like Chao does? If you’re religious, you could try to pray here. Some of you may consider putting the lid on your pan, but that will trap in any escaping moisture, and you want your patties to be crisp more than you want melted cheeze. The Chao will have softened by now, which will instill in you a false hope that the Daiya will too. Allow yourself to embrace that hope before looking at the timer because there’s only thirty seconds left and it’s not going to make a difference.

It’s time to eat! Before serving, remember to make a self-deprecating remark about the zucchini fries. This way, you pre-empt any criticism from George and Sally will say something nice, but it doesn’t really count because she just likes zucchini.

(The final product - a casual, easy meal for a Monday night after work)

To talk seriously for a moment, I definitely recommend this dish. A lot of vegan food seems to be intimidating to cook, like you slice up forty vegetables, sautee some tofu, spiralize a cucumber, toss it all in some oil and vinegar, and then boil it, or some equally complicated set of instructions. I’m atrocious at cutting vegetables and preparing things in an efficient order, so I love food like this. It’s very palatable, too, the Trader Joe’s garden burgers have a good texture - crisp on the outside, a little soft on the inside, and the flavor is mild and hearty enough that you can modify it in any way you modify a regular burger. I like the classics, so I had onions, lettuce, relish, ketchup, Chao cheeze, and mustard, and throughout all that, the burger’s flavor didn’t get overwhelmed, it served as a great base for the toppings to work together. Even George enjoyed the burgers, and he’s always skeptical of meat-substitute meals.

Despite the problems I had with the zucchini fries, I enjoyed them immensely. Any of the smaller pieces that were totally crisp on the outside were absolutely perfect, better in my opinion than regular fries. Zucchini fries have a faintly sweet flavor to them that’s somewhat like sweet potato fries, but they have a different texture once you bite into them. I think they go great with ketchup, or if you’re serving as vegetarian instead of vegan (or have vegan ranch), they’re amazing with ranch dressing.