Eat Your Heart Out Gaga

Tonight everyone I know is at the Lady Gaga concert in Kansas City. But, this shows you what kind of person I am, I decided to stay home and hang with some great friends and eat some great food. We started out around 3 prepping and preparing the mise en place. The menu for dinner: a quinoa red bean burger with caramelized onions and mushrooms with a side of sweet potato fries. For dessert: a gluten-free vegan almond custard plum tart. 

Pressing the gluten-free almond crust in the tart pan.

We planned on going to yoga before we ate. So we really were doing all of the prep. We made the burgers and caramelized the onions and mushrooms, cut the sweet potatoes. However, I made the dessert so that it would be cooled and set by the time we got home from yoga, made dinner, ate and were ready for some dessert. 

The first thing with the dessert was the crust. It was a super easy crust and beyond delicious. Like, I will never use any other crust for pies, tarts, or cheesecakes. It was the best part of the entire dessert. It was brown rice flour, almond meal, coconut butter, and agave. It was soo simple. And no need to kneed, because there is no gluten that needs to be formed. So simple. I blind-baked it for 10 minutes before putting the custard filling in. The custard filling was silken tofu, almond meal, vanilla and some natural cane sugar. To top off the tart, I cut up the elegant plums that I purchased at the farmers market in St. Louis. I cut way too many but it provided a great snack for Sarah and I as we prepped the food. It turned out sweet, creamy, and fruity without it being heavy, too sweet, overpowering, or unhealthy-feeling. It was very picture-perfect as well. (There will be a final picture at the end of the post.)

Sarah cutting the sweet potatoes

As the tart was baking, Sarah cut the sweet potatoes and scallions as I tended to the caramelizing veggies and the boiling quinoa. The veggie burger recipe was super simple to put together. After the quinoa was cooked, we threw it in a bowl with chopped scallions, a can of red beans, some potato starch, walnuts and a grilling spice mix that I picked up at the spice shop in St. Louis. The spice mix tastes like grilled meat. Now, this might sound like a bad idea for a vegan, but really, it's a great idea! It brings those flavors that you can rarely impart any other way but to have charring protein from a grill. So, it really did help with the veggie burger believability. 

The sweet potato fries were topped with a Moroccan spice mix I also picked up at Soulards in STL. It gave the fries a smokey, spicy flavor that compliment the natural sweet, caramelly flavor of sweet potatoes. As a condiment to the burgers or the sweet potato fries, I whipped up my family's secret recipe barbeque sauce. It is super sweet and super smokey, so it went really well with all of the flavors the permeated the dish. The smokey burger with the sweet caramelized onions on top; the Moroccan spices on the sweet potato fries. It just tied it all together. 

I'm sorry the pictures are kind of crappy, but that's the nature of trying to photograph food at a party with a shitty camera. Regardless of the picture quality, the dinner was filling, but not heavy, while still being healthful and delicious. The entire meal was gluten-free, vegan, and refined sugar-free. The only fats were heart-healthy, skin-healthy fats that were not saturated. And the burgers had a complete protein (quinoa) as well as the proteins in the walnuts and beans. The mushrooms, spinach, and onions and sweet potatoes added the veggies that were well-needed. The plums added the sweet fruit that was lacking. Overall, this was a well-rounded meal and was beyond what I was expecting. 

These were the meals that satisfied la lengua de un vegan and other omnivores and pescatarians! :D