cheap meal – Singing about Cooking

I’ve been craving zucchini fritters and corn fritters and have been on a ground chicken kick, so when I came across this recipe for Chicken, Zucchini, and Corn Burgers from The Cafe Sucre Farine, the ingredients when on the shopping list!

And if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I had to make a couple of modifications due to food allergies – though thankfully not huge changes:

red peppers (nightshades) are replaced by chopped frozen spinach
panko (gluten) is replaced by chickpea flour

Check out how this recipe when for me.

Mise en Place

I’ve been taking an online cooking course in gluten-free and dairy-free cooking, and the first lesson isn’t in cooking itself but in the philosophy of mise en place – preparing all of your raw ingredients so that once you begin with assembly, you won’t have to stop or worry about missing something as you move efficiently through the cooking process. So that’s how I started here since it’s all raw ingredients, mixing and shaping, and then cooking.

1 lb ground chicken
1 cob of corn, kernels sliced off
1 cup shredded and drained zucchini
1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach
4 green onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 egg, beaten
4-6T chickpea flour
2T cilantro
1T cuminn
1T salt
1/2T pepper

Mix with Your Hands

Both sides of my family – the country cooks and the city cooks – have a hands-on approach to cooking. Pretty much any time ground meat is mixed, we use our hands. And this is no exception, especially since I choose to form the burgers and place them on a cookie sheet to bake rather than cook in a skillet.

I was making these for lunches for the week, so I made five “regular” sized burgers, like I would want on a bun if I chose to eat them that way. The original recipe also suggests making more, smaller patties to dip as an appetizer.

With replacing the panko with chickpea flour instead of gluten free break crumbs or panko, the mixture remains a bit more wet since there’s not as much carbohydrate to soak up the moisture from the egg, vegetables, and chicken.

I chose to go with the chickpea flour because I wanted more nutritional value than any bread crumb or panko – regular or gluten free – provides while achieving similar results. I also like keeping the moisture available during the cooking process so that the resulting burgers are still juicy.

Meal Prep

And that’s how meal prep is done for this week. These protein- and vitamin-packed burgers will accompany my gluten-free, dairy-free, nightshade-free lasagna for lunch at work.