My terrible confession

I had a grand plan for November. I was going to tell you all about my awesome meal planning skills, specifically my latest trend in cooking. I used to have a large cooking day on Sundays, which would make enough for leftovers for lunch throughout the week. But then I started thinking bigger. Why do that four times when I could have one large cooking day and be set for the month?

I have a pretty decent approach, I think. To wit:

1. Look through the circular the day before you go shopping to figure out what items are on sale (chicken breats, pork, ground beef, frozen veggies, etc)
2. Go through your pantry and see what you have wasting space
3. Keeping those ingredients in mind, go through all the recipes you've bookmarked or pinned lately and see if anything looks good
4. Make your grocery list
5. Cook for hours!

This method served me well all summer and through fall. But then November hit. My chili came out inedible (way too spicy). The veggie curry dish is bland and I get bored eating it about half-way through.

Not everything came out horribly, but that didn't mean it was blog worthy. My fried tofu was tasty, but looked rather unfortunate (tofu sticks covered in a peanut sauce, I'll leave it to your imagination what that resembles). My enchiladas were tasty, but were made using left-over frozen pulled pork, and while delicious wasn't exactly a recipe anyone would need me for (put meat in tortillas, cover with enchilada sauce, smother in cheese, bake).

So I can only once again apologize for a lengthy wait between entries. And also let you know that I am by no means a cook who never fails to have something beautiful and delicious on the table. Recently, I've been all about the Austin peanut butter crackers, take-out, and frozen tortellini with vodka sauce. But I have high hopes my cooking mojo will return soon. If for no other reason than December is a new month with some new recipes to try!

Thanks for sticking with me :D

Spicy Black Bean Burgers

Do you guys ever go to the grocery store with the best of intentions of only buying the stuff on your list? And then you see some of the sales you missed the first time you looked through the circular – beans 3/$2, pasta 10/$10, chicken broth 2/$2!

Which would explain why I recently looked in my pantry (or more accurately, large cabinet that works as cleaning supple storage place and overflow dry goods storage) and found I had 5 cans of black beans.

I love black beans, but didn’t anticipate eating that many servings of rice and beans so it was time to google recipes that would use up my excess, allow me to see the bottom of the drawer, and if they could be vaguely healthy it would be a bonus.

Enter these black bean burgers. They’re easy to make, pretty healthy, store for a while in the freezer, and best of us are delicious. Hope you all enjoy!