Labor Day Dinner

The “B4 Burger”: You Won’t Believe it’s Nearly Meatless!

Labor Day…the day that (most) Americans celebrate the Labor Party. Well, actually it is now more of a celebration of the end of summer…but not here in Houston, where temperatures are still commonly getting up into the mid-90′s (today included)! Mark had to work today, so that left me to my own devices, yielding a lot of baking and preparing for dinner. Tonight’s dinner was the B4 Burger, recipe courtesy of the Austin American Statesman, served alongside sweet potato fries and grilled corn on the cob. Topped off with a nice cold beer, and you’ve got one awesome meal to celebrate!

Today I was bored…quite bored…but with my boredom comes productivity in the kitchen!

Chocolate Chip Cookies – check

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies – check

Peanut Butter and Honey Granola Bars – check

Prep Dinner – check

Pancakes for the week – oops…hopefully soon to be checked off…

Two recipes shone today…the one for my chocolate chip cookies and the one for the burgers we ate for dinner!

I love burgers, but tend to go more towards non-beef patties as of late. That is, until I found this awesome recipe at the Austin American Statesman for what they call their B4 Burger (Bulgar, Bean, Beef Burger). This by far was one of the tastiest and cohesive burgers we’ve grilled to date!

I won’t go into the recipe details in this posting, the recipe on the website I referred has the exact instructions and recipe I followed. But, I can go into our dinner and how we fixed the burgers!

This recipe yielded 6 patties for us, 2 that we ate this evening, and 4 that we froze for another evening. We served this burger on a Hot Hatch Chile Hamburger Bun from Central Market (yum!) with baked sweet potato fries (a cool New Jersey variety that has white flesh) and grilled corn on the cob. I chose not to have cheese on my burger, but Mark used a good Swiss Cheese and he said it complimented the burger quite well! I instead ate my burger with an heirloom tomato, very delicious!

We topped off the meal with cold beers from our favorite brewery that distributes down here from back home, Victory. Finally, we finished off our meal with one of the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies I made for my bake sale tomorrow (stay tuned for recipe in my Week 6 training update).

Burger Nutrition (no patty only):

• 179 cal
• 4g fat
• 22g carb
• 5g fiber
• 13g protein

I also got some training in today, running ~1.5 miles and completing ~1.5 hours of yoga, for Day of Free Yoga in Houston. However, now I’m so ready to actually relax with my hubby for the rest of my holiday…

Happy Labor Day and enjoy what’s left of summer!