I think I need to be stopped. As if I wasn’t making myself crazy enough, I decided tonight we needed to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Actually, my cousin Hanna, a fantastic food blogger, is really to blame. Sort of.
You see, every effing vegetarian cookbook has a recipe for a black bean burger. Those black bean burgers are unavoidable and inescapable. They have 9000 steps and one of them always involves grinding your own flour out of an oat or stomping barefoot on cashews to make paste. (Any recipe that has me hauling the food processor out of the basement is generally immediately suspect.)
Still, if the black bean burger was a staple, then God dammit I was going to make one.
Until Hanna talked me out of it.
She said the black bean burger would bring me nothing but disappointment and heartache. She said they would either disintegrate on the grill leaving me with an enormous mess and the smell of burning black beans, or they would stay whole (in the oven) but gum up in the kids’ mouths leaving them unable to breathe but just able enough to tell me how awful they were.
“You will spend all day making them. Nobody will like them. You will want to cry. Don’t waste your time. Sauté the black beans with onions, some cumin and salt, and use that for taco night.”
I don’t know how often taco Tuesday lines up with Cinco de Mayo, but I now firmly believe that if you celebrate both of them at the same time you will have five years of good luck. Our luck began when we got to have a vegetarian taco night, and I didn’t have to use that revolting fake meat, which I have said before I am sure is made from dodgy soy, used car tires, and gum.
Frances discovered that she does after all like black beans. That in and of itself was worth Meatless May. 
Even if the beans look like rabbit poo. (I have had several rabbits, so I know of what I speak.)
I like to relish in whatever victories I have, even when they are minuscule. Happy Cinco de Mayo!!
 

Posted in food, Vegetarian on May 5, 2015