Naturally Preferred Veggie Burger

Well, I was all stirred up yesterday evening and I was going to try making some homemade veggie burgers from a new recipe that I found on the internet. So I went to the grocery store to pick up a few ingredients that I needed when I discovered that my local grocery store does not carry chickpea flour. Dang it! I think they carry every other product that Bob's Red Mill makes except chickpea flour. So, I will have to make a trip to the health food store to get that. I guess the weekend might be a better time to experiment with a brand new recipe anyway.

So, without the chickpea flour, I knew I wasn't going to be making any homemade veggie burgers, so I walked over to the freezer section and started looking at the veggie burgers there to see if there was anything new, and vegan. That's when I spotted a box of veggie burgers called Naturally Preferred. There's not too much info on the internet about them, although I think I have seen them in the health food stores before (I could be wrong), but this was my first sighting of them in a regular grocery store. I checked the ingredients to see if they were vegan, and they were. Then I noticed something strange about the ingredient list. It basically read like the veggie burger recipe that I was wanting to try last night, which is pretty much just a combination of TVP and vital wheat gluten (along with a little chickpea flour) and some flavorings. I decided to pick up a box of these so I would have something to compare my homemade burgers to so I could see how close I could come to achieving that storebought veggie burger texture.

I ate one of these last night and it was very good. Now it's probably my favorite vegan veggie burger that is supposed to be an imitation of a beef hamburger. It will be interesting to compare the homemade ones to this (once I make them) and see how close I can get. For today's lunch, I just brought one of the Naturally Preferred patties on a whole wheat bun with a couple of pickles. I used to have to bring along some Vegenaise in one of the little blue lunchbox containers, but now I just keep my own big jar of Vegenaise in the fridge at work. For me, there's less waste that way. Mmmmmmm... I love veggie burgers with Vegenasie and pickles.

In the red container I've got some delicious BBQ Soy Crisps by Genisoy. My boss introduced me to these things a month or so ago and I have been buying bag after bag since then. These are so delicious, and so much more substantial than just a regular old rice cake. The BBQ flavor on them is really good too. The only bad thing about them is that it is entirely too easy to eat the entire bag in one sitting.

And then, I accidentally turned today's lunch into a big 'ol soy fest by bringing some edamame. This was actually my first time trying edamame since becoming vegan. In fact, I had never even heard of them until after I became vegan. Now, I think that the ones that are still in the pods are really cute, and it would be fun to pop them out of the pods and eat them, but space is at a premium in the lunchbox, so I couldn't afford to fill up a bunch of space with the pods. So I bought the ones that were already shelled. I just boiled them and then used a grinder to put some nice chunky sea salt on them. I tried some of these last night too and I really liked them. I will definitely be snacking on them a lot in the future.

Dessert ended up being a Cashew Cookie Larabar for the sake of simplicity, and also because it's NOT made out of soy. I was so happy yesterday when I went into the store and the Larabars were still on sale. I stocked up again. I have gotten into the habit here recently though of eating one of these for breakfast every morning on my drive to work, so my stash never seems to last that long anymore.

Well, that just about does it for Friday's lunch. If I can locate some chickpea flour this weekend, I might try making that veggie burger recipe that I'm so interested in (I'll wait until I actually try it before I show you where I got it, I want to make sure that it's good). If I can't find that, then who knows what I might end up bringing.

Thanks for looking at my blog and I'll see you on Monday.

Have a great weekend everybody!