A Happy Meal……

As I promised, I am bringing you a well-rounded variety of sweets, vegan and meat free recipes, as well as regular recipes. Today is a meatless recipe that is so easy you won’t believe it. Once again, an incredibly short ingredient list, short cooking time, and a whopping ten on the health scale. You can’t get much better than that. Should have made these for meatless Monday, but here they are popping up on a Wednesday. Any day is good for a meatless day, you don’t have to wait until Monday. 😉

A lot of my readers have a hard time with chickpea flavor, and texture, so I wanted to make today’s recipe a little bit friendlier for them. I really wanted to use great northern beans, like I have in the past, but for some reason our grocery store just didn’t have them so I used navy beans instead. I find that they are a little harder to cook down then great northern beans, but they work just as good. I boiled mine from dry, but if you are in a hurry feel free to use a canned white bean. If you have an instapot, even better. I don’t have one yet, but I have read that you can cook your beans from dry to mashed in 30 minutes! That is going on the top of my list. Time is money, and that sounds like it would save a lot of both.

We all know that when you are creating a veggie, or bean, recipe something must hold it all together. Most of the time I use bread crumbs, but this time I decided to use oat flour. If you don’t have any on hand, I never do, just grind up some oats in your coffee grinder and voila, you have oat flour. In this case grind, just a little less than half of a cup of oats and you will have the right amount of oat flour that will keep the nuggets tender without drying them out. I am always terrified of over seasoning my recipes, and sometimes they just turn out bland. My first round with these nuggets tasted like bland beans. The next time I made them I bumped up the seasonings and they have more of a fried chicken flavor. Not the chicken itself, but the breading flavor. So, these little babies are anything but bland.

I decided to pair this recipe with another super simple recipe. It is so simple I’m not even calling it a recipe. I just threw together some oil free shoe string potatoes seasoned with salt and garlic powder to taste and topped them off with some dried parsley flakes. The main trick to these potatoes is to cut your slices lengthwise and then cut each slice into thin little shoe string potatoes. Nothing fancy, just quicker to cut up, they cook faster, and they are easier for little hands. Grab your favorite dipping sauces, throw a side salad on the table, or some veggies, nuggets and fries, and you are all set. Dinner on the table in less than an hour and you can sit back, relax, and enjoy!

Have you tried an instapot?

What are your favorite ways to dip your nuggets and fries?

WB Nuggets and Shoe String Potatoes

By Angie Gouchenour

24 nuggets and 4 servings of fries

Ingredients

Nuggets

3 cups cooked navy beans (or great northern beans)

3/8 cup vegetable broth

½ cup oat flour (See notes above)

1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper

1-2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons paprika

1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon onion powder

Fries

2 medium potatoes washed

Salt and garlic powder to taste

Directions

Nuggets

Preheat oven to 375’f

In a medium bowl microwave beans and vegetable broth for 2 minutes

Using a fork, or pastry cutter, mash the beans into a paste (Try to leave very few whole beans)

Stir in the oat flour, black pepper, salt, paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder until well combined

Using your small cookie scoop drop 24 scoops of bean mixture onto two prepared cookie sheets covered in parchment paper

Pat each scoop down and shape into the shape of a chicken nugget (This is a really quick process)

Bake in your preheated oven for 15 minutes, remove and allow to cool for 5 minutes before serving

Fries

While the nuggets are cooking cut up the potatoes

Cut them lengthwise into “steaks”

Cut each steak lengthwise into thin strips

Place the cut-up potatoes onto a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper

Sprinkle with salt and garlic powder to taste

When you remove the nuggets from the oven raise the temperature to 400’f

Cook the potatoes for 30 minutes

Remove from the oven and serve