Heather: Hey guys, this is Heather from healthyveganrecipes.net.
So, today I am going to show you a Vegan Meatball Recipe which is going to be great.
It's really versatile, you can have it on spaghetti with some tomato sauce, you could
have it as burgers if you make your patties bigger.
I've even done it in a soup.
Phil's grandma used to make a meatball soup and so his mom and I teamed up and made a
soup this weekend using these little meatballs and the soup base.
Okay, so what are we going to start with is a base of cooked buckwheat.
It has a great texture for making balls.
You know, what I really like about buckwheat is that it cooks super fast especially the
kasha, the toasted kind.
So, there it is, cooked and what we are going to add is some ground flax that has been mixed
with water to make a flax egg because buckwheat does get kind of dry when you cook it.
And then I've got some seasonings mixed together here that I am going to put with that.
So, there’s stuff in there like tomato paste, tamari which is like soy sauce, some onion
powder, some herbs, some garlic powder, some other seasonings.
And what I am going to do is mix these all together so that the buckwheat gets nicely
coated in flavor and gets sticky with the ground flax.
So, you can give it a taste here to make sure that all the seasonings are working for you.
Hmm, really tasty!
It's really, really good.
Okay, so now what we have to do is form them into your balls and put them in the oven.
Now, like I said, you can make this into like meatballs or you can form a patty and make
them into burgers.
I find that baking works best for these guys because they are very moist with the flax
and so you could fry them but they will be very soft.
So, when you bake them it helps them to dry back out a little bit.
Alright, so you just take some of the mix and form it into your little balls.
Now, for anyone who is vegan and is questioning the use of the term “Meatballs”, I saw
a fascinating lecture by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau where she was talking about the use of the
word “meat” because back when it started meat was used to describe any food that was
solid as distinguished from drink.
So, she really is a proponent of using the word meat even for vegan foods.
So she likes to talk about using grain meats or soy meats and not using the word fake meat
or trying to make a different word for meatballs for instance.
So, these are just going to be buckwheat meatballs and we don't have to apologize for the fact
that they are vegan, right.
They are delicious.
That's what it matters.
Buckwheat is one of those things like Quinoa where it cooks like a grain so we often talk
about it in cooking as a grain but it's actually technically not a cereal grain.
It is a fruit and so we call it a pseudograin or a pseudocereal and what that means is that
it has a whole ton of nutrients that are different from whole grains like brown rice.
Now, as most whole grains have lots of fiber and minerals and B vitamins, so does buckwheat
but it also has a really interesting compound that I don't know if I am pronouncing this
right, but D-chiro-inositol.
Anyway, what I've read about this compound is that it has insulin like bio-activity which
I take to mean in your body it works kind of like insulin.
Some of the studies that they have done on this compound in buckwheat shows that it can
help regulate your blood sugar tolerance so that it helps give you better tolerance if
you have blood sugar fluctuations.
Alright, they are fresh out of the oven, they will be a little bit delicate so give them
a few minutes to cool down before you try to move them.
They do pick up right away but the bigger they are, the more delicate they are going
to be so the little ones will be much more solid than the big ones.
Alright, so I hope you guys enjoy them, super tasty and super healthy with the buckwheat.
Like I said, lots of ways to enjoy them - have them with spaghetti and tomato sauce, make
them into burgers, you can make this into a loaf or you can just have them as little
snack balls.
Yummy, I could place these here and just eat this whole tray as is.
Anyway, hope you guys enjoy and I'll see you again soon.