Homemade Veggie burgers and Reiki Attunement

This weekend was pretty great, to say the least. I had the amazing opportunity to obtain Reiki Attunement and I am now a first degree Reiki practitioner. I'll explain more about what this means after the recipes. To make this shorter, I'll just say that Alex (my amazing boyfriend) and I headed down from Long Beach to Malibu and of course I thought, what better time to make something healthy and packable for lunch on Saturday :) Of course this needs to be somewhat easy, somewhat healthy, easy to make, filling, and able to please a meat-eater (at least this one, who luckily is easy to feed). So here goes!

Homemade Black Bean and Rice Veggie Burgers with Spicy Veganaise and Sweet Corn Salsa 

So for the patties, I looked around some recipes online and eventually just took what I liked from each and took out whatever I didn't have on hand. So I ended up with a can of black beans, about a cup of cooked brown rice, some taco seasoning, and a bit of onion (not a lot, as I've mentioned I don't really like onion, if you do you could always put more than I did) and garlic as well as an orange bell pepper. The orange ones were on sale, but you can use whatever color your heart desires.

Drain the beans REALLY well and set aside.

Start with a little Extra Virgin Olive Oil in a pan

And start with the onions, then pepper, and then the garlic, careful not to burn anything. I know with most cooks this is not problem, but I'm still fairly new to this :)

 Not to point out the obvious, but this smelled soooooo yummy. So now you can add the beans and about a 2 tablespoons of the seasoning, just stir till everything is nice and warm and it smells so good you want to eat it right then and there. I made this around 8 am Friday morning and kept thinking how yummy it would be with an egg and tortilla (save that for another post haha)

 So what I did then was put it back in the bowl with the brown rice, and mashed it a bit with the fork, not too much, you still want some whole beans in there. A potato masher would have made this easier, but I'm still getting used to this cooking thing so a fork was alright. When the mixture cools down you can form the patties, I made 6. Then throw a bit more oil in the pan and just brown both sides. 

I needed to save these for later so I put them in a little tupperware with a layer of foil in between. You can use wax paper if you're fancy like that, I just didn't have any. These would freeze fine too, if you need to make them a few days ahead of time. Note: I don't think these would last very well on a grill, I made them stovetop and they were falling apart a little. 

Now for the salsa yummmm!

I didn't follow a recipe for this, I just threw in what looked good and taste tested, that's the way my mom does it and with salsa you just gotta do your own thing. I only used one jalepeno, only a bit of the corn, less onion than most people would use, a bit of cilantro, 2 tomatoes and the juice of one lime, as well as a shake of salt and pepper. Soooooo good. 

 Then I made some spicy veganaise, not following the latin theme here but it was pretty delish. Just some mayo or veganaise if you'd like and as much sriracha as you can take.

The trick was packing this all to go. That night I put the patties on ciabatta buns (they don't get soggy easy) and wrapped them in foil, put them in a lunchbag with the mayo and salsa and an avocado, made sure to bring a knife and we headed off! 

 So as we all know, life is imperfect and nothing is set in stone, so we were SO HUNGRY we completely forgot about the salsa and the avocado!! The spicy mayo went on there though, and they were pretty good :) 

 And I kept trying to get Alex to take a normal picture without the thumbs up, but hey, if he liked them enough to give them a thumbs up well then goshdarnit I should be flattered and post the thumbs up! 


Now for the Reiki part. What is Reiki? Reiki is a Japanese technique of healing by utilizing the universal life force energy that is transmitted through the hands of a Reiki practitioner onto the person. Alex introduced me to this, and I've had a few treatments before getting my attunement. The key is being open to it, miracles have happened using this method of healing. I like it because it doesn't only heal the symptoms of the illness, but treats the causes behind whatever the ailment in the mind as spirit as well as the body. I am not ready to practice on others just yet, but I feel wonderful. 

Being able to open myself to this energy was a gift and an honor I couldn't possibly put into words. I will keep everyone updated on my progress with this and let you all know when I'm ready to work on others. 

So until next time, friends, remember:  There is never a dull moment <3