Spinach Tofu Burgers with Creamy Tomato Sauce & Roasted Sweet Potatoes

It’s Easter evening and I’m bloated from salty ham and other extravagant holiday meal food.  It actually has me reminiscing healthier meals from earlier this week.  Now, I’m not one to nay-say extravagant food but it often comes with the price of feeling gross afterward.  Vegetables and whole grains excite me because of the association I have with how I feel awesome and energetic following my feasts.

I first heard of Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks from my friend Claire who is one of those creative fantastic d-i-y types who sews, gardens, bikes, and essentially walks-the-walk that so many of us teeter upon.  This is my first foray into cooking Moosewood recipes even though their series of cookbooks are always popular at the library.  I chose Moosewood Restaurant Cooking For Health simply because it was the most recent Moosewood title to come into the library.

The meal in the photo is three separate recipes: Spinach Tofu Burgers, Tomato Sauce, and Roasted Sweet Potatoes.  Basically I chose to make the Spinach Tofu Burgers and then took one of their serving & menu suggestions to round out the meal.  That was a definite virtue of this cookbook – the menu & serving suggestions offer a great variety for these dishes that might mean that you would be less likely to get bored with cooking these recipes.

There were also a surprising amount of nutritious ingredients packed into the burgers and the sauce.  A more accurately descriptive name would be Dill-Miso-Mustard-Oregano Spinach-Carrot-Brown Rice-Tofu Burgers with Onion-Garlic-Carrot-Bell Pepper-Neufchâtel-Fennel-Red Wine-Tomato Sauce.  I can see why they chose not to call them that.  The sweet potatoes are just straight up roasted sweet potatoes with salt, pepper, & cumin sprinkled on top.  The simplicity of one dish was a necessary balance to the complexity of the other dish.

The clear king of the meal was the sauce.  That sauce was the kind that you chased around your plate to sop up every last bit.  It looks so plain in the photo, but if you compared it to other tomato sauces, they would be in Kindergarten and that sauce would have a Master’s Degree.  I would eat this sauce over a variety of veggies, or to top plain pasta, meatballs, or polenta.  Good stuff here.

Moosewood Restaurant Cooking For Health by the Moosewood Collective.

Verdict: Check it out.

The recipes I tried were a bit time consuming, but over all a great source of a variety of tasty, healthy foods (the two are certainly not exclusive).