• Location: The Hobbit Hole
• Mood: good
• Music: RedNex– Cotton Eyed Joe (in my head)

In Which I Eat a Veggie Burger and Like It

I understand why fries are bad for you; I mean basically they're "carb sticks boiled in butter." Of course they're bad for you. But I've never understood why burgers are so friggin' bad. It's nuts! Using the Weight Watchers point method the average grilled burger starts at something like 20 points for a lean turkey burger, and goes up to 50+ for Ye Olde Bacon Deathburger at a sports bar-type place.

To put this into perspective, a 200-lb healthy adult male has a daily points budget of somewhere around 35 points. So, yeah. Burgers not a great choice. Put a 15-point order of fries next to those and you can see why so many people have that distinctive Body By Diabetes shape.

So in our continuing quest to find food that won't kill us that isn't "wheat germ sprinkled on half a cup of plain yogurt" [1], laurie_robey picked up some Morningstar Farms veggie corn dogs. Because let's face it, if you can make a friggin' corn dog be relatively healthy but still actually taste like a corn dog, you can probably do just about anything.

So we tried the Morningstar Veggie Corn Dogs and discovered that... holy crap, they were actually good. O.o They didn't taste exactly like the last "real meat and corn meal" corn dog I'd had, but they were definitely within the functional parameters of what a corn dog should be like, in both taste and texture. And at 4 points per, they're on the low end of snack foods, points budget-wise.

Emboldened by this, we searched online for reviews of veggie burgers, and came to the conclusion that Morningstar Farms seems to win again in that category. So we went out and picked up a package of "Grillers," which are approximately the size and thickness of a McDonald's "quarter pounder," or maybe a little larger. To keep things simple, I sprayed a pan with some cooking oil and just fried 'em up, topped with a little Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar, and served on a toasted english muffin. With a side of oven-baked crinkle fries (which are much better points-wise than deep fried fries), the entire meal came to a total of 11 points(!), plus beverage. And was delicious. :d

Again, it wasn't "just like a quarter pounder" (I consider that a feature not a bug), but it was within the parameters of what I recognize as a burger. It scratched that "I want a burger" itch, but more importantly, it was just a tasty meal in its own right. Besides being a great choice for my health goals, this is something that I'm looking forward to having again because it was yummy. :d I'll be trying more stuff from these folks soon.

-The Gneech

[1] Something a personal trainer once swore to me with a straight face was "a tasty snack," and has since become my ur-example of how to convince people not to eat healthy foods.