Lighter Side Comfort Food Dinner To Calm Your Soul
Goat Cheese Rosemary Mac & Cheese with Black Bean, Sweet Potato, and Quinoa Veggie Burgers
Anyone who knows me knows my favorite comfort food is macaroni & cheese.When I found a recipe with my favorite cheese, I knew I had to make Rosemary & Goat Cheese Mac & Cheese. As many times as I’ve eaten just mac & cheese for dinner, I really wanted to make it a meal and pack in more yummy nutritional goodness. I also wanted to keep it comfortable, and who doesn’t find a burger comforting? That’s where I came across the Sweet Potato & Black Bean Burger to make it a complete meal!
Everything in this meal was super easy to make. I’ve only made scratch mac & cheese a couple times so the cheese sauce always makes me nervous, but this came together no problem. One adjustment I would make to the pasta would be to only use ½ to ¾ of the box of pasta instead of the whole pound. I found the 8×8 pan was too full and the sauce too thick. If there was less pasta, I think the creaminess would be more to my taste, but the flavor was so so good!
Once the quinoa and sweet potato were cooked the veggie burgers only needed to be smashed and shaped. I didn’t have ground flax as the recipe called for as a binder. Since I didn’t care about the burgers being vegan, I used an egg. Let this be a cautionary tale to only use half an egg or just the egg white. I also tweaked the spices a little away from the southwestern in the recipe by omitting the cumin. These burgers freeze fantastic and hold up to being reheated, so making them ahead is definitely an option. I froze 4 of the 8 burgers right after they cooled because I knew that was way more than could be eaten in this house before they would go bad.
I rounded this meal out with steamed green beans, but any vegetable will do. I had fully planned on my go-to broccoli, but the green beans looked so fresh and good, it made it easy to change up. This meal I will definitely make again and I think is easy enough for a weeknight meal if you time everything right or batch ahead the burgers from the freezer. This meal was like a cozy warm blanket for me and I hope it does the same for you!
