Loaded Veggie Quinoa Sliders

If you spend much time poking around in the food blog world, you may come away thinking that January is National Quinoa Month.  I’ve noticed that, in particular, there are a lot of vegetable quinoa burger recipes popping up.

Great idea, I thought.  What I tried to take away from all of these recipes was some sort of quinoa burger that was hearty, kid friendly and super tasty.  Most of all, I wanted a healthy veggie burger.  If you’ve ever looked at the ingredient list on frozen veggie burgers, you’ve probably wondered if they were really food, or the output of a university science class.

Like a lot of my recipes, especially the ones I scrap together on the weekends, there’s a heavy influence from what is in our refrigerator that’s hitting the use-by wall.  This time around it was red pepper and broccoli.  So they’re in.  And what goes great with both of those ingredients?  Spinach.  Garlic too.  What I came up with was a pretty tasty veggie burger recipe that’ll trump anything in the frozen food aisle.

For the vegetable mixture, I was pulling together leftovers to get about 1 cup of vegetables.  I put a sliced medium red pepper, a handful of steamed broccoli and some cooked spinach into a food processor and pulsed until it was well chopped.  Put the vegetables into a large mixing bowl and add the breadcrumbs, cheese and herbs

Basically, you want to get to about 1 cup of chopped veggies.

These have some serious next day appeal too as the garlic really popped when I had them as a snack.  The next time around I’ll double up what I make so that I’ll have some healthy lunch meals throughout the week.

Featured on: 
Oh My Veggies: 40 Vegetarian Quinoa Recipes, March 2013
Featured Recipe on Cooking Quinoa, April 2013
Acting Balanced: 25 fabulous Back-To-School lunch ideas, August 2013
Hello, Wonderful: 10 Yummy Ways for Kids to Try Quinoa, September 2014