Sweet Potato Fries and Carrot Burgers

I made Aarti Sequeira’s sweet potato fries from the Burger Station episode. I followed the recipe, but with 2 exceptions: I cut the recipe in half, and I used Pam instead of olive oil (I saw Marcela Valladolid use Pam to make some spicy tortilla chips on a different show). It was hard to find garam masala, so I had to use some weird pre-packaged chicken tikka masala spice pack. Also, I had never bought a sweet potato before so I didn’t really know how to tell if it was a good one... they all seemed deformed, hard, and odd.

I made burgers too, but didn’t follow Aarti’s recipe. She was talking all about the marbled fat in her special combo of ground sirloin and ground brisket. So instead of marbled fat burgers, I made veggie burgers. I roughly followed this recipe for carrot burgers, but I swapped some of the ingredients. I made 5 burgers instead of 6, but only because the mixture was so sticky that I was having trouble getting it off of my hands. I served the burgers on honey whole wheat sandwich thins with ketchup and brown mustard.

• 1 cup shredded carrots
• 1/4 cup eggbeaters
• 1/4 cup low-fat mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp garlic
• 1 1/2 cups uncooked oatmeal
• 2 cups crushed honey nut cheerios

The fries and the burgers were both surprisingly good. The picture didn’t do it justice at all. They were good enough that I had to consider the fact that they might not have been 100% healthy. However, I decided that the point wasn’t whether a sweet potato was any better than a regular potato… the point was that the fries were baked instead of fried. The point wasn’t whether an oatmeal & cereal burger on a bun was high in carbs… the point was that it wasn’t high in fat & cholesterol.