In the Kitchen with Dan

Hey, everybody. Welcome in the kitchen with Dan. Today, I have a bunch of healthy ideas coming your way. We are going to make chickpea cakes, and I'm going to show you how to make a really healthy yogurt sauce that you can use not only for these, but a bunch of other things that you'll cook in the future. So let's get started today. Like I said, we're gonna be making chickpea cakes, and I just realized the recipe is on my phone. Talk about organized. Yeah. Do you have your phone with you? Yeah. Do you mind looking at it?

Well, you know what? I'm gonna go with the flow. I think I know how to do this. I think I know. So we're gonna go barefoot? You know, that's one of the things that I've learned working in kitchens, is you really gotta be ready for a plan b. And it happens like that throughout the week for us, too. You might have something planned. You might have everything ready to go, all your ducks in a row. But when you get ready to launch, things aren't the way you expected, so you have to have a plan b. And.

And in life, things are like that as well. So always think about, you know, if this doesn't happen, do we have a backup? You know, we do that when we plan parties. You know, weddings, it's gonna be outside. But what if it rains? You know, you have a backup. So life can be like that, too. And if you don't have a backup, you know, you can always go on the flight, like I'm doing right now. So one thing that I teach when I'm teaching people how to cook is to read through, through the recipe, which I've done a couple times.

So that's going to help me. Now, you read through the recipe at least once, usually twice. Make sure that you have all the ingredients that you need to make the recipe. And not only the ingredients, but you have the equipment that you need. A lot of recipes don't call for special gadgets or this or that, but some do. So make sure that you have the items in your kitchen that you need. Not just the ingredients, but also all the things that you need to cook with. If you gather all those things together beforehand, like I've done here, it makes cooking so much easier.

You have everything right here ready to go. I'll drop the camera down in a minute. When I get ready to mix all this stuff up, I want to talk about garbanzo beans for a minute. They are really, really a great source of protein. Really, really so they're so healthy, tons of fiber and low fat. So you see chickpeas a lot in salads, you see them a lot in curries. And they are what make hummus. So on another live, I'll do a hummus recipe. But today we're making chickpea cakes, little cakes. They're really delicious.

And we'll show you how to make a yogurt sauce, too. All right, so the first thing we're supposed to do is put in half of the chickpeas into the processor. A food processor. Now, if you don't have a food processor, you can use a blender and you can also mash these up. Woo. Mash these up by hand. Hold on a sec. Sorry, my camera works a little shoddy, didn't I? Okay, there you go. So you can also mash these up by hand if you do not have a food processor. Luckily, today we do. So I'm going to show you how to do these.

So we're going to put half of the chickpeas in with half of these chopped green onions. Here is a tip for green onions. I bought these at the store two weeks ago. I used them and I put the tips in some water. Now, not only do these sprout a bunch of roots, they also grow at the top. So all of these I got from these second time around. Save some money, save some time. Now, another great tip with these is find a small water bottle or a glass jar or whatever you'd like, and put these in that container in the freezer, and you will always have them ready to roll when you need them.

Hey, Katie. Hey, Luke. Happy Easter. I thought you said Katie from afar. Katie's always in here. All right, so that's how a little tip for the green onions, right? You chop the green onions up when they're down like this, pop them in the water and they grow up. And you can keep chopping your green onions as they grow over and over and over. All right, we've got half of the chickpeas in and we got half of the green onions that we have chopped. We're going to let these go for a roll in here for a minute.

Get them all nice and chopped up. Now, a lot of times with the food processor, you want to scrape down the sides of the bowl. It's one of the things that when this kicks in, it throws a lot of stuff on the bowl. So I always at least try to do it one time. All right. Now, it tells us to take these out, scrape the bowl and make the rest. And the reason is that you get two textures of the chickpeas. One really blended fine, and then the other you have a little bit of a coarse, more coarse mixture. All right, step one, ground chickpeas and your green onions.

Step two. Now, the rest of the onion are, with the rest of the green onion. Two tablespoons of breadcrumbs. Now, I'm going to teach you another little trick. If you can get, if you can get one of these hand mixers, the wand mixers, these are fantastic. You can use these for mixing hot soups right in the pot. But what I use these for are breadcrumbs. I take all the heels from the bread and any leftover bread I have, I put it in a plastic bag. I turn this on and I ground them up right in the bag. Real good.

Money saver, time saver. You need breadcrumbs. So much for recipes, especially some of my favorites, like a meatloaf. All right, now we are going to measure out two tablespoons of the breadcrumbs. One and two. All right, and now we've got a little bit of soft. We're gonna throw our seasonings in now. And once I get this recipe back, I will put it in the comments for you guys. Little bit of cumin. Oh, man, this is gonna be so good. I love the smell of cumin. Cumin, great. In a lot of mexican recipes.

I'm going to put in a couple dashes of hot chili pepper. We're going to do a little bit of dill. Okay. All right, now this is the liquid that came off of the chickpeas. I'm just going to do a little dash of this in there. And we need some lemon juice. And we need about two tablespoons of lemon juice. I always do this. You can catch the seeds or you can squeeze your lemon out this way in your hand and the seeds will come out in there. Oh, all these little tips. Okay, now we're ready for the separate.

That's to grind up. Let's see how it looks. Nice. Be nice. Nice. All right, I'm gonna add this mixture back in, and I'm just gonna give it a quick pulse to get it all mixed up. Look at that. Oh, my gosh. It smells so good. Delicious. Can you smell it over there, Brian? Yes. He loves it. All right, now we're having fun. All right, so we empty this dealio out, and we're gonna patty these up, and we're gonna cook them in a little bit of oil in a pan. Now, this is a great recipe for vegan vegetarian.

This is a really good, heart smart. One of our biggest fans, junk food junkie, is always looking for great, healthy recipes. This is a great one for you, junk food junkie. If you're out there and you're there today, you are there. Hey. I knew it. I could feel it in my bones. Okay, so we're done with the food processor. I'm gonna move this out of the way so you all can see my lovely face and the food, more importantly. All right, I'm gonna get some heat on the pan over here. I've got a pan with some olive oil.

Now, you can spray your pan a little bit if you'd like, cut down on the oil, get a little bit healthier, a little bit more healthy. All right. I always love to clean as I go. As you guys know, it makes the process so much more enjoyable. When you're done cooking, you're not going to have a huge mess to clean up. It's as clean as you go. You've got lots to deal with when you're ready to chow. And, you know, as you clean, as you go through your week, that can help you a lot, too. By the time the weekend comes or whatever day is off, you have.

If you've done some work throughout the week to keep things up a little bit, right. Don't hold everything off until the end of the week. Try to throw a load in of laundry mid week or keep up on your dishes, or, you know, make a list of some of the smaller things you can do throughout the week so that you can enjoy the time off that you have. All right, now we're going to get our patty on, and you just take a little bit of these and you roll it into a ball, right? And then you just press it down and you make it like a little burger.

Little chickpea burger. Kind of cute. Kind of cute. All right, Patty these up. You know, when I make meatballs, I like to put whatever's in to be balled up in my hand. And then I use my thumb like this. I roll it around like this. And then I use my thumb to press along the sides to make it more ball shaped. And then pop patty ball into patty ball. Patty. These are fun if you want to try one. This is great for the kids, too. Get the kids involved a little bit. I mean, what could happen? A little misfortune, maybe.

Patty. All right, looks like we might have one more perfect. Ready? Patty. He's a little smaller, but that's all right. Okay, look at that just that quick. Got some severe thumb marks. Finger marks on one. I think we'll be okay. All right, now, in the pan they go. And we'll get these nice and browned up for us. You want to get your oil real hot so that when you drop these in, you hear the sizzle. I hear the sizzle. The sizzle on the sizzle. All right, now what are we doing again? Cleaning up a bit.

We're done with the cutting board. All right, now, this is really fun, this, this soft part. I like this a lot. Now, this sauce, a yogurt sauce. You can get the no fat as long as your yogurt's plain. The greek yogurt, I tend to like better. There's that. I'm going to turn these down just a little bit here. I'm rolling over here. Okay, now, this is real easy. What you want to do with your garlic, you break it open, and this takes two cloves of chopped garlic. And you go like this with the edge of your knife and the heel of your hand.

Put over that like that. And then the peels come right off. Ta da. Another little shortcut. Get your garlic on. Now, this is one of my favorite kitchen toys. It's a little chopper. It's got a little lid. Put the garlic cloves. Or I use this for ginger as well. Chopped garlic in the dip. Yum. A little bit of salt, curry, hot pepper, and that's it. Oh, garlicky. A little bit more curry in there. And beautiful color to the sauce here. So that's as simple as it is. Get some yogurt, some garlic, pepper flakes, curry, a little bit of salt.

Yum. See how it tastes. Oh, wow. That's delicious. Now I'm gonna put some dill in here, too, actually, quite a bit of dill. So this is a dill curry yogurt sauce right there. That's as quick as you can do them. Little extra garlic on the side here. All right, now let's flip our patties over, see how they're doing. All right, how are these looking? Look at that. Nice golden brown. These are great. Finish flipping these, get them going on the other side. You know what I love is vegan, vegetarian healthy food that tastes really, really good.

And this is one of my recipes. All right, we're gonna get that other side browned up, turn the heat up a little bit. I'm gonna get my plating ready to go here. This is another really important thing about cooking is eating with your eyes, right? We eat with our tummies well, we really eat with our mouths. We eat to fill our tummies. But, you know, we want food to look good, too. You know, if you've got a pile of bl and you've got a nice, pretty plate next to you, you're gonna go, you're not gonna choose the bet, you're gonna choose the pretty.

So do what you can to make your food look good. Garnishing citrus is a great way to garnish. If whatever you're making could use a little zest, orange zest, lemon lime zest is a great way to bring out the flavors of food. Vinegar is also a great way. Just a tiny little bit elevates and brightens a lot of the food. So let's see. Brian asked Dan my question. Will these freeze well? These will freeze incredibly well. Really well. That's a great recipe. Pop. Freeze them by portions, and you can pull them out and have them ready whenever you go.

I would recommend reheating in a toaster oven or air fryer would be great if you've got that. If not, just a regular oven, too, like 350 for 15 minutes. All right, now I'm going to get a plate. We're going to make all this look pretty for you. Get a nice, pretty purple plate for Easter, and we'll put a little of our sauce in a cup. I can show you a different method as well for plating. And this they call the schmear method. Ready? Go like this. All right. Little sauce. Take the spoon, and it's called a schmear.

Oh, you'll see. A lot of restaurants charge you a lot of money for this. All right, now is the fun part. We're going to get these out of the pan and give them a try to pick the prettiest ones. Right? Smells really good. Brian says it smells delicious. I'm gonna add a little bit more of my onion on top, make it look pretty. All right. Green onion on top. Oh, Jack's excited, too. Our puppy dog is excited, too. So there you go. Let's give them a try. Maybe a little bit of lemon juice. Brighten them up.

All right, let's see how they are. Mmm. Mmm. Oh, wow. These are so good. They have so much flavor. Bunch of flavor. Cumin, dill, curry. Really, really good. They have a real smooth and a velvety texture. And then you get a little bit of the second texture. That batch that we just blended really lightly. Yum. Yogurt. Mmm. Great, healthy recipe. This one's for you, junk food junkie. Really good for your diet and all of okay, you guys, don't forget. Don't wait till your days off. They have to do all your stuff.

Break things up into little pieces throughout the week. Do a little clean as you go, do as you go. Plan ahead. Maybe get a couple things prepped today so that you have extra time to spend with your friends and family instead of working away in the kitchen for hours. The more you can prep ahead of time, the better off you're going to be. Thank you guys so much for joining me today. And check in next week. I'm on every Sunday at 01:00 for the next couple months and we're going to be doing tons of fun stuff.

You can meet me in the grocery store for some shopping tips. I'll be here in the kitchen and who knows where else. So as always, don't forget when you need some health and wellness in your life, hop on to Cadre. We've got a bunch of it here. Keep coming back and leave comments and give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you want more of my content. Also, we have a community forum. Don't forget to hop on there. Tons of great information there. Love you guys and we'll see you right here on Cadre. Bye.

You want to try this? Smells good.