I am patty-impaired.

First of all, if I'd read the darn recipe all the way through before starting, I wouldn't have wanted to make it in the first place. Well, I might have made it *sometime* but not last night when it was 98 degrees out.

And second, I should know better by now. Every time I try to make homemade veggie burgers or cakes or patties- whatever you want to call them- I wind up irritated.

Last night's recipe was Brown Rice & Goat Cheese Cakes, from the March/April issue of Eating Well magazine. I chose them because they've received a couple of nice reviews on the Cooking Light bulletin board, and because the recipe suggests serving them over greens as a main course. So I thought "Great! Another big salad!"

Well. I made the wrong assumption that this was a stovetop recipe. It isn't, not entirely. It calls for pan-frying the patties first, then finishing them in a 400 degree oven. I only discovered this after I'd already cooked the rice and mixed the ingredients in the food processor. Too late to turn back, so I preheated the oven despite the fact that I just might have been able to fry the darn patties on the asphalt outside.

Here's the thing. Whenever I make burgers/patties/cakes, they always seem to stick to my non-stick pan, falling apart when I try to flip them. And even when I do get a nice firm crust on the outside, the inside is still super-moist, sometimes almost raw. I always vow to either stop attempting these recipes, or to make the patties much smaller, the size of falafel, so they are easier to handle and have a greater ratio of surface area to interior.

Anyway, this recipe said to cook the patties in the skillet until well-browned on each side. I think the rice cake mixture was just too wet. The cakes did develop a nice crust; unfortunately said crust stuck horribly to the pan when I tried to flip them. After prying them from the pan and losing all the crispy crust, I decide to bake them FIRST, then try finishing them in the skillet. This approach worked- the oven dried the rice cakes out a bit, and then I was able to return them to the (now-clean) skillet and develop a nice golden crust on the outside. They were not exactly pretty, and I forgot to get a photo since I was late getting dinner on the table.

However- the cakes had a really nice flavor, and we ate them with a salad of lettuce, bell pepper strips, and sugar snap peas with a tangy honey-mustard dressing. Plus some roasted local asparagus (hey, the oven was on anyway) with a sprinkling of parmesan. Not bad at all, in the end, and if you aren't patty-impaired like I am, you might like to give these a try.

A side note: Ryan has enjoyed shelling and eating peas so much, that he wanted to shell the sugar snap peas in our salad last night. I explained that we can eat the pods of the sugar snap peas, and he happily did so, but only after extracting and eating the little peas from inside. Then, toward the end of the meal, he casually said "I have a pea in my nose." Indeed he did. Augh. I will spare you the details of the pea extraction; suffice it to say it was removed. It seemed like a fitting ending to a frustrating evening of cooking.