I consider cooking to be a hobby, even though I do it sporadically (well, serious cooking, I make noodles and quinoa a lot, but I’m terrified of cooking meat – hey, hey salmonella!).

I know a few of you have been privy to my burgeoning Pinterest recipe board. I’m working my way through trying the equivalent of one new recipe a week, picking largely from the vast expanse of the internet.

But lo! Let me warn you on the dangers of using the internet to search recipes. This may also speak to my inability as a cook and validate my skills as a baker (of which I truly believe are two separate skillsets).

I’ve been looking for a good recipe for black bean burgers, and ended up settling on one that also included quinoa. I’m not even going to bother linking to it because it’s such a clusterfumble, I don’t even want to give the page hits. Mid-way through making it, though, I realized the recipe skipped a step, had a bizarre flavor profile and didn’t include salt.

They are awful. Like mealy, bland-black-bean-dip-formed-into-hockey-pucks awful. They are covered in panko, but since they went in the oven, they look like coconut flakes.

I thought about actually eating them as burgers, but that though is so unpalatable, that I’m just going to crumble them up on the top of my lunch salads. Which is really going to bring down the whole level of my salads, but it’s better than waste, I suppose.

If only I had a dog…but I’m guessing the black bean gas mixed with dog flatulence would be incendiary.

So, those black bean burgers were a bust, but I’m digging through the following two cookbooks, so I’m bound to find something that works:

Have any no-fail black bean burger recipes I can try?