The days of the tasteless and unsatisfying Veggie Burger have come to a wondrous end. In recent years with more and more people wanting to eat healthier the old Veggie Burger had to go. It is no wonder that chefs have stepped up their game and are now crafting Veggie Burgers worthy of consuming. Check out more on these delicious babies in this article from The New York times.

~ Enjoy!

THEY were the four syllables that had the power to make both carnivores and vegetarians cringe: veggie burger.

For meat-lovers, the veggie burger was long seen as a sad stand-in that tried to copy the contours and textures of a classic beef patty while falling pathetically short of the pleasure. And for meat-refusers, the veggie burger served as a kind of penitential wafer: You ate this bland, freeze-dried nutrient disc because you had to eat it (your duty as someone who had forsaken the flesh) and because at many a restaurant or backyard barbecue, it was the only option available.

If that has been your mental framework since the days when Jerry Garcia was still with us, it might be time to take another bite. To borrow a phrase from the culture that produced it, the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization.

Across the country, chefs and restaurateurs have been taking on the erstwhile health-food punch line with a kind of experimental brio, using it as a noble excuse to fool around with flavor and texture and hue. As a result, veggie burgers haven’t merely become good. They have exploded into countless variations of good, and in doing so they’ve begun to look like a bellwether for the American appetite. If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs — even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina — are paying attention.

“I just think it’s important to accommodate everybody,” said Josh Capon, who opened Burger & Barrel in SoHo last fall and quietly slipped a chickpea-based veggie burger onto a menu heady with pork chops, charcuterie and carpaccio. “And I don’t think somebody should feel like they’re eating an inferior burger. If you’re going to do a veggie burger, it should have that richness and mouth feel and overall texture. When you pick it up, it should eat like a burger.”

He will get no argument from Adam Fleischman, the owner of the expanding Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles. Even though his Earth Burger includes no meat, it offers the taste buds a gooey, decadent tradeoff by dandying up a mushroom-and-edamame patty with ricotta, truffle aioli and cipollini onions.

At Cru, a largely vegan and raw-food-focused cafe in that city’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the dietary and structural restrictions only seem to open up pathways of metamorphosis. Cru’s South American sliders are made of sprouted lentils and cooked garbanzo beans pulsed with garlic and spices. They’re deep-fried, dressed with a mojo sauce of blood orange and paprika and Peruvian aji amarillo chilies, and served on leaves of butter lettuce instead of a bread bun.

Read the rest of the Article, HERE.

Article Credit: Jeff Gordinier

The Healthy Crossroads of Fashion and Nutrition

By Mark Bielski
Nutiva Internet Sales and Customer Service Manager

When do we look our best? When we are feeling our best. How do we feel our best? Probably not on Big Macs and Big Gulp sodas. Certainly, genes play their part in overall health as well as our environment but making the most of what we are given can be influenced greatly by what we choose to eat and the activities we engage in. David Wolfe’s book Eating for Beauty is a good example of how the foods we eat can affect the way we feel and the way we look.

Kandee Johnson, a young, well known YouTube make up artist, with a flair for creating amazing looks, looks amazing herself, and she attributes this in part to her diet and workout routine. She recently made a YouTube video to address her viewers’ frequently asked questions about her lifestyle and how it affects her well being. In it she recommends Nutiva’s Hempshakes in the mornings as an integral part of her weight loss and fitness program.

Many of you are already familiar with The Nutiva Diet Makeover plan which is a program we developed for weight loss and well being. In it we recommend switching out unhealthy fats in your diet for coconut oil and hemp oil and using our other hempseed products; the shelled hempseeds, hemp protein powder, and Hempshakes. It is also important on this plan to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, organic whenever possible, and to eliminate the junk fats and foods from your diet.

In a tribute to Kandee and her fans, Nutiva has decided to extend our Hempshake sale on our website at www.nutiva.com until June 1st.

Thanks, Kandee, for being a loyal Nutiva fan and for sharing your enthusiasm and zest for life with your followers.

Here is her video mentioning the Nutiva Hempshake products:

The Origins

Hemp was cultivated in China more than 6,000 years ago, from a wild plant that grew in central Asia. The Chinese recognized hemp’s amazing nutritional value, and used it as a food source long before soy foods. About a thousand years ago, hemp traveled to Europe, where peasants used the plant in several ways, one of the most popular being the making of hemp butter by grinding the tasty seeds.

A Nutritional Powerhouse

Hempseed is considered by leading researchers and medical doctors to be one of the most nutritious food sources on the planet. Shelled hempseed is packed with 33 percent pure digestible protein and is rich in iron and vitamin E as well as omega-3 and GLA. A recent report funded by the Canadian government states that hemp protein is comprised of 66 percent high-quality edistin protein, and that hempseed contains the highest percentage of this of any plant source. Hemp also contains three times the vitamin E contained in flax. Unlike soy, hemp is not genetically modified, and it doesn’t contain the anti-nutritional qualities commonly found in soy.

Got Your EFAs today?

Because the human body produces no Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs), it is important that EFAs be consumed on a regular basis. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of Americans take in too little of one of the most important EFAs–omega-3–which is found in flax, walnuts, deep-water fish, and hempseeds. EFAs are the “good fats” that doctors recommend as part of a healthy, balanced diet. The quality of omega-3 is vital, and can be diminished by oxygen, heat, and light. Thus consume the freshest seeds possible and store them in a dark, cold environment such as a refrigerator. Nutiva obtains its seeds exclusively from Canada, and we date all our products. Great nutrition never tasted so good.