Advice for Vegetarians going to cookouts

Summer is officially here and I’ve got some advice for fellow vegetarians out there.  When you get invited to a cookout, bring your own burger.  You cannot subsist on side dishes alone.

There is not enough water in the world to quench your thirst after you’ve spent all afternoon eating only potato chips because there is no other vegetarian option at the cookout.

There will probably be bacon added to the potato salad.  So that’s a no go, too.

Just bring your own burger, don’t fight the side-dish battle, and take care of yourself.  Your hostess will thank you. (Although Frito-Lay Potato Chip company may not).

Pictured above are the burgers I took to the cookout I was invited to for the 4th of July.  I wasn’t about to spend the most patriotic holiday of the year scrounging on store bought hamburger buns and ketchup (I don’t actually eat ketchup, btw), so I took care of myself.  And I took care of everyone else at the cookout, too, because these things flew off the buffet table like bats out of heck.

But your eyes are deceiving you.  No, I did not stop at Krystal or White Castle on the way to the cookout to pick up miniature veggie burgers.  No, I did not make my own sliders.

I made dessert-burgers.  And they’re way better than any ol’ Angus Beef, Buffalo Burger, or Ground Turkey Patty you’ve ever met.

Ingredients:
1 cooked recipe for 9×13″ pan of brownies.  You can use a box mix here.
1 cooked recipe for 18 yellow cupcakes.  You can use a box mix here, too.
1 batch of white frosting + red, green, yellow food die.  You can use a can o’ frosting here.
sesame seeds

Assembly:
Make the brownies and cupcakes.

Slice the cupcakes into thirds once cooled, saving the outer thirds for the bun ensemble:

Find the perfectly size shot glass, wine glass, juice glass, or small cookie cutter, to cut rounds of brownies:

Pause and thank Henry Ford for implementing the assembly line.  Then pause and give thanks to the fact that your Omnivore does the dishes:

Divide the frosting into three portions.  Whip it with an electric mixer while adding food dye to achieve desired color.  In order to get the most vivid ketchupy red, add a drop of violet to the mix.  Place frosting in ziptop bags.  Cut tiny corners off the yellow and red batches.  Cut a slightly larger tip off the green frosting (for more lifelike lettuce, use green-dyed flaked coconut.  Me?  I’ve got texture issues with coconut flakes.  Pass).

Squiggle thin lines of ketchup down the sides of the brownie, placed atop a hamburger-bun-bottom, to resemble ketchup:

Using the green frosting, add a squiggly loop of “lettuce” along the outer edge of the “burger:”

Then squiggle yellow frosting to resemble mustard atop the green frosting.  Some people at the party mistook my mustard for cheese.  But I didn’t judge.  They might have been a little tipsy.  My mustard might have looked like cheez-whiz.  What ev.

Top with cupcake-lid.  Sprinkle sesame seeds on top of the cupcake, moistening the top of the cake ever-so-slightly to achieve stickiness needed for sesame seed adhesion (very scientific).

With remaining cupcake-innards and brownie-pan edges, create a towering BIG MAC as a thank you to the Omnivore (or your own personal dishwasher – yourself, if that may be the case) for the hour or two he’s about to spend in the kitchen cursing your vegetarianism.

Bakerella, the food blogger responsible for giving me this idea, suggests making sugar cookie french fries to go along with the burgers.  Personally, I cannot handle that much cuteness in one day.  But maybe you can.