Vegan Ground Beef

Rivera said I'm ahead of schedule. He said this the way Rivera says everything — like he's reading a parts manual — but I could tell he meant it because he wrote something on his clipboard and didn't tell me to bend it more. He told me to bend it more later, obviously, but there was a pause. A Rivera pause is a standing ovation from anyone else.

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The leg is cooperating. Forty degrees of flexion, which means I can almost sit like a normal person instead of the straight-legged arrangement I've been doing for seven weeks that makes me look like I'm permanently bracing for turbulence. The arm is better. I can grip, lift, carry. I carried my own tray in the cafeteria Thursday and felt like I'd accomplished something, which tells you where the bar is right now. The bar is carrying a tray.

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I went outside again. Three times this week. The courtyard has a bench under a dogwood tree that's blooming — white flowers, the kind that look like they'd blow apart in any real wind. I sat under it Tuesday and watched two sparrows argue over a bread crust and thought about nothing for almost five minutes. Five minutes of nothing. That's a record. My head usually fills the silence with the road and the sound and Derek's face before I can stop it, but Tuesday the sparrows were louder than the memory, and I sat there and let them be louder.

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Vasquez is getting better on the prosthetic. He walked the full hallway Wednesday without the parallel bars — just him and the leg and the determination of a twenty-year-old from Portland who decided he was going to walk and so he's walking. We ate dinner together. Hospital meat loaf, which I've decided is made from whatever feelings the cafeteria staff have given up on, compressed into loaf form. I told Vasquez about Dad's meatloaf — the real kind, ground beef and ground elk mixed, onion, egg, ketchup on top, cooked in a cast iron loaf pan that's older than I am. Mom makes it on Wednesdays. Has made it on Wednesdays for as long as I can remember. Vasquez said his grandmother makes albondigas — Mexican meatball soup — and described it with the kind of detail that made my mouth water and my chest hurt at the same time because food from home hits different when home is theoretical.

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I'm thinking about meatloaf. About albondigas. About how every broken person in this hospital has a meal they're trying to get back to. That's something. Maybe that's the thing. The meal you're trying to get back to. I don't know. It's late. The ceiling has 847 holes. I'm sure.

I got home from that hospital visit and didn’t make meatloaf. I didn’t make albondigas. I stood in my kitchen thinking about Vasquez’s grandmother and Dad’s cast iron loaf pan and every meal that means home to somebody, and I pulled out a bag of walnuts and a carton of mushrooms and made something that wasn’t trying to be anyone’s memory — just something new, something I could shape with my own two hands in fifteen minutes while the ceiling-counting part of my brain went quiet. It crumbled like ground beef. It browned like ground beef. It wasn’t ground beef, and that felt right, because maybe the meal you’re trying to get back to doesn’t have to be the same meal you left.

Prep Time: 5 min | Cook Time: 10 min | Total Time: 15 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

2 cups whole walnuts*
8 ounces baby bella (cremini) mushrooms
2 tablespoons soy sauce or tamari (or coconut aminos for soy free)
2 tablespoons ketchup
1/2 tablespoon each smoked paprika**, cumin, dried oregano, onion powder, and garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided

Instructions

Pulse the mixture. Roughly chop the mushrooms. Place them in a large food processor, then add the walnuts and tamari, ketchup, cumin, spices, and salt. Pulse gently multiple times until everything is evenly chopped, being careful not to over process (or it will be too mushy). If you don’t have a food processor, use a chef’s knife to roughly chop everything and place in a bowl with the spices.
Cook and brown. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a non-stick skillet over medium low heat. Cook for 7 to 10 minutes, stirring until it releases all of its liquid then becomes dry and browned. Stir in the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Taste and add more salt to taste if desired. Store refrigerated for 1 week or freeze on a sheet pan, then place in a sealed container and freeze up to 3 months.

Nutrition (per serving)

Vegan Ground Beef — The Meal You're Trying to Get Back To