Are you still thinking of a dish you could make for your significant "other" on Valentine's Day?  Well, maybe this heart-shaped mushroom bean loaf is the answer.

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The recipe is very simple to make even though it looks a bit challenging, I promise it's not. That said, as long as you have the heart-shaped cookie cutter. You can buy it in restaurant supply stores, or Amazon.

Before starting this recipe you want to make sure you have everything ready. It is ok to make the heart-shaped mushroom bean loaf in the morning and then reheat it at night.

What to do first:
The first thing I recommend is steaming or roasting the purple potato until fork-tender. Then cook the Marinara sauce. While the Marinara sauce is cooking it's time to start with the mushroom bean loaf. If you don't like mushrooms, no worries, leave them out or replace them with eggplant or zucchini.

When making the bean loaf, keep it fairly dry towards the end of the cooking process. You don't want too much liquid in the bean mixture as we need to bind it with flax meal and oat flour.  Imagine making a bean loaf, (just like a meatloaf) that needs to hold together. 

A tip on pureeing the bean mixture: If you want more texture then only puree up to half or less of the mixture, that will give the dish a more rustic look as shown in the right picture below.

However, if you want the dish to look flawless then puree all of the beans as it is shown in the left picture below. That will give the heart-shaped loaf a more classic look. 


Binding the beans: depending on how moist your bean mixture is, the more flax meal and or oat flour you need. 

Baking the bean mixture will give the loaf more texture. However, the longer it cooks the dryer it becomes.

 Carrots look much prettier when they "turned". Which is the French way of beautifying roots vegetables and potatoes. Instead of cutting simple slices or cubes we simply cut 2-inch pieces and peel off the edges. The key is not to have any hard edges as shown in the picture below.