Apricot Red Lentil Stew

This is one of my staple recipes. I love the sweetness of the (dried) apricots in this hearty stew from Color Me Vegan. With 17 grams protein, 7 grams of fat and only 364 calories per serving, this recipe provides two full dinners and two full lunches. It is soy-free, wheat-free, and oil-free if you saute using water (which I often do).

The recipe doesn’t call for spinach, but I take every opportunity I can to incorporate greens into our food because they are so incredibly healthy. So I threw in about four handfulls of baby spinach with 5-10 minutes left to go in cooking time. It shrinks down and you barely know it is there.

Usually we eat this as a standalone meal, but tonight we ate it with home-made Black Bean and Portobello Burgers that we had pre-made and stored in the freezer.

Black Bean and Portobello Mushroom Burgers

In the winter, our dinners tend to consist of an entree only. Rarely is there time to pull together side dishes, and since we often eat hearty soups and stews in the winter, there is a wide variety of food sources in that entree. But tonight, we pulled out of the freezer home-made black bean and portobello mushroom burgers that Matt made earlier this year. These are the best plant-based burgers I’ve ever had, with the exception of the Beet Burgers in Color Me Vegan.

We ate the burgers topped with some home-made hummus, sweet pepper relish from a country store in West Virginia, onions and peppers, alongside a hearty serving of Apricot Lentil Stew.

Spaghetti with Ground Tempeh

I love Tempeh. People in Asia – particularly Indonesia – have been eating tempeh for hundreds of years. It comes from soybeans mixed with another grain like barley or rice and is super high in protein. You can make it at home, but I probably never will, so we buy it packaged:

There are many different ways to cook and prepare tempeh. One night this week, Matt grated two packages of tempeh using a hand grater and put it in a spaghetti sauce. Here it is grated (aka “ground”) and sautéing with garlic and onion:

This was a dish that Matt put together on his known, so I can’t link to a recipe because it is in his head. But some of the other ingredients in the sauce were:

• 1 can of crushed tomatoes
• 1 tbs tomato paste
• black olives, chopped
• roasted red pepper, chopped
• Italian seasoning
• nutritional yeast to sprinkle on top

It was enough for two dinners and two lunches. Perfect!

Our Typical Breakfast

For years I struggled with finding a breakfast that would fill me up until lunchtime. Matt introduced me to oatmeal, and I’ve never turned back. We typically use either a multi-grain mix of rye, barley, oats and wheat or just oats. We almost always use the “rolled oats” because they only take about about 5-10 minutes to cook on the stovetop. With the exception of when we travel, we also always use the kind that are just plain oats or grains and don’t include any added sugars, flavoring, etc… because we make our own.

The typical staples in our oatmeal are:

• banana
• walnuts (rich source of omega-3s)
• raisins
• dried cranberries, blueberries or other dried fruit (from Trader Joe’s, the cheapest source I know of for dried nuts and berries)
• flax seed (rich source of omega-3s and high in fiber)

You can cook the oatmeal in the microwave but we do it on the stovetop. While it is simmering, we get ready for work.

Once the oatmeal is finished we add a little bit of non-dairy milk and eat!

A few notes:

• We used to always add some maple or agave syrup to sweeten it, but our need to taste sugar has reduced over time so that’s no longer necessary. If I remember to, I simmer the raisins with the oatmeal so that the oatmeal soak up some of the sugars from the raisins.
• This can get boring over time so we try different variations. My current favorite is peanut butter oatmeal. Another favorite is adding chopped apples and cinnamon. We also sometimes do Happy Herbivore’s chai oatmeal and pumpkin oatmeal (using canned pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice)
• It may seem like this takes a long time but it really doesn’t if you plan ahead. And, the feeling of fullness all morning is worth it.
• My friend Myra loves our oatmeal breakfast. She says she dreams about it 🙂

Split Pea Stew with Sweet Potatoes and Kale (Bean Bread on the Side)

I’ve been trying out split peas lately and have been wanting to try this stew, based on a recipe in Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s Color Me Vegan (my favorite cookbook, btw).

The original recipe called for yellow split peas, but I used green instead. It called for collards, but I used kale instead. It is oil free and soy free.

Split peas take an hour to cook, so with prep time, this whole thing takes about an hour and a half. That’s a long time, and is why I waited until a day I wasn’t working to make it. I also took advantage of my extra time on a holiday to made a side of bean bread (from Vegetarian Soups for all Seasons cookbook).

Have you ever asked me where do I get my protein? Just one serving of the stew plus the bread provide 18 grams of protein (and only 5 grams of fat.)

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. I created this blog so that friends and family who are interested in learning more about what we eat can find out a little more about it. We’ve recently had a lot of friends and family members ask us questions about our plant-based diet. Do we end up eating the same things over and over? How do we get proper nutrition? How do we know what to make? My goal is to take the next few weeks and blog about the meals we make and provide link to the cookbooks, website, blogs or other resources that we use to guide our recipes and decisions.

Green Smoothies and (Eggless) French Toast

Today is President’s Day, which is a holiday and so we both have the day off of work. I wanted to take advantage of the lazy day to make a fun breakfast (Eggless French Toast) that is also healthy (Green Smoothies)

Matt made one of our typical green smoothies. We eat smoothies for breakfast about 3 times a week. We vary the ingredients, but this one included: spinach, non-dairy milk (e.g., soy), bananas, frozen berries, flax seed, peanut butter and almonds.

I have been wanting to try Eggless French Toast for a while. I followed the recipe from the cookbook, Peas and Thank You. Ingredients included non-dairy milk, whole wheat pastry flour, cinnamon, nutritional yeast and vanilla extract. It also called for a non-dairy creamer, but I didn’t have any of that, so I used extra non-dairy milk plus about 2/3 Tbs. of tapioca powder.

It took about 15 minutes to make. We ate it with a bit of non-dairy butter (made by Earth Balance, which is a plant-based oil blend and is non-hydrogenated, meaning there are no trans fats) and maple syrup.

Delicious!