A Few Recipes & a LOT of Garlic

We’re mid-Lent, which means it’s the time of year when Christians are doing a few “weeks without”. I’ve finished my “Week Without Aisle 11” (paper towels, Kleenex, Ziplock bags, etc.) and I’m currently between challenges.

Although I’m not giving up meat for Lent, I HAVE been getting a little more adventurous in the kitchen, including quite a few meatless meals. My new strategy at the grocery store: Tell my fiancé to “go pick out a couple of weird vegetables”. If you’re curious, here are some of the recent recipes I’ve tried:

Whole Wheat Healthy Pancakes (Momma Hen’s Kitchen)

I topped these with pumpkin butter and walnuts. Yum! Thought this would be an easy recipe, but I had to make a lot of substitutions (skim milk + lemon juice = buttermilk; ground flax seed + water = the little bit of egg that I was short of). Nikki, check the fridge before you start a recipe. Duh.

Quinoa Egg Bake (Whole Foods)

This has become my fiance’s favorite breakfast, so I make it often. Morning is when he struggles most with blood sugar issues, and this recipe seems to help. Plus, I can throw in whatever veggies I have on hand, like a yucca root (see weird veggie explanation above). I also added Caribbean jerk seasoning, which sounds odd, but tastes great in this!

Crockpot Vietnamese Roasted Chicken (Crockpot365) *Meaty, non-Lent recipe*

My first experiment with Fish Sauce! I cooked a single serving of rice in a coffee mug and served the chicken on top of it for dinner. Pretty good.

Hummus (Simply Recipes)

It had been awhile since I’d made a batch of homemade hummus. This recipe is a good basic one. I looove tahini!

Hearty One-Pot Meal Miso Soup (Fat Free Vegan)

This recipe was my destiny. It perfectly used up all of the unusual ingredients I had on hand, including bok choy, edamame, and miso powder. I hope it tastes as good as my kitchen smells right now.

…This list makes me sound awfully healthy, but remember that I’m the same girl who hasn’t made it to the gym in over a month. Also, I may or may not have eaten a spoonful of peanut butter and chocolate chips tonight. Worth it! Plus, since I can’t think of a good segue, here’s the story of my cauliflower incident:

For years, I’ve been meaning to try mashed cauliflower in place of potatoes. People on Pinterest say to try it. My friend April recommends it. Jillian Michaels recommends it! So, after roasting some cauliflower the other night, I thought “What a perfect excuse to use my immersion blender!”. It worked beautifully. Then, I thought “These would be great with some garlic!” …followed by an accident with the garlic powder that rivaled the BP gulf spill. But by then, I’d already spent a good half hour baking and blending. I was eating that cauliflower.

Garlic is not spicy in the same way that peppers are spicy. Garlic is flavorful, but not hot. This was so much garlic, my mouth burned. And I still stubbornly ate a good half cup of it.

Fiance walks in the door: “What’s that smell?”

Me: I can explain!!

I thoroughly brushed my teeth and mouthwashed (is that a verb?...it is now.) THREE times before bed and I still had garlic breath until the next afternoon.

So, aside from lethal doses of garlic breath, who's got an idea for what to give up next??

I'm spent.

I think I could become a permanent vegetarian pretty easily. When I started this week, I thought I would miss meat a lot. I don’t. A lot of times, it’s just convenient.

Saturday, I went to the Huskers’ season opener against Chattanooga. Although there weren’t really any vegetarian options at the tailgate, I took the turkey off of a turkey sandwich and ate a couple cookies. Plus, there’s no meat in beer – which really worked out in my favor this week. After the game, we went to BisonWitches, and I had no problem finding vegetarian options for a soup/sandwich meal. +1 for artichokes on the veggie sandwich!

Yesterday, I used fake meat crumbles for the first time. I made a breakfast scramble-thingy with potatoes, mushrooms, and soy crumbles. Soooo gooood. I also went to a wedding, which had surprisingly nice options for vegetarians! I had a green salad, a really good pasta salad, green beans, & a roll. So, even in some tricky situations, it really wasn’t difficult to avoid meat.

Overall, I think my week without meat helped me get more fruits & veggies into my diet, made me read menus more carefully, and made me more conscious of what I eat.

This week, I’m going A Week Without…spending. I already pulled into the Walgreens parking lot this afternoon and had to pull away. This could be rough. I didn’t prepare, so I’m thankful I have a full tank of gas. I’m also regretting not buying Coke Zero. As it turns out, I’ll be giving that up for another week. Ha! I’m not counting things that are on auto-pay (I’m not going to rearrange a gym payment around this), and I’m going to try my darndest not to rely on Ben and ask him to buy things. I guess I’ll be cooking a lot this week!

Yes, we have no bananas.

I went to make a vegetarian meal in my crock pot, and realized: I have no food. I have dry goods like couscous, bulgur wheat, & quinoa. I have beans & lentils. But aside from a zucchini from the office garden, a couple potatoes, & a withering basil plant, I have virtually no fresh produce in my house right now. Not because we don’t eat fresh fruit & veggies. In fact, we eat a LOT of them. But we didn’t shop, and now my fridge is empty! I have just enough cheese to make a veggie pizza for dinner, and one lonely frozen meal which qualifies as vegetarian (my lunch tomorrow). Every vegetarian crock pot recipe I’ve looked at calls for vegetable stock or some item I don’t have.

Last week, our fridge was stocked full of –get this- vegetarian lasagna & homemade roasted potato-corn salad. Oh, the irony.

Lesson learned: If you plan to cook vegetarian, have vegetables on hand.