Shopping and Prep

Yesterday was grocery day and time to prep for next 2 weeks of meals. The food for the next two weeks is pictured above.  I finally broke the $200 barrier with the cost being 186.84. Buying a whole butternut squash and dried beans would have lowered the cost, but I like the convenience. I also bought premade Italian bread, English muffins, and a baguette.  I still have quiet a few staple items like olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper spray oil, whole wheat flour, and spices.  I keep thinking that the week will come when I have all that stuff on hand. I did have the dried cranberries, walnuts, and nutritional yeast on hand that I used in making food for yesterday and today.

One of my goals was to start making my own faux meats. First up are meatballs.  I used one pound of the textured soy protein shown above with almond milk soaked Italian bread slices, nutritional yeast, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper. For the egg I used  ground flax seed, olive oil, baking powder, and potato starch. I tried to mix everything together with my hands like you would do with regular meatballs, but the soy protein  would not mix well.  I had to use the food processor to incorporate everything.  The result looks very meatball like. I will see how they taste later in the week.  This recipe idea came from an old Bon Appetite magazine for traditional meatballs made with sirloin.

They are a light color, but the recipe I will use calls for chicken meatballs.  My other prep for the week included roasting yellow and red peppers.

And a loaf of whole wheat bread

My other 'meat' attempt is to make a sausage.  I rehydrated 8 oz of Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) and crumbled in 8 oz of flax seed tempeh. I added a small baked potato for texture, sage, salt, pepper, marjoram  and cayenne pepper. I used the immersion blender to reach the right texture. I rolled them to look like bulk sausage.  One  roll went into the freezer for later. I will fry the other one up later in the week.  The idea for sausage came from a Breakfast cookbook I have.  The recipe I looked at used 2 pounds of pork butt.  So, I  improvised a bit.

I have finished up the recipes in the Vegan Kickstart program .  http://www.pcrm.org/health/diets/kickstart/kickstart-programs . 

So from this point on I am finding recipes and ideas from other sources.