Try, try again.

We caved. Again. We went out to eat last night, too. June is really sticking it to us.

I worked from home this afternoon, which has many advantages, one of which is that I had time to do some really quick prep work for dinner on my lunch break. Another bonus? No 1/8 mile round trip to the bathroom. That can really start to wear on you if, like me, you drink approximately a gallon of water every hour or two. At home, I think I’d have to take a few laps around the outside of the house to get in 1/8 mile. And that would require getting off the couch.

Anyway, during lunch, I mixed up a quick marinade (1/3 cup balsamic vinegar, a little olive oil, garlic) for some sliced portobello mushrooms and put them in the refrigerator for a few hours. When it was time for dinner, I just seared them in a hot pan with a little more olive oil, and served them with quinoa and some double garlic swiss chard. Now I have room for more large-stemmed green vegetables, which is great because I saw some serious looking bok choy at the farmer’s market last Saturday, and I fully intend to get in on that action tomorrow.

this looks disturbingly like steak to me

the breakdown

.37 lbs portobello mushrooms @ $4.99/lb = $1.85
2/3 bunch swiss chard = $1.34
3/4 cup quinoa @ $4.43/lb = $1.66
and some pantry staples (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, garlic)

grand total = $4.85

At 3 servings, this comes out at $1.62. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Grilling in

Even if Memorial Day wasn’t the unofficial start of summer, the fact that it was 88 degrees in our apartment at 7:00 this morning would have tipped me off to the change in seasons. Over the past few nights, I’ve learned my lesson about seasonally inappropriate cooking. First, it is not the most awesome idea to make a spinach ricotta quiche when it is 90+ in the kitchen, however delightful it ended up being.

And  then there was this black bean soup and sauteed asparagus with cilantro pesto and lime cream…

delicious, if ill-advised

It’s just too hot for soup now. It’s time for me to get real with my menu planning.

Last night’s curried beans and greens were a little better, as they required only some stovetop simmering.

basically everything I like to eat in a single bowl.

Tonight, in honor of the holiday, we grilled in. We don’t grill out because 1) we don’t have a grill, 2) we don’t have a yard or really even anything resembling one (as much as I’d love to call the alley next to us a yard, it’s just not realistic) and 3) I’m really more of an indoors person.

What we do have is the will to grill. Also, a grill pan, a stove, and a bulk bag of bamboo skewers. Bring it.

These were pretty basic extra firm tofu, pepper, and mushrooms skewers, marinated for a few hours in a mix of soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, and sriracha. Apparently the reason I’m constantly disappointed by tofu is that I’ve been buying that silken stuff, which is the only kind they usually have at Dillon’s. When they have tofu at all. I got this at the coop and it’s like a new world of tofu. Substantial tofu. Now I know why restaurant tofu always tastes better than mine. Because it is.

on the grill

In the grill pan over medium for 2 minutes or so per side.

all done

And what’s a cook-in without slaw? I made a mix of broccoli slaw, shredded carrots, mixed bean sprouts, and a dressing of rice vinegar, honey, ginger, and oil.

and I never even had to leave the house.

Okay, I’m off to sit in the sweat lodge that is my living room.

Same difference

Have you ever noticed that 85% of the meals I cook look the same?

Be honest.

This is not an exception, but it still tasted pretty good.

Bengali-style black-eyed peas with mushrooms and rice

I have no idea what makes this “Bengali-style,” but I’m assuming it was the spices. If you can’t tell from the yellow, I went a little turmeric-happy. Mostly because I wanted to balance out the ground cumin, which I accidentally dumped in the pot in a moment of confusion between the sifting side and the pouring side of the bottle. Oops. The recipe also called for cinnamon, which was an interesting addition. It warmed it up without spicing it up.

This was from The Tropical Vegan Kitchen, the most recent Donna Klein (of PDQ fame) cookbook that I checked out from the library. For the first time ever, I actually preserved the vegan-ness of a vegan recipe, though it was only because cheese didn’t seem like it would taste right with it (I know) and I’m out of plain Greek yogurt, which would have been the perfect addition to balance out the spice overload.

I’m sorry for the lack of posting. I’ve been doing a horrible job of sticking to my “don’t eat out during the week” rule for the past few weeks. Or months.

Okay, time to focus my attention on basketball.

One pot, three meals, and reflections on a month of no meat

I love few things more than I do a one-pot meal. Considering that Matt is our designated dishwasher, I think this is a sign of my true and pure selflessness. I just want to make things easier on him.

Even better than a one-pot meal is a one-pot meal that I stretch out over three days. As was the case with this winner:

pasta and mushrooms marsala, Pretty Darn Quick style

I’m really into this cookbook, in case you haven’t been paying attention. Now, I’ve never actually had a marsala dish of any kind, so I didn’t know what to expect beyond a pretty darn quick meal. And I got a little nervous while reading the recipe, which warns against using “cheap Marsala cooking wine found in most supermarkets,” as what I had in my hand at that moment was cheap Marsala cooking wine found in my supermarket. But I went with it because, hey, it was there. We can’t buy regular wine in the grocery store, so without dragging out my already overly complex weekly shopping trip, I went with cooking wine. And, guess what? It turned out fine.

More than fine, in fact. This meal was amazing and very rich-tasting, without actually being rich. Which means I was able to eat more. Which always scores points with me. I was especially a big fan of their method of cooking the pasta and mushrooms in just enough broth that it all got absorbed and there was no draining involved. This also helped the pasta get humongous, which is how I stretched it out for so many days. It also helped that Matt didn’t eat any of it until tonight.

And now for a lot of musing about meat

This little experiment was harder than I thought and easier than I thought. The easy part, which I’ll cover first, was finding good vegetarian recipes, trying new dishes, and keeping the grocery budget on the low side. The hard part was shifting my lifestyle. Duh, right, but I really thought that this would be easy since we don’t eat much meat to begin with. What I didn’t really consider was that I tend to cook with chicken broth several times a week, that I sometimes like turkey sandwiches for lunch, and that, oh yeah, I really like sushi and other varieties of seafood. And poultry. I do. And so, while meatless January was actually a great experience, and it’s not like I’m waiting for the clock to strike twelve so that I can scarf down a turkey burger, I’m just not sure that I’m ready to completely commit to a vegetarian lifestyle.

I’m kind of torn on the whole thing and I already planned our meals for next week and they are all vegetarian out of habit and blah blah blah, but the truth is that we’re going out to dinner tomorrow night specifically so that I can order the shrimp fajitas I’ve been avoiding this month. Also, there’s apparently a big football game or something, so it’ll be an ideal time to go out on the town.

Am I really still talking about this?

I’ll just leave it at “we’ll see what happens.” And we’ll see what happens.

Pretty darn quick

I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but we stayed completely on track with our meal plan for this entire week. I can’t remember the last time that happened. It usually falls apart around, oh, Tuesday.

I think the trick to this week’s success was that I carefully planned a menu of dinners that were super quick. Cookbooks like Vegetarian Times Fast and Easy and The PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) Vegetarian Cookbook pretty much did my planning for me.

Last night, we had the greatest food on earth.

quinoa and mushroom skillet

The recipe can be found here, and I highly recommend that you make it immediately and then again every day from now on. I even took some leftovers for lunch today and I never interrupt my peanut butter sandwich / hummus sandwich rotation.

Tonight’s meal was from PDQ.

hearty minestrone

Part of the reason this was pretty darn quick was that it called for frozen peas and carrots. Well, I couldn’t find a bag of just plain peas and carrots, so I picked up one that had carrots, peas, green beans, corn, and limas. Basically: even better. Add vegetable broth, a can of red kidney beans, and some acini de pepe, and you’ve got a pot of soup that will last at least a few meals. Brilliant.

And now, as a reward for how well we’ve stayed on track this week, we’re bundling up and going out in the freezing cold for dessert. That’s how committed I am to cake.

I am a loser

Well, last night we went out for dinner, and tonight I’m having leftovers cleverly disguised as a different meal:

That’s a tempeh melt with grilled veggies on the side. I polished off the veggies no problem, but I’ve only had half of the sandwich so far. I had a bigger lunch than usual, and I’m having a lot of trouble with my hunger cues today.

The AC is still broken at the gym, and yet they still keep opening and then (BIG SURPRISE) having to close early due to “extreme heat.” Today they opened up at 5:30 and then had to close at 9:00am. This is really throwing me off my routine, and I’m all agitated and I feel like I could just start yelling at any moment. I’m hoping to take a walk later, but the heat index is still 100 and it’s already 7:00pm, so yeah. We’ll see. I did some yoga this morning, and I would do another round, but it would require 1) getting off the couch and 2) moving things out of the way. That feels like so much effort.

In which I persevere in the face of adversity.

The stars were aligned against my workout today. Somehow, I powered through in spite of:

1. Knee pain the morning that ruined my 5:30 workout plan.
2. The AC being broken at the gym. Again.
3. Yoga being canceled due to #3.
4. My iPod crapping out 12 minutes into my workout.
5. Did I mention the AC was broken?

They had two floor fans. Two. Floor. Fans. Yeah. That helped. When I was leaving, I think I may have noticed a slight change for the better, but at that point, the damage was done. My kicky green workout top may never be the same again. I also heard one of the kids working there, who was walking around with some sort of temperature gauge, say that it was 88 degrees.

So, I somehow made it through 45 minutes on the Arc Trainer. Seriously, I think I already blocked it out, because I know it happened, but I can’t really recall it.

I was pretty wiped out when I got home, so I wanted a nice, replenishing meal. And I came up with grilled veggie and tempeh fajitas.

I marinated the tempeh in a tapatio/honey/paprika/garlic/black pepper mix and grilled it. I left the veggies plain and just grilled those, too. You probably can’t tell, but there’s also zucchini, yellow squash, a green pepper, and some mushrooms under there. And, of course, cheese.

I really love tempeh, but I’m always hungry an hour after I eat it. I’m waiting for that so I can have another snack. You know how I love my snacks.

Crispy, Crunchy, Peanut Buttery…

…stir fry.

This was good. Tofu, rice noodles, carrots, peppers, snap peas, cauliflower, and mushrooms. In peanut sauce.

It looks gross, but it wasn’t. I promise.

I feel like I say that a lot. Hmmm.

I took the afternoon off, and I think I’m more tired than I would have been if I’d just stayed at work. We went to the laundromat, got our announcements printed, got food for dinner, and came home to cook and eat. Oh, I also did noon yoga, which is my new favorite thing. Crane pose, I will conquer you!

Someday.

Maybe not. It actually reminds me of the “tripod” that we did in dance class when I was five, which I couldn’t do and which haunted me for years.

After dinner, some friends came over and we practiced wedding hair and played a little Wii. My head looks funny right now. But it looked nice before. So, we’ll see.

Detox

Last night I went out with some friends for a dinner/drinks thing to celebrate my upcoming nuptials. We went to Coco Bolo’s, where I had a salad with shrimp, chicken, and pico de gallo, and some crazy banana/rum/ice cream dessert that set me on a really bad path for the evening. I bet most people wake up with a normal hangover after their bridal showers/bachelorette parties, but not me. I woke up with a sugar hangover. I had that banana thing, most of a piece of baklava, half of a “magic bar” which had coconut, chocolate, 46 tons of sugar, and a bunch of crack or something in it to make it almost impossible to stop eating. And some “dirty shirleys” which have 7-Up and grenadine. I haven’t been able to eat anything remotely sweet all day. Even smelling my peanut butter, which is only made from peanuts, made me feel a little sickly.

We volunteered to help with the post-tornado clean-up today and it was insane. They were busing people from campus to the areas that were hit the hardest. The house we were helping with was completely leveled, stuff was everywhere. We worked for about two hours (the sweat helped with the sugar detox, btw). It was really surreal work, you’re going along and throwing stuff in big bags and boxes and everyone once in awhile you stop and think, “Oh, this is someone’s roof. This is someone’s wall. This is a piece of a mirror that someone used.” We even found the rotating plate from inside her microwave, broken into a bunch of pieces. The woman who owned the house was there, trying to get the last bits of stuff out of her basement. She had a cute dog. I’m sad for them.

I came home and basically slept for the rest of the day, got up at 6 and took a walk with Matt, then made dinner. We had chicken and veggie skewers grilled in the grill pan, with some quinoa pilaf. I also had a little salad bar salad from the grocery store that I didn’t eat at lunch.

Now I’m watching The Tudors (still dirty) and getting ready to go to bed because I have to work in the morning. Yes, on a Sunday.

Ris-oat-o

It was kind of weird today, weather-wise. This morning I was actually kind of cold, because it was raining and really windy. I also stepped in a puddle and had to go back inside and change my clothes. It’s kind of sad to think how often this happens. If only I worked from home more.

Anyway, so I decided during that time that I would make this steel cut oat risotto for dinner, because it would be all warm and comforting, and because I’ve been experimenting with breakfasts other than oatmeal this week. It’s left me feeling kind of… wistful. Oh, oats. I just can’t quit you. Even when it’s 91 degrees in my home.

Later, it got sunny and nice and warm-ish, and I had the afternoon off so I got to hang out with Matt and run some errands and go to the gym at a different time, with all of the old people who hog the treadmills going like 1mph. That’s what the indoor track is for, old folks.

I also had to go to the mall twice. Once is enough to leave me paralyzed with anxiety, so you can only imagine what twice did. Plus, I have these out of body experiences where I go into the candy store and buy some candy “for Matt” and then I’m mindlessly reaching into my purse for it as I walk around the Gap or whatever and I CANNOT STOP MYSELF. Seriously. It’s like I’m watching someone else.

So, the point of the story is.

I was annoyed with the people who work at Victoria’s Secret and I was all tweaked out on too much sugar. So I needed something nutritious AND comforting. So risotto it was. I even found some frozen butternut squash in the freezer. Score!

And now I have to go talk to Matt about simulated basketball games.

As in, games that do not happen in real life.

Wait, he just said, “They DO happen in real life. They just don’t involve real people.”

Got it?