Meal Planning: Week 2

Look at me: back at work for less than a month and I've already fallen off the regular-blogging wagon. Obviously I'm no good at multi-tasking, so you can see why I need at least a semi-structured meal plan!

Our second week of meal-planning began with the best of intentions. We would go to the market, get whatever produce looked good and was cheap, and then plan a week's worth of meals. But on Sunday morning we woke to find Tika in a bit of discomfort and sporting a huge belly. The night before, I left the dog food bag open, and she helped herself. So we skipped the market, instead staying home to keep an eye on her (also, it was hot).

So I thought about what we had on hand, and started flicking through some cookbooks, but I only got through two before I had so many ideas. Week 2's meal plan became our Week of Urban Vegan. Her cookbooks tend to be my faves anyways, so I wasn't surprised to find a big list of possibilities. Here is the plan that I wrote, based on some input (and some resistance) from Andy:

• Esther's Baked Falafel (Celebrate Vegan p.107), or Chickpea Chilli Burgers (Urban Vegan, p.48) - early in the week, so Andy could have leftovers on his lunch-time sandwiches
• Black Bean and Bulgur Tacos (UV, p.83) - on Tuesday or Wednesday, so the lettuce was still fresh.
• Pumpkin risotto with sage and sundried tomatoes (UV, p.152)
• Spicy Seitan 'Wings' (Celebrate, p.165)
• Spaghetti alle Melanzane (UV, p.91)
• Pumpkin-Daal Soup (UV, p.54)

There were others I could have chosen, but there are only so many days in a week! At this point, Andy got a little nervous that my meal-planning would become inflexible, so we agreed that this was just a guide - a list of recipes that we could use if we didn't know what to make, but if we felt inspired to do something else that was cool too.

Here is how it turned out.

On Sunday, while soaking beans for the week, I decided to turn some overripe bananas into muffins. I used the recipe for Blueberry-Banana Bread (UV, p.24) as a guide, but changed it up heaps, so I will post the new recipe another time. These were high in protein, and super yummy, the perfect morning tea snack for a week without fruit (on account of not going to the markets).

Sunday night's dinner was a mash-up of the two chickpea patty recipes. I couldn't decide, and then I did, but then I changed my mind. So the flavouring is falafel, but I added oats as per the burger recipe to bulk the patties up. They were a little dry, so not very well suited to BBQing, but they were delicious with BBQ potatoes, beetroot and corn.

Monday night we had eggplant pasta, basically following the recipe for "alle Melanzane" but adding a jar of pesto (because our freezer is so full of it!), and using penne pasta.

Up until now, our meals for Week 2 looked strikingly similar to Week 1, with a few minor variations. Andy would have preferred to keep this up, but Tuesday is where I took a more serious detour. Instead of our normal tomatoey Mexican meals, I made Dynise's Black Bean and Bulgur filling, with the addition of some corn, which we ate burrito-style. I thought they were delicious, and a great change. Andy likes what he likes, and thought these were just okay.

On Wednesday, we got a break from the sticky, hot weather - instead, it was 25 degrees and we got 200mm of rain. I felt like something warm and snuggly, so flicked through the two cookbooks and decided to make an afternoon snack of Milk Pudding (Halvaye Shir), a Persian sweet (Celebrate, p.10). Except I didn't follow the recipe well - I used different spices, vanilla instead of rosewater, and walnuts instead of pistachios. It was very yummy, anyways.

Then for dinner, we went off-plan in favour of something hearty and warm - Mesir Wat with Chappatis.

Thursday was still a little on the cool side, so rather than BBQ-ising Dynise's seitan wing recipe, we followed the original recipe and baked them in the oven. I think of them as nuggets, more so than wings, but whatever you call them they are fantastic (with oven-baked potatoes).

On Friday, we fell into old habits (not necessarily bad habits...) and threw some gnocchi and jarred tomato sauce together and called it dinner. It did the job, got us through the week, and made a dent in the big pile of gnocchi taking up space in our freezer. So Week 2 was a little similar to Week 1, a little creative, and still flexible. A success, even if not a resounding one!

Meal Planning: Week 1

Despite saying in my page on spending less money that meal planning isn't really for us, I made it a resolution to be a bit more organised about dinner. But I didn't want to adopt the kind of meal plan that requires choosing recipes, buying specific ingredients, and following a plan very strictly. We need flexibility, and also Andy gets a little grouchy about buying things full price when there are on-special alternatives, so specific ingredients are rarely purchased in our place.

Our first week of meal planning didn't come about as much through planning as through indecision. Scene: Sunday morning, after breakfast, on the couch. Me: Do you want to go to the market? Andy: We probably don't need to. Me: But the only veggies we have are corn and lettuce... Andy: Well, let's have... dhal, nacho salad, burgers, gnocchi with pesto, and pumpkin risotto. Me: Wait, let me write this down.

So we had a vague plan. Then I realised I wanted fruit so we went to the market anyways, and came home with some more things: potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and beetroots (plus bananas, a bucket of mangoes and three pineapples). Add to that our eggplant bushes heavily laden with quickly-growing fruits. So I amended our meal plan.

Monday and Tuesday I was home still, not yet finished with my holidays. So I did a lot of prep stuff for the coming week - cooking beans, making chappati breads, and roasting eggplant. And then we enacted our meal plan: no set schedule, just a pretty good idea of what we could make given the ingredients on hand, and no real thinking required (for those nights after work where thinking is very undesirable). Here's how it shaped up.

Monday: Nacho salad. Chips and lettuce on the bottom, a mix of kidney beans, sweet potato, tomato, corn and rice in the middle, and a fresh mango-pineapple-cucumber salsa on top.

Tuesday: red lentil dhal with wholemeal chappatis. I didn't snap a photo of this, because it was just dhal.

Wednesday: kidney bean burgers, with grilled pineapple (under the patty), potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Thursday: gnocchi with eggplant balls and a pesto-y, tomato-y sauce.

Friday: Andy went off script, and crafted a semi-delicious curry of eggplant, tofu and jackfruit.

Since this seemed to work reasonably well for us last week, I tried again on Sunday, this time going a little more adventurous and looking for recipes that we could use. I'll give week 2 a post of its own when we've finished it, but so far meal planning seems to be going well. As long as it doesn't require buying special things, and we have the flexibility to cook what we feel like on a given night, it seems to work for us.I guess I should update the part about not meal planning soon...

Cleaning out the Kitchen

As I said in a previous post, we have been doing our best, in the past few weeks, to clear as much out of our kitchen as possible. Instead of shopping, we have been emptying out the pantry, fridge&freezer, and garden. We have been buying fresh veggies still, because duh. But we have gotten our cabinets down to practically empty.

This is where we were up to on Wednesday morning.

Freezer: 2 blocks of flavoured tofu, 1 block of plain tofu, bread, 2 ice bottles (for keeping our food cool when we move), pumpkin ice cubes for Nacho, 2 seitan steaks, 3 pumpkin muffins, 1 jar of mango chunks, 1 jar of chickpeas, a handful of blueberries.

Fridge.

Pantry cabinet 1

Pantry cabinet 2

Pantry cabinet 3

Okay, so we still have a lot of food. But we have been focusing our eating-efforts on things we knew we could finish off in the timeframe. So a huge thing of chickpeas, and the 4 jars of jam Andy brought home from a field trip, weren't included in our list (you bet I made a list).

Eating down the pantry, for us, has meant eating pretty well. Here are some of the yummy things we've had so far...

 Remember when we bought 22 packages of sweet chilli flavoured tofu for 20cents each? We weren't even halfway through them when Andy brought home a few more packages of other-flavoured tofu, left over from a field trip which was massively over-catered. We're down to two, finally, thanks to meals like this one. Tofu, fried briefly. Also, brussels sprouts with leek, spinach, and the last of a jar of vegan bacon bits from the US. And basil potato salad in the background. The dressing for this salad used up a tin of coconut milk, a bunch of basil from the garden, and some capers from the fridge.

 

Pasta, from the pantry. Sauce, made from 3 tins of tomatoes, the last of a jar of tomato paste, some sundried tomatoes, the end of a jar of capers, a jar of artichoke hearts, and some green olives. And a heap of basil from the garden.

 Pizza/focaccia. In front, caramelised onion and za'atar focaccia. In the back, hawaiian pizza, which used up a block of seitan from the freezer and a tin of pineapple from the pantry.

Tapioca pudding, which used up all the big tapioca pearls, a tin of coconut milk, some bananas from the freezer, and some of the rainbow sprinkles from the pantry.

Black bean tortilla chip soup (based closely on the recipe from La Dolce Vegan), which used up a jar of frozen black beans, a chilli from the freezer, spinach from the garden, some chips, and a whole bunch of garlic chives from the garden.

Chickpea & seitan green curry. This used up a jar of frozen chickpeas, the last of the seitan blocks in the freezer, some garden spinach, all of the brown rice, a tin of coconut milk, a bit of ginger from the freezer, and the rest of a jar of green curry paste.

A green smoothie, which used the last of the frozen pineapple and bananas, and some spinach from the garden.

So not too much to go yet, but we still won't be eating like paupers, if the past fortnight has been any indication!

Sweet Tart

I've been on a bit of a caramel apple kick lately, manifested in my graduation party caramel-apple upside down cake.  The start of the caramel apple theme started a week earlier, though, with a Friday night dinner.  Andy suggested we have enchiladas for dinner, and while the oven was on, why not make a tart? 

We had a few apples and one pear in the fridge, so I got the puff pastry out of the freezer and sliced up some apples.  Flipping through my exciting new cookbook, Vegan Bake Sale, I saw a recipe for a small batch of caramel sauce.  The sauce is meant to drizzle over cupcakes, but I thought it would do well with some apple tart.  And flipping through The Joy of Vegan Baking, I was inspired by a crunchy nut topping for an apple strudel.  So I combined all of these things into my tart, which ended up being reminiscent of those caramel apples coated in peanuts that I occasionally got from the fair when I was a kid.

First, I sliced up two apples and a pear.  I don't bother peeling, because I like the texture.  I tossed those in a bowl with some cinnamon, a dash of salt, and a tablespoon of flour.  I mix my apples with flour for crumbles, pies and tarts because it helps the juice from the apples get thick and glazy, instead of runny.

I mixed up my strudel topping - crushed peanuts, sugar, and cinnamon.

Then I mixed up the caramel. 

This recipe is great because it only makes 1/3 of a cup.  I let that cool down a bit before assembling everything.  I turned out to have too many apples, but I kind of liked having a big mound of fruit on top of my puff pastry.  Then I drizzled the caramel sauce over the top, and Andy sprinkled with the nuts.

It went into the oven while we nommed on our enchiladas.

Then when I pulled it out, it looked pretty disappointing.  Some of the caramel had run and burnt into the pan. 

But when we served it up, it turned out not to be a fail at all.  It was sweet, and tart from the apples, and delicious.  Andy wanted another the next day, it was so good.

And then we mixed together the leftover nuts and caramel, and swirled them through some peanut butter ice cream, for a delicious, delicious frozen treat.

Tortilla Pie

Andy and I always try to cook enough dinner that we can have leftovers, which I bring to work for lunch during the week.  But sometimes we find ourselves with an excess of leftovers, and we need to find more creative ways of using them up so that I don't have to eat the same lunch for days in a row.

This was the situation we were in after a dinner of nachos.  Lots of leftover tomatoey, beany, sweet potato mix sat in the fridge, asking to be transformed into something delicious. 

I thought of my ill-advised purchase of a $5 round silicon cake pan - it was too cheap and cakes don't bake properly in it.  But, it is beautifully non-stick.  So I decided it would be a good pan for a tortilla pie.

I cut tortillas to fit the pan, and then layered it with nacho filling and uncheese sauce.  After the pie baked for 30 minutes, it was time for the moment of truth.  I flipped it over and slid off the silicon pan, worried that it would fall apart, but success! It looked great.

And it sliced up pretty well, and was very tasted topped with salsa and jalapeno slices.

It was a respectable use of leftovers, especially served with potato wedges.

PNG Eats

On my recent trip to PNG, I ate lots and lots of food.  Even though the snorkelling was by no means strenuous (and only for a few hours a day) I snacked like crazy.  And, given the availability of food in the shops and the market over there, things were pretty carb-heavy.  In other words, I was kind of in heaven.

There was no soy milk around, and since it was a short trip I didn't bother worrying about it. (When I went before, for two months, I brought up some powder which was gross, but then found some asceptic soymilks from Vietnam for sale in the store.)  Breakfast, then, consisted of toast or oats.  Both with lots of bananas.

Most days we went diving at 11 or so, and had a big mid-morning snack before going.  Avocado toast, anyone?

Lunch was either two-minute noodles or sandwiches.  Then for an afternoon snack I often had Ryvitas with peanut butter, or with vegemite.

We got through a few chocolate cakes for afternoon and evening snackage.

And we cooked dinner every night, except for one when we went over to the resort for a rather disappointing meal.  Our kitchen was a bit small, and the stove, pans and utensils weren't wonderful, but we managed to produce a few good meals (and a few mediocre ones).

The first night, Andy cooked up a bunch of pasta with a tomatoey-sweet potatoey-olivey sauce.  It was an interesting combination - the flavours were good but the texture of sweet potato with pasta was a little funny.  (The photos of our dinners were hard to get, because it was so dark by 6pm and the lights in the house were not great, so apologies for the fuzziness.)

I had brought the recipe for Jamaican Cook Up Rice from The Tropical Vegan, so we made that with some changes.  We didn't have any fresh herbs, and barely any spices, but this coconutty rice & black eyed peas was good anyways.  The pumpkin greens we stirred through were a winner; the sweet potato had gone off and made me want to gag.  We picked it out and somehow managed to enjoy the meal anyways (being in PNG makes me a lot less precious about that sort of thing).

We had two noodle stir-fries.  One, with a packet of Ma Po sauce, made our mouths tingle in a chemically way.  Another was much better, made with simply sweet chilli and soy sauce, with eggplant, pumpkin and a green that looked like watercress.

The rice in PNG is good.

Especially with a yummy chickpea stew on top.  This was coconut milk, tomatoes, and curry powder and was surprisingly good.  On the side we had a giant salad, and some more pumpkin greens sauteed in liquid seasoning.

And we found a new favourite food in plantains.  We tried two varieties while we were over there - kiau kiau were skinny like regular bananas, and there was a fatter, starchier variety as well.  I fried them up, tostone style.  One night we had them with refried beans & corn.

Another night they went with a veggie & black eyed pea stew on rice (and a chocolate cake cooling in the background).

All up, we ate pretty well.  I'll be back soon to show you some of the activities I spent all those calories on...

Some Things Vegans Eat - Beans, beans...

Beans are one of the cheapest sources of protein around, especially if you buy dried and cook them up in a pressure cooker.  They are also versatile, and (I think) delicious.

 Andy made chickpea cakes from Vegan Dad's recipe, but changed it around to incorporate okara.  We had some leftover from dinner, so he made a big salad with spinach, tomato, grated carrot, cucumber and more chickpeas.  This was a delicious and huge Sunday lunch.

 Kidney bean patties are very hearty to eat, and went great with what I think are risotto balls, quick-wilted ceylon spinach, and tomato.

Beans are also a key ingredient for every fiesta!  This colourful burrito filling has black beans, kidney beans, corn, red & green capsicum, seitan, and tomatoes.  Ole!

Pizza Party

Andy and I have pizza pretty regularly -- like about once a week.  Lately, it seems that Friday night has positioned itself as pizza night in our house.  Our preferred base of choice is the pizza dough recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, with the addition of an extra tablespoon of sugar and 2 tablespoons of gluten flour.  We just throw everything into the breadmaker, and then after the dough cycle is finished I stretch and throw the crusts (for real!) to get them nice and thin.  To avoid repetition, however, we mix up the toppings (and also because we often have limited veggies by Friday).  Here are a few of our recent pizza creations...

Here are two foccaccias -- caramelised onion and kalamata olive; and roasted garlic and herb.

Sauteed veggie pizza with tomato sauce.

Mexican pizza.  Instead of sauce, refried beans.  Topped with capisicum and tomato, and then guacamole when it came out of the oven.

BBQ Capsicum Lovers Pizza.  Tomoto sauce, red and green capsicum, and vegan pepperoni drizzled with BBQ sauce.

Cheesy garlic bread pizza.  To make this, mash together a whole head of roasted garlic, 1 T. margarine, 3T. olive oil, and 2T. nutritional yeast.  Season with salt and pepper, and spread onto the crust.  This is so yummy we always eat the whole thing, straightaway.

Two pizzas here: Broccoli; and Za'atar with fresh tomato.

Here's a close-up of the broccoli pizza.  Melty White Cheese from Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and mince broccoli.  This was a bit of a throwback to the broccoli and mozzarella pizzas they served in my high school alongside cheese & pepperoni, and which I ate while convincing myself I was so sophisticated.

Thai Pizza -- peanut sauce, homemade tofu drizzled with a spicy soy sauce mixture, red capsicum and cucumber.

Roasted garlic and caper foccaccia.

This is a deep dish cheese & pepperoni with capsicum, and a tomatoey sauce underneath.  The pepperoni is one of our favourite ways to use okara (which I will post about soon).

And another Mexican pizza, this time with beans and corn, seitan chunks, capsicum and guacamole.

What is your favourite pizza topping?