We started this journey with a typical New Years resolution to lose some weight and eat healthier. In the past, we've had success with the 21 Day Fix by Beachbody. This is a system where you get a budget of food groups using colored boxes for portion control in each category. On the phone app, you put in your current weight and it calculates how many of each food group/colored boxes you need each day. My problem in the past is that I just can't consume that many vegetables in a day. My breakfast and lunches are carb and protein heavy. Unless I eat broccoli for breakfast, there was no way I could get enough vegetables for this diet. So, this time around, I decided to just work with it. I would cook vegetarian dinners.
Now, the point of this was not to eliminate meat. I love meat. I love bacon and brisket and tenderloin and pulled pork and grilled chicken..... but I need to get more vegetables in my diet. I love pasta too, but I need more vegetables in my diet. I needed help because the only vegetarian recipes I could find were some variation of a pile of pasta or tofu. I put out a call on Facebook and ended up with three really good vegan cookbooks.
The first is Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites. I chose three recipes from this book which were really good. A lot of these recipes, though, were for a true vegan who is looking to replace meat with something that is not meat. You want that meaty experience without having real meat. It also leaned heavy on wheat products to fill the belly, which wasn't exactly what my objective was. We tried tempeh, sliced and prepared with a smoky flavor, and we were surprised that we really liked it! Not as much as I like bacon, but it was really good.
The second book was How Not to Die. I really enjoyed reading this book. There was some really useful nutritional information and food-philosophy in the front matter as well as on the recipe pages. This book was exactly what I was looking for as far as solid vegetable recipes, but the way the book is written was that there were embedded recipes that you had to flip to other pages to get. It took an extra 5 minutes in the grocery list making and an extra 5 minutes of the meal prep. (The embedded recipes were intended to be made ahead and kept on hand, rather than made with the meal, but ain't nobody got time for that.) But everything we cooked out of this one was really delicious and satisfying. Also, something to note about this book; the photography was beautiful. Every dish was beautiful and colorful. I wanted to cook all the things!
The third book, Plant Powered Families, was my favorite and we will probably add some of these recipes to our regular rotation even when we aren't dieting. Every recipe was fairly easy to prepare and kid-friendly. They were created by a busy mom for busy [vegan] families. The recipes didn't rely on wheat products or meat-substitutes.
So, our kids have basically starved the last three weeks. I wouldn't put them in the adventurous category, but they typically eat what we eat which is a lot more diverse than other houses. But they hated this experiment and most nights refused to participate. Which, in our house, means they choose to go hungry. We had a few dishes at which one of the kids nibbled, but nothing that all three of them really loved. I didn't really care. They aren't really starving and they better appreciate their dinner when we put meat back on the table. (Empathy isn't my strong trait.)
I really love food and I love talking about food. I actually enjoy people's dinner on Instagram. So, I feel the need to describe some of these meals for you. We didn't have a single meal that Walter and I didn't like. Every single one was delicious and nutritious. A few of them we probably won't make again, but not because it was gross, but rather because the effort:reward ratio wasn't as high as some others.
For the first week, I relied on a few online recipes, but once I got the books, I combed through each and jotted down the recipes that seemed appealing, remembering that we're a busy family with two careers and some extra curricular activities. The meals I chose had to be easy to prep, cook, and consume, but I did save a few yummy labor intensive recipes for the weekends.
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