Hi everyone! I hope you are having a fabulous day. I know I am! :) Wednesday is my day off and it was glorious. I went shopping and shopping and shopping. I bought fall decorations for my room (pictures tomorrow when there's good light in the room) and my room now smells like delicious spiced pumpkin via a seasonal spray bottle of Febreeze. Unfortunately that lovely week of fall weather is gone and it's hot again =/ bleh, but I'm going to pretend there's beautiful crisp fall weather outside.
Well, I've never gotten around to writing an "About Me" page. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually ;). If I had written one then you would probably know that I'm vegetarian. I've never liked meat much and when I got to college I decided to just cut it out entirely. It made it a lot easier to turn down meals I didn't really want.
I've been vegetarian for a little over a 4 years now and the most frequent question I get is "What do you eat?" This always comes as a surprise to me because I am aware of so many vegan and vegetarian options and I can never understand why others find it so strange or haven't heard of these options. I mean, it's really a big thing right now. Vegetarian is the in thing. Anyways, everyone thinks that the only possible option is salads and pasta. Well first of all, a salad is lovely when I'm in the mood but I'm sorry there is just no way I'm going to eat salads for the rest of my life. Absolutely cannot do a salad diet. I love my salt and I love hot warm comfort foods. The salt is a story for another day, oh how I wish salt was good for you... sadly it will have to go eventually. Pasta is fine but I rarely eat it. No real reason, I just prefer tomato sauce/spaghetti sauce on other things and pasta in my opinion really has no redeeming qualities (although I'll probably be stuffing my face with spaghetti, aka carbs, the night before the race).
So what do I eat? A huge variety of things :). Breakfast is always oatmeal, sometimes with add-ins, currently pumpkin, sometimes blueberries, sometimes bananas but I also love them plain. I try to add ground chia and flax seeds but don't always cause they get stuck in my permanent retainer and can be a bit annoying. I usually have small lunches, more like snacks. Banana and a large handful of nuts or cherry tomatoes with cheese and nuts. If I'm feeling like a bigger meal I'll have some Ezeikiel bread toasted with spaghetti sauce slathered on with slices of avacado, sliced cherry tomatoes, maybe some black beans, salt, pepper, oregano and some more sauce on top. Yummy.
Dinner is always something different. I've looked up vegan/vegetarian recipes before online and found some great recipes but a lot of the time they're full of cheese or pasta or rice... things I'm not very thrilled about eating everyday. Other recipes are great but are often really labor intensive. So, I was very excited to make a discovery! I am responsible for Wednesday's meals and since I'm busy all the time I needed to find something quick. I used to make dump chicken recipes on the weekends and freeze several at a time so all I had to do was pop them out of the freezer and into a baking dish but now I only make vegetarian meals for my family. So what I've been doing is using the same dump chicken recipes and substituing beans/potatoes/sweet potatoes/grains for the chicken. They have been turning out SO good.
A few weeks ago I made greek chick peas and potatoes (tasted lemony) and delicious. Last week I made honey glazed kidney beans and sweet potatoes, roasted until the kidney beans had a slight crunch to them and the sweet potatoes were nice and soft. This week I made wine and herb roasted canalini beans and red potatoes. I wanted to skip the potatoes and make some amaranth a la rice style to put the canalini on top of but I ended up making too much wine and herb marinade and had to find something else that would soak some of it up. These meals are absolutely delicious and have been SO easy. It takes about 5 minutes to put all the ingredients together in a pan and then 30 minutes or so to bake them.
I have no idea why I haven't been able to find recipes like these on recipe websites but I am so happy that I've made this discovery. Mmm mmm!
P90X arms and shoulders followed by ab ripper x and then bedtime :)
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