I just had the most delicious dinner.  It was a long day at school today, so I think that was part of why it tasted so good.

It was so good that I forgot to take a picture of it.  Doh!  Since I can’t supply you with pictures, I’ll provide you with instructions to recreate it.

Here’s what I had:

• Roasted Portobello Mushroom
  • Roasted with just a bit of balsamic vinegar and dried oregano in the cap at 400 degrees for 5ish minutes.  Removed, set toaster oven to broil.  Topped with tomato and red bell pepper slices, panko breadcrumbs and broiled for 2-3 minutes.  Topped with Munster cheese and broiled for another minute or so.
• Sweet Potato and Butternut Squash Mash
  • Leftover roasted vegetables simmered for a minute or two with some soymilk and leftover mushroom stock.  Mashed.
• Spinach Salad with Feta, Farmers Market Tomatoes, & Annie’s Brand Goddess Dressing

• Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
  • I was being seasonal?

****

So yeah.  Tasty.  Make it.

So almost everyone knows that they should be eating the least processed, most natural types of food they can find, but for one reason or another, a lot of people don’t do it.  The reasons are many, including: lack of knowledge of what constitutes those types of foods, budget constraints, availability of fresh foods, minimal cooking skills, etc.  Today I’d like to address the limited budget aspect of grocery shopping for healthy foods.

Why do I think I can talk to the wide world of the internets about grocery shopping on a budget?  Let’s just say that 3 years of private law school education isn’t even remotely cheap.  I’m also on a fixed income (can you call it income if it’s actually debt?) so I know a thing or two about stretching a buck.

Instead of droning on and on about this, I figured I would just lay my tips out in a list.  Here we go:

1. Learn how to cook.  Like, really cook, not just opening a box of something and adding water.  It can be really fun, eating at home is cheaper, and the quality of foods is likely to be better.
2. Buy fresh vegetables and fruit at a farmers market.  If you can’t afford organic, buy local!  It’s cheaper (less miles traveled) and it’s better for the environment and your community.
3. Skip convenience/prepackaged/prepared foods.  Most are (by definition) heavily processed and contain gross chemicals and additives.   If you follow tip #1, you don’t need them anyway!
4. Buy in bulk.  I’m a big fan of oats for breakfast, and I like granola in my yogurt, so I buy tons of oats from the bulk bins for a great price, and make my own cereals for wayyyyy less than packaged cereals cost.  Oats are really cheap anyway.
5. Learn to like and make oatmeal.  It’s good for you, the organic version is not much more money, it’s quick, and cheap.
6. Have a plan for the things that you buy. Just because something randomly looks good doesn’t mean you should buy it.  If something does catch your eye at the store and you would like to try it, decide what you will make with it and pick up the ingredients while you’re at the store.  That way, there’s less of a chance of it spoiling or collecting dust in your cupboard.
7. Skip most of the middle aisles.  Sure you can find some canned beans, canned tomatoes, etc. in the center aisles, but you also find cookies, crackers, chips, and soda.  I think this might be the #1 place where I save the most money.  It’s not that I never buy these things, but granola bars, tortilla chips, and oreos are super expensive and give you next to nothing in terms of nutrition.  90% of the time it’s not worth it to me.  (The other 10% of the time I really frickin want those chips and salsa!)
8. Frozen foods. If you’re a sporadic cook, buy frozen vegetables.  Fresh is definitely better, but if you don’t have a plan for using all of the portion you buy in a week or so, they will spoil and it’s a waste of money.  Frozen vegetables can be really cheap, too.  Also, if you like a certain bread and it goes on sale, stock up and place the extra loaves in your freezer.  Bread keeps really well in the freezer.
9. Take advantage of sales. The grocery store where I normally shop doesn’t always have the best sales, but the quality of the food is good, and the prices on a lot of the things I like to buy are usually cheaper than other stores.  But today I hit the jackpot and there we’re a billion little sale signs out so I picked up some extra bread, sushi and arborio rice, and flour.  They weren’t on my list (gasp!) but they would be within the next few weeks, so since they were on sale, they went in the cart.
10. Go to the store on off hours, if possible. Avoid Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Nuff said?

It’s very, very rare that I don’t feel like cooking.  It’s usually one of my favorite parts of the day, but the past few days I’ve been experiencing this crazy “I don’t want to cook” feeling.  So there have been many pieces of toast with almond butter, egg sandwiches, veggie burgers, packets of granola, and sliced apples consumed for full meals.  I’ve also eaten out a few times in the past couple of days.  This is probably normal for a lot of people, but for me it’s definitely the exception to the rule.

On top of my “meh, I just don’t know what I want to eat/make” attitude, I’m trying to use up a lot of the ingredients that have consumed my cupboards lately.  And I missed the farmers market yesterday.  In order to use up ingredients which I’ve had on hand for months, I need the be creative, and that just isn’t there right now.

I’m determined to get myself out of this rut today! Here is my game plan:

• I hope to at least make a big batch of granola, which always seems to make the apartment smell awesome which makes me hungry, which makes me want to cook more.  I hope to post an approximation of the recipe I generally follow real soon.
• I have several cookbooks that I don’t open nearly enough.  While I hardly ever use a recipe when I’m cooking, in my opinion it is a great source of inspiration when you are in a cooking rut.  I’m going to try something new today!

My Reading List for Today

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I will now show you a few things that I’ve eaten recently that have been super tasty.  Good looking food should help me get in the cooking frame of mind, right?

Whole wheat mini bagel, hummus, grape tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, fresh (homegrown!) basil, mixed olives, and grapes

If you read the caption, I’m pretty sure you don’t need me to tell you how this tasted.  Nom.

I also ate some crack salsa made by the person who introduced me to the stuff.  Amazing.

And finally, I made bruschetta for the same party where the salsa was consumed.  I bought the tomatoes from the farmers market the day of the party, and boy oh boy were they tasty.  Since I’m a sweetheart, I’ll give you this very complex recipe for bruschetta.  Aren’t I the nicest?

Bruschetta

Ingredients:

• Tomatoes
• Basil
• Garlic
• Olive Oil
• Salt
• Balsamic vinegar (optional)
• Crusty Bread

Directions:

1. Chop upsome seeded tomatoes.  Throw them in a bowl.
2. Pour in some olive oil, enough that it coats the tomatoes and some pools in the bottom of the bowl.
3. Chop the basil, don’t get fancy with the chopping, just rough pieces, and add to the bowl.
4. Slice a few cloves of garlic in half and put them in the bowl as well.
5. Season with salt and the vinegar, if you want, and set aside for an hour or so.
6. Slice the bread into 1/2 inch or so pieces (don’t freak out, it doesn’t really what size/shape, just big enough to hold the tomatoes and not too thin that it gets super crispy, and not too thick that all you taste is bread).
7. Spray on some olive oil, and put them in a hot oven for a few minutes.  You don’t want toast, you want very lightly browned tops.
8. Slice another clove of garlic in half, and rub it over the bread.
9. Top with the tomato mixture.
10. Consume.

*****

Yup, definitely feeling the inspiration coming back now.  :)

Since I’m still new at this blogging thing, I thought I’d try a different approach to posting.   Here is a fairly random sampling of food that I’ve made and eaten over the past couple of weeks!

First up: A Green Smoothie

Green Smoothie

I bought a bunch of spinach at the farmers market (an entire plastic grocery bag full!) and decided to use some up in smoothies before it went bad.  Green smoothies are great, just add everything you usually like in a smoothie and chuck in a handful of spinach!  You can’t taste the spinach at all.  This one had banana, yogurt, soymilk, and some blueberries.

Next up is a typical breakfast.

Oatmeal with half a banana mashed in and homemade granola, yogurt, blueberries and flax seeds on top.  It’s getting a bit hot out for oatmeal these days though.  More recently I’ve been having cereal or yogurt.

Some weekends I really make an effort to make a bunch of food to take for lunches during the week.  Here’s photo documentation of it   First I made Spaghetti and Bean Balls from the vegan bible cookbook Veganomicon.

I topped the bean balls with some shredded vegan mozzarella cheese.  I’ve tried a bunch of vegan cheeses, and I have to say that I’d rather just go without rather than eat “fake” cheese.  The texture and the flavor are just not satisfying at all.  I thought I’d swoon over Teese and I was disappointed, and FYH was a little bit worse.  Bummer.

I’d show you the final product, but the pictures came out pretty bad.  Basically I cooked some whole wheat pasta, topped it with some of the red sauce, some of the bean balls, and a bit of sauteed zucchini.

I also took advantage of my oven space, since it was already on and made some Chickpea Cutlets, also from Veganomicon.

Chickpea Cutlets

These are awesome to make in advance, and are great on top of salads, pasta, or in sandwiches during the week.  My favorite way to have them is to reheat them in the toaster oven, slather them with Franks Red Hot, and chow down with some yogurty dipping sauce.  Who needs chicken wings??

Strawberry shortcake was my favorite character from when I was a kid.  Perhaps that’s why I love the dessert so much!  I made a really simple version to highlight some local strawberries that I picked up at the farmers market.

Local Strawberries

I made vegan biscuits from scratch, using a recipe from Vegan Explosion (I made half of a batch).  Homemade biscuits are essential for good strawberry shortcake, and they are so so easy to make.  You don’t even have to measure most of the ingredients, which is my favorite part   To make biscuits vegan really the only substitute you need to make in any recipe is to use Earth Balance margarine instead of butter.  I use Earth Balance anyway, so this was an easy sub.  You can use any biscuit recipe you like

Vegan Biscuits

The strawberries were hulled and macerated with a wee bit of granulated sugar and some maple syrup.   I tasted them after 45 minutes or so and they were still a little too tart, so I added some more maple syrup.

Macerating Strawberries

I topped the cakes with sweetened soy yogurt instead of whipped cream.  They probably would have been tastier with the whipped cream, but I didn’t miss it, and Philip seemed pretty content without it!

Strawberry Shortcake!