A New Week

Our trips to the grocery store look a lot different than they did a month ago!

Today we did our usual Sunday errands: Chattanooga Market and Greenlife. This week we picked up tomatoes, Bibb lettuce, zucchini, squash, purple peppers and apples at the market – all for $19! I’m excited to try the lettuce, this was the first time we had seen their booth. I wish I would have taken photos today, the produce was gorgeous. And Alton Brown was there 🙂

On the menu this week: stir fry, salad, spaghetti and tortilla soup. Lots of duplicates from last week, but we had some leftover ingredients we wanted to use up before they went bad. It’s going to be another busy week!

Vegan Tortilla Soup | Recipe

Dinner. Was. Amazing!

We made tortilla soup using this recipe and it is now on our top 3 recipe list. SO good! We tweaked it a bit based on our likes and things we had/didn’t have on hand:

• 1 tbsp EVOO (Didn’t actually measure)
• 1 sweet onion, finely chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 small zucchini, chopped
• 1 small purple bell pepper, chopped
• 1 ear fresh corn
• 3 tbsp ground cumin
• 28oz can crushed tomatoes
• 3 cups vegetable broth
• 15oz can black beans
• salt, pepper, crushed red pepper and garlic salt, to taste
• chopped avocado, for garnish

We followed the directions on the original recipe and it was perfect! We didn’t make the tortilla strips this time, so I guess this isn’t technically ‘tortilla’ soup 🙂 I think I will try it next time. I’m excited to try and make my own tortillas to use!

Sweet Potato Chips

Before & After:

I am LOVING my new microwave chip maker from Pampered Chef! These were super easy. Just wash the sweet potato, slice using a mandolin slicer (I used the new Pampered Chef Simple Slicer) sprinkle with a little salt and pop in the microwave!

I have no affiliation with Pampered Chef, I just love their products 🙂

Catching up

I haven’t blogged in a while, and found lots of photos on my phone that I need to share!

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Thursday (9/15 – the night we had bean burgers) After dinner we made smoothies! We just put a bag of frozen strawberries in the blender with a little water and raw sugar. They weren’t amazing, but were great for our after dinner sweet tooth! I had mine in a bowl, more like sorbet than a smoothie.

After I got my portion out, Blake added a banana to the blender and his was more of a smoothie consistency.

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Saturday (9/17) Our ‘cheat day!’ After all our talk about how horribly we were planning to eat, we didn’t do too bad! For lunch we had salads from Chick-fil-A. We got two entree salads, one with chicken and one without. We split the chicken and ended up with 1.5 chicken strips each. There was also a small amount of shredded cheese on the salad. I knew the salad dressing was AWFUL and I didn’t even want to look at the ingredients list. (I got the Berry Balsamic and Blake got Ranch.) It was very good, but we both felt guilty the whole time we were eating.

I don’t have a photo of our dinner from ‘cheat day.’ After church on Saturday nights we always go out to dinner with my family. They chose Marco’s which is a fairly new Italian restaurant downtown. We both planned to continue cheating through dinner, but Blake ended up with a soup & salad and I had eggplant parmesan. My eggplant did have some cheese on it, but it was a much better choice than the chicken parmesan I was planning on! And oh my goodness, it was SO good! We will definitely be going back to Marco’s!

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Tuesday (9/20) – I took photos of my breakfast, snack and dinner but for some reason never posted. Surprise, surprise – for breakfast I had oatmeal and fruit!

I’ve been eating breakfast so late that I usually don’t have lunch. Just breakfast, snack and dinner. I know I need to be eating more often, but I have to wait a while after I wake up to eat breakfast and by then it’s almost lunch time! That day I had an apple and some Justin’s honey almond butter for a snack. I am LOVING the almond butter! To me it tastes like the candy Mary Jane’s.

For dinner that night we had boring spaghetti and a spinach/romaine salad.

We found a great brand of dressing, Drew’s, that meets most of our requirements! We have three flavors in the fridge. This was our first night trying out the Rosemary Balsamic flavor – I’d give it a 7 out of 10. We don’t really have many other salad dressing options so I am going to learn to love it 🙂

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Wednesday (9/21) – I had my usual oatmeal for breakfast, apple for snack and went out to dinner with my Dad. There are no photos from breakfast/snack because I’m lazy and there are no photos from dinner because I didn’t do very well 🙂

And that brings us to today! There were no clean pans for oatmeal this morning so I broke tradition and just had lots of fruit. Now it’s time to clean this house – I’ve got company coming this weekend! Eek!

Habit

I’m a creature of habit, especially when it comes to the way I eat. I typically order the same thing whenever I go to a restaurant, and make the same handful of recipes when I cook. I think its because I am such a picky eater that once I find something I like, I stick with it. Which explains why I have had oatmeal for breakfast everyday for the last eight days! Haha. I did switch things up a bit today after getting some new ingredients over the weekend. Rather than my usual 1 cup water & 1/2 cup oats, I used 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk & 1/2 cup oats. This bowl was much creamier than the others I’ve been eating! I also added some shredded, organic, unsweetened coconut on top. Yum!

The photographer in me feels like I shouldn’t blog without a photo, but bowls of oatmeal all pretty much look the same. Especially since I’ve been lazy and have only used my iPhone to take blog photos!

Link | Pesticide chips?

Here is a great blog post about non-organic, GM (genetically modified) foods, as well as some info about how much corn we consume. Lots of good links in the article! Thought this was interesting:

“The South Dakota Corn folks give some estimates of how much corn we eat:

According to the Corn Refiners Association, nearly 4,000 food items in a typical grocery store contain corn ingredients. And that number doesn’t include all the products—milk, eggs, meat, poultry—that come from corn-fed animals. Or the sweet, whole-kernel corn that comes in cans and freezer bags, and on the cob.”

Lunch at Chattanooga Market

This isn’t technically cheating because it’s real corn, not a corn product… Right?? 🙂

Melted brown sugar oats

I’m sure there will come a time when I’m sick of having oatmeal for breakfast every single day. Today is not that day 🙂

I forgot to stir in the vanilla and brown sugar at the end of cooking today, so I just sprinkled a little (too much) brown sugar on top. I loved the melty brown sugar goodness! Hopefully this keeps me full through my very busy day.

Week one weigh-in

This is technically one day early since we started on Sunday, but our cheat meal is tonight and we didn’t want it to affect our numbers 🙂

Blake: -13 lbs
Sarah: -7 lbs

Our goal for this was to eliminate animal products and greatly reduce soy and corn products. Here is how we did this week:

Animal products: 0
Soy: <5
Corn products: <5

Those numbers include all ingredients for all meals. The only thing I can really think of that had corn/soy is our veggie stir fry sauce (soy sauce and xantham gum) and the salad dressing we had last night (xantham gum), but I could be missing something. Six days, with three meals a day plus snacks – I am beyond amazed with how well we stuck to the plan!

We originally said that today would be our cheat day, and discussed Taco Bell, pizza, Chick-fil-A chicken biscuits and chocolate cake – among other things 🙂 We decided to narrow it down to just a cheat meal, and even that will probably just be adding chicken and/or cheese to our salad at dinner. So funny to me how our idea of a ‘cheat’ has changed! Though I would still really like a bite of chocolate cake 🙂

Bean Burgers & Zucchini chips | Recipe

Tonight’s dinner was something I didn’t ever think I would eat: black bean burgers. They were surprisingly good! The flavor was amazing, but the texture definitely took a little getting used to 🙂

We started with this recipe, but of course tweaked it a bit. Once we mashed the beans and added the breadcrumbs (about half the breadcrumbs the original recipe called for) I added things to it like I would my regular hamburgers: ketchup, ground mustard, Pampered Chef smoky bbq rub, Frank’s hot sauce, pepper, garlic salt, etc. I never measure when I do this, so it’s hard to give an exact recipe. Just throw in whatever sounds good to you! I used my mandolin slicer for the onions before chopping into little pieces because I love the onion taste, but hate the texture. As I was sautéing them, I also added a clove of garlic.  We didn’t add the cracker crumbs that the recipe calls for because we didn’t have any, but I think it would have made them too dry anyway.

I read somewhere online that it’s hard to get rid of the ‘mushy center’ of bean burgers, so we flattened the patties out as much as we could while they cooked. I think it worked because we didn’t have that problem! We will probably make the patties a little smaller next time because the thin, crispy edges were the best part. Rather than the full burger set up, we just made the patties – I don’t know that we would have liked them as well if we had eaten them on buns. This way, we had no expectations of a traditional burger texture as we were eating them.

On the side we had one of my favorites: baked zucchini ‘chips.’ I sliced one zucchini using my mandolin slicer and it was enough to fill up my two largest cookies sheets with some left over. I normally toss the slices with melted butter before laying them on the parchment lined cookie sheet, then sprinkle them with parmesan cheese, garlic salt and pepper. To make these vegan-friendly I used EVOO instead of butter and left out the parmesan. They were just as good! I could have eaten both pans, but had to share with Blake 🙂

Tonight was our first night trying out the new organic ketchup. I’m a bit of a ketchup snob and typically only like Heinz. We bought the Greenlife store brand and I honestly couldn’t tell much of a difference! I think we’re getting the hang of this!