Playing Catch Up

I’ve been slacking on posting… so I’ll back up to Monday night. 

Monday

I wanted something fast, but a plain veggie burger sounded boring.  So I cooked up some red onions to use as a side dish / topping.

I sautéed the slices in:

• 1-2 tbsp peanut oil
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar
• 2 tbsp chopped garlic
• oregano

They tasted great on their own as a side dish, but even better on the burgers!  Pat’s was served with shredded cheddar cheese and mine with Laughing Cow swiss cheese.

Tuesday

Tuesday night was a typical Freebirds night.  We always seem to go on Tuesdays – just our night for fast food I guess.  In addition to our burritos, the “pot” brownies caught my eye, so I picked one up for me and Pat to split.

Don’t worry, you can see the ingredients for yourself:

They were good, but as Pat put it best, “well, it’s a brownie.”  Nothing special, but it was a tasty brownie.

Wednesday

Wednesday night we ate at Mongolian Hot Pot.  It was a fun experience, but a difficult restaurant for a vegetarian surrounded by carnivores.  You order raw meat (among other things), and cook it yourself in a big “hot pot” on the table.  The restaurant staff was really nice though, and helped me to make it work.  Most of their broth options used beef or chicken broth, but they offered to serve their original with water instead of chicken broth.  It still had a lot of flavor from all the items they used to season the water – big garlic cloves, onion, some kind of nut, etc.  The water broth is on the left side of the hot pot:

They offered several tofu options on the menu, and I went with the fried tofu sheet.

It tasted good, and just needed a few seconds in the broth to soak up the flavor.  The texture was a little weird though, and reminded me of rubbery Chinese food.  As a side dish, I ordered the egg dumpling.  I asked what was in it, and the server told me just egg.  Well right before all our food came out, another server arrived and asked who the vegetarian was.  He told me that the first guy had told me wrong – the egg dumpling has meat in it.  So instead he recommended the egg noodles.  It was an excellent suggestion – this was my favorite dish!  If I were to go back again, I would just get the egg noodles – they were amazing, and really good dipped in the garlic paste sauce.  I could have done without the cilantro topping though.

For dessert, I was curious, and just had to try the Red Bean Paste Yam Cakes.  Sounds interesting, right?  Well, interesting is a good word to describe them.

The yam part was chewy, almost like a thick jello.  It didn’t have a strong taste, and I didn’t really like or dislike it.  The inside was a sweet, gooey red bean paste.  I was surprised by how sweet it was, and I really liked it.  It was very rich, and I ended up just eating the red bean paste out of a few pieces.  I was glad I tried it, but might not get it again.

Wednesday was also my baby sister’s birthday – Happy Birthday Cara!!  And thank you for not telling the family before you decided to jump off a mountain – yes, she went paragliding on her birthday.

Thursday

I made a Tri-Colored Tofu Stir-fry with couscous on the side.  It was colorful and tasty, with soy sauce, veggie broth, garlic and brown sugar.  We ate our dinner while watching Big Brother.  I’ve never watched the show before this season, and I’m not sure why we got started on it, but now we’re addicted.  It’s crazy that it’s on 3 times a week, but it keeps me hooked.  Is anyone else watching this season??

And that completes the tour of my dinners this week.  I hope your week was just as tasty!

Do you find that you fall into the same weekly patterns for food?  I’ve noticed that I usually cook Mondays, Tuesdays are fast food (usually Subway or Freebirds), Wednesdays could be either, but are usually eaten out or ordered in, and Thursday I’m back to cooking.

My Day in Food

It’s been a long but somewhat productive day.  Let’s start with breakfast… I made myself a cherry chocolate green monster, inspired by Caitlin’s at Healthy Tipping Point.

Into the blender:

• 2 cups spinach
• 10 frozen cherries
• 1/2 frozen banana
• 1/4 cup oatmeal
• 1 pack diet hot cocoa mix
• 1 cup light vanilla soymilk

I think this was one of my better green monsters.  The oatmeal taste might have been a little too strong, but it was chocolatey and thick.  Pat wanted eggs instead, so I made some scrambled eggs with Monterrey Jack and cheddar cheese.  We didn’t have any “real” milk so I used the light vanilla soymilk.  When I brought the eggs out, Pat commented that his eggs smelled sweet.  They still tasted pretty good!

After breakfast we took Bailey to an off-leash dog park for the first time.  We weren’t able to socialize her for a long time as a puppy because her immune system was too weak.  And since then, we’ve been a little nervous about how she reacts around other dogs – she’s very submissive when other dogs become aggressive, and seems to prefer people to other dogs.  Well, this dog park was no different – she had to go up and greet each dog owner in the park, while trying her best to ignore the other dogs trailing behind her.  But she seemed to make a few friends and enjoyed the exercise, so I’m sure we will be back soon!

Lunch was a Gardein 3 minute meal.  I picked up a few versions of these when they were on sale at Kroger last week ($2.99), and this was the first I tried.  The Sicilian Trio.

It was easy to make, and actually pretty good.  It was a little spicier than I expected it to be, but I really liked the tomato sauce.  The chicken was a little rubbery and hard to cut with just my fork, but I liked the taste.  With the package of rice, it felt like a lot of food for just 220 calories.  I would buy this one again, but I’m eager to try the other flavors.

We ran several errands this afternoon.  We spent a very long hour at Lowe’s and didn’t end up buying what we came for.  We wanted to get an area rug for our living room.  We picked one out, but they said it would be $70 to deliver it, and it was too big to fit in our car, so we’re waiting to buy it until we have a larger vehicle with us.  We also went to look for a new back door (the one we have now is an old one with a doggy door that we don’t really like), but I had no idea how expensive a single door (and installation) could be.  So instead, we bought some weather-stripping to deal with the water that comes into our house when it rains.  Pat bought a drill and a hacksaw and is ready to start the weather-stripping project tomorrow!

After Lowe’s, we went to Costco.  My parents gave us a Costco membership for my birthday, and I was so excited to go and sign up!  And shop!  We went a little overboard on this trip… yep, $186 in groceries.  Although we had dinner plans out with friends this evening, we decided that we better be eating in for the next month.  Or two months.  Most of what we bought is non-perishable or freezer food, so it should last us forever.

Dinner tonight was Barnaby’s Cafe with another couple.  Barnaby’s is one of our favorites in Houston – they have a little bit of everything.  The prices aren’t bad, but the serving sizes are gigantic, so you get a lot for your money.  This was my first time there as a vegetarian, so I looked at the menu a little differently.  Normally I would order the turkey sandwich with cranberry mayo.  Or the giant cobb salad with chicken.  Looking over the menu tonight, I realized there weren’t too many veggie options.  But, they did have a boca burger and a garden burger.

I ordered the garden burger, not sure what the difference was between that and the boca burger.  I asked our server what all comes on the garden burger and he said, “Onions… cabbage… a lot of other weird veggies.”  Hmm.  I don’t like many veggies, so the chances that I would like “weird” veggies were slim.  I ordered the garden burger with cheese, onion and avocado.  Mmmm, much better.  I also substituted the fries for grilled zucchini.

This was a very good choice.  Maybe not that good for me (do you see that mountain of guacamole?), but it was much better than my normal turkey sandwich.  Let’s be fair here, I haven’t tried anything at Barnaby’s that I didn’t like.  I’m usually not a huge fan of zucchini, but I actually ate most of it.  A very delicious and filling dinner!

No matter how full I am, I always have room for ice cream.  I’ve always said that I have one stomach for normal food and one for ice cream.  So after dinner, I suggested we try the Swirll in Houston, just down the road from Barnaby’s.  After trying Swirll in Austin, I was ecstatic to find out that we have one just down the street.  Tonight I had the Cake Batter flavor with chocolate chips, cookie dough and strawberries.  The perfect way to end the evening!

I Hug Avocados

Now here is a blogger challenge I can really get behind – Katie’s Hug A Fat challenge.  She’s encouraging everyone to get out there and hug their favorite *healthy* fat.  Choosing my favorite fat was not easy – I love nut butters, almonds and coconut… but in the end, avocado won.  I love avocado.  So much that I went ahead and hugged it.

Not pictured:  I kissed it too.  And then I cooked with it.  On the menu tonight was black bean veggie burgers on the grill & a strawberry/avocado salad.  My salad was inspired by this post from Organic Undergrad.  After seeing the strawberry & avocado combination, I knew I needed to try my own.

Let’s start with the salad.  Into the bowl:

• 15 strawberries
• 1/2 red onion
• 1/2 avocado
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1.5 tbsp light raspberry vinaigrette dressing
• a bit of cilantro

I’m not a fan of cilantro.  It tastes like soap to me.  But Pat loves it, so I tried to use a little – and set the rest out so he could add more to his portion.  The strawberries we got had some interesting shapes.

The final product was pretty.  This was a really good one, I will be making it again.

But I didn’t stop there.  After having an avocado burger earlier in the week I was craving more, so I added avocado slices to my veggie burger.  I ate it on wheat thins with Laughing Cow garlic & herb cheese and ketchup.

The veggie burger had a strong black bean taste, which I really liked.  But if I were to ever give up meat, this does not come close to replacing a thick burger.   I would eat this again though.

In the spirit of the challenge, what is your favorite (healthy) fat?