Today my preparations paid off. At the start of the month I spent quite a bit of time reading vegan recipe books, writing a (very long) shopping list and then hunting down a lot of random ingredients in the supermarkets. (I was literally Googling items in the shop so that I knew what I was looking for!)
This extra effort has meant that my kitchen cupboards are now fully stocked with of a lot of supposedly useful ingredients so that I can easily try out new recipes without too much planning. Tonight’s unplanned dinner of stuffed butternut squash with dried porcini mushrooms and sundried tomatoes would definitely never have been possible with my previous cupboard’s ingredients. But this evening I was very thankful to be able to make this yummy dish as a last minute recipe choice to use up a butternut squash that I hadn’t got round to making into a soup yesterday.
My kitchen now definitely has a much wider range of ingredients than it used to. My herbs and spices shelf has had to be moved to a larger drawer to accommodate all of the new additions, I now have a dried fruit, nuts and seeds drawer and I am also finding it very useful to have a constant supply of things like chickpeas, lentils, black beans and pinto beans etc. (I had never even considered cooking any of these things before starting to go vegan.) My fridge is also now constantly full of vegetables and salads and we have even had to get out a second fruit bowl as we get through so much of it.
In terms of actual recipes, this week we have enjoyed a vegetarian cottage pie, a vegetable stir fry and Jamie Oliver’s Black Bean burger. (The Big Bosh Burger is also very tasty.) For my lunches I have tended to have some easily reheated leftovers or salads and I have been particularly focused on experimenting with Kale this week as it is supposedly a bit of a superfood and is in season. So I have been making my own salad dressings for it, roasting it with sugar and cinnamon to get some crispy seaweed and yesterday we sautéed it with ginger, chill and garlic to go with a delicious Mushroom Wellington that we got from Morrisons.
It has taken quite a while, but I am finally feeling like I am starting to get the hang of a Vegan diet (I no longer have a mini stress about what to eat at each mealtime), but I definitely still have a long way to go before I can feel confident enough to easily throw a dinner together. In the meantime though these recipes do actually taste so much better than anything I used to cook anyway. The most telling sign is that my husband no longer seasons the meal before he has even tasted it!
#plantbaseddiet #veganuary #bethechange #sustainableliving #imperfectfootprints