Southern Comfort Food

For lunch we had yesterday's leftovers - surprisingly, 1 can of beans, 2 bell peppers, 1/2 onion makes enough filling for 3 people for 2 days of wraps, especially if you have some avocado and salsa also. I say three because Derek eats as much as 2 people at any given meal.

Instead of the same old pics, here's a clip of Toby and Quinn playing hide and seek (what looks like garbage is actually their toys):


This time I made a shredded broccoli/carrot salad (from a slaw mix at - you guessed it- Trader Joe's), with apple and walnut pieces and raspberry dressing.

Dinners at the end of the week are usually a mix of random things, since I don't grocery shop with a list. I just buy a bunch of vegetables in different categories, like fresh greens and toppings for salad, greens for steaming, vegetables for cooking, cans of beans and tomatoes, tortillas, tofu. Things like pasta or rice or breads last forever now, which is nice.

We get about 6 paper bags worth of groceries a week for around $100;


I don't know what the norm is, but I do know that I've heard from many people that produce is too expensive to afford a healthier diet. From my own experience, though, our bill is about the same now as it was when we bought a lot of pre-packaged things - prepared foods are way more expensive.

So today's dinner: I was supposed to go to a cookout but I felt so guilty for being 2 weeks behind in my studies due to work, and so baffled by the bull and bear spreads, collars, straddles, and strangles, covered written call options and insured short positions, that I felt too weighted down to get out of the door. Instead, later on we decided to get a fruit smoothie, no sugar added, from Smoothie King in Carytown.In general, it's a fantasy to think you're being health-conscious when you drink smoothies, but Smoothie King isn't entirely as bad as say Jamba Juice which makes smoothies that are basically ice cream. At least they have some fruit-only shakes with the option to opt out of sugar. But, alas, Derek, weakened from hunger, forgot to hold the sugar on our Vegan Angel Food smoothies, making them each 75 grams of sugar instead of 30-something. Noooooooooo!
So, I had to save it to split between the next 2 workouts, as post-workout is the only time it's okay to eat a lot of sugar.

Tonight we had the one packaged main dish item we still buy:








For a packaged veggie burgers, they have great nutrition stats, being composed almost entirely of vegetables with some oat bran and black beans for good measure. Dr. Praeger's "California" veggie burger, however, is terrible. This "Tex-Mex" variety tastes pretty good, but don't expect them to taste anything like a meat burger. For that I recommend:

To accompany the burgers, I decided to do a quick and easy Southern thing made up of the random components left over this week:


I chopped up some onion (which was the only prep work), sauteed in water, threw in a can of black-eyed peas and shook in some cayenne, black pepper, oregano, and added chives from the garden. Steamed 1/2 lb of a kale/chard mix with some saltless seasoning, and Derek microwaved some sweet potatoes.

We each only had 1 whole-wheat bun, ever mindful of keeping the low-nutrient stuff to a minimum.

But with overflowing plates like these, who misses it?