I just made Skillet Gardener's Pie (vegan shepherd's pie) from the fat free vegan blog. https://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2008/05/skillet-gardeners-pie.html It is so ridiculously good and so filling!

Interesting! I'm not a tempeh lover either, but haven't tried crumbling/mixing with other ingredients so this could help! Worth another try, thanks for sharing!

Vegetarian: Raspberries & blueberries from the freezer, topped with plain yogurt (I like Trader Joe's European Style Whole Milk Yogurt) and pistachios.

Vegan: Ratatouille... I used canned tomatoes obviously, because those winter tomatoes at the grocery store would not do the trick. This tasted like summer in a bowl, and I had it for breakfast several days in a row. (I added a soft-boiled egg which obviously made it vegetarian instead of vegan.)

Vegan: Buckeye Bean Soup with veggies: sweet onion, celery, carrots, garlic, and of course Buckeye beans. (No recipe, I winged it.)

If you have never eaten beans that made you want more, I HIGHLY recommend taking a look around Rancho Gordo’s website and treating yourself to a bag of beans or several. Life-changing! I was never a big fan of beans until I had theirs, and now I literally eat them every day. 🧅🥕🧄🫘

All vegan: Fruit & veggie snacks!
Apple & celery with peanut butter...

... raspberries & blueberries with oats, chia seeds, and almonds...

... banana & almonds.

I like to make things look nice, feels like more of a "meal" when I eat things off a dish rather than just biting into a banana or whatever.

Sorry to post everything at once... clearing out some backlog. Obviously I did not actually eat all of this today

henridw2095 wrote: »

I really like looking at food - unfortunately I don't have the patience to make things look pretty much of the time...

I might try the delicata squash curry. I love delicata squash, they're pretty and I don't peel them, so they stay pretty!

To be fair, I eat plenty of "ugly" food The most important thing is how it tastes, but I've been trying to make a little effort to also make things look presentable when possible. Getting that pretty glass to eat my dessert from certainly made things easier, lol

I had never used a delicata squash until this dish, but man is that a gorgeous vegetable! I didn't peel mine either. (Does anyone?)

@henridw2095 OK this is hilarious, I read right past that hahaha

I have always had struggles when I made rice and lentils in the past.

If I make them separate and mix them together, that works, but then I have two pots to wash. I love to cook. I do NOT love to wash dishes. If I try to make them together, I don't get the right amount of water and/or to get the right amount of cooking time. I use brown rice, so it cooks long enough that the lentils can't cook the whole tine or they'll get mushy and turn the whole thing into glop. Don't get me wrong, I like glop. I also like having lentils fully cooked that hold their shape. If I wait too late to put them in, they are not done. If I don't add enough water, it burns.

Tonight I decided to give it a go again because I still have lentils from last year to use up before I buy more for this winter.

I was hunger, and I had plenty of calories left for the day. I made a batch that had two servings of rice and two of lentils. I put a half cup of brown basmiti rice in a pot with too much boiling water flavored with a little bit of Better than Bullion and cooked for 30 minutes. I added a half cup of rinsed lentils and a chopped jalapeno and a tiny bit more water (it looked like it needed it), and cooked it another 15 minutes. I turned off the heat, gave it a stir, put the lid back on, and let it sit and keep cooking another five minutes.

I had a hard cooked egg in the fridge that I made the other day. This makes the dish not vegetarian, but you can omit the egg if you make it.

It came out pretty much perfect.

I sprinkled some Maldon salt on, and dug in. It was as tasty as it looked.

What you see here is about 2.5 quarts of chickpea salad I'll be digging into over the next few days. It's vegan except that yeast was implicated in turning grapes into wine, and bacteria was implicated in turning that wine into vinegar. Yeast is not actually an animal, but it's not a vegetable (plant) either. It's in the fungus Kingdom. Bacteria surely isn't a plant - it's not even a Eukaryote. So I guess that's OK.

Two cups of dried chickpeas, soaked all day, then cooked in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes and set aside for the pressure to naturally release.

While it cooled, I cut up some celery, carrot, English cucumber, orange sweet bell chile, jalapeno chile, red onion, shallot, and parsley. I mixed all that together with some cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. I will probably have a little bit tonight, but it will be much better tomorrow. One hundred grams apparently will set me back 127 calories but only provide six grams of protein. It does give me four grams of fiber and a little calcium.

I have been making a salad like this during winter the last couple of years. I don't make it when it's warm out because the cooking heats up the house, although the pressure cooker may change that. I might even be able to do the pressure cooker on a propane camp stove in summer, because this would be a really nice thing to eat when it's hot out and the garden is giving me lots of crunchy produce.