Meal Planning

Time to detox a bit from our Christmas vacation.  We had dining reservations for most meals though, so Disney World yielded more salads and less cheese this time than last, so that was nice.

Almost Instant Ramen (TNMA pg. 116)
I ran across this recipe for healthy vegan ramen in The No Meat Athlete Cookbook (pg. 116) and wanted to try it, so I'm going to try that this week.  It also uses a lot of random things I have on hand right now like adzuki beans, tofu (currently cubed up in my freezer), and wakame and nori.  I think I'll throw in some of my dried mushrooms too.  It just calls for "vegetable broth" so I think I'll make the broth from the Vedge cookbook to start so I have a good base, and also because I want to make another recipe this week that calls for it.  I also have an ice cube tray of "umami sauce" from The How Not to Die Cookbook in my freezer that I can throw into the ramen for flavor modification as necessary.

Refried Black Eyed Peas and Turnip Greens
I'm going to make this for New Years Day.  I heard about these recipes on NPR and they sound good, and they're easy to make vegetarian, particularly since I have homemade vegan chorizo in my freezer.

Portobello Frites and Kohlrabi Salad with White Beans and Horseradish (Vedge, pg. 38)
This one is from the Vedge cookbook (pg. 150) Sameer got for Christmas.  It's a vegan take on the typical French bistro dish steak frites.  It has the added bonus of only using ingredients I don't have to Google to know what they are or order special.  This whole cookbook sounds appealing because it's a combination of vegan and so fancy and high end it's served in a restaurant, but it has some ingredients I'll have to try to hunt down and some cooking techniques that are new to me, so I'll be working my way through this book slowly.

Chilli-Garlic Noodles
Because the vegetable stock recipe called for a few green cabbage leaves and now I have an entire head of green cabbage in my fridge.  I'm not sure what I'll do with the remainder.  Maybe vegetable manchow soup.  That would be a good way to use up more of the homemade vegetable stock too since the recipe yields five quarts.

Enchiladas and Red Cabbage Slaw
Because the ramen calls for a small amount of shredded red cabbage and this seemed a good way to use up the rest of the head of red cabbage.

Edited 1/1/2018:  I couldn't find kohlrabi or turnip greens at the store, so I ended up replacing the kohlrabi dish with a different vegetable side from the Vedge cookbook: shaved brussels sprouts with whole-grain mustard sauce.  It was phenomenal and unpredictably my favorite part of the entire meal.  There were no leftovers because Sameer and I both went back for seconds.  I'd never had brussels sprouts I liked before, but I could eat these every day.  They're also quick and easy to make.  They're supposed to be thinly shaved, and I was delighted to learn one of the blades for my salad shooter worked very well for this.  The portobello frites was also very good.  Simran liked the fries best.  No leftovers of those either.  They were good, but they were still my least favorite part of the meal.  She ate everything without complaining.  She even deemed the mushrooms "not bad," which is high praise from her when talking about something that isn't specifically pizza or ice cream.  In place of the turnip greens for tonight, I bought mustard greens and will just cook them as I had planned to cook the turnip greens.  I think they're both dark leafy greens found in southern food so hopefully I can swap them out this way without ruining anything.  I'm also using last night's portobello mushroom stems to make a small batch of portobello stem anticuchos, from page 39 of the Vedge cookbook.  It's a sort of Latin-spiced kebab.