Healthy Party Girl

Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a concerted effort to eat out less, plan my meals better to try to spend less money and get more out of my nutrition. This has resulted in some fun and tasty adventures.

First, I decided that caramelized balsamic vinegar is the greatest dressing to have with a drizzle of olive oil on my favourite salad which includes baby spinach, cherry Roma tomatoes, red capsicum, avocado, cucumber, Kalamata olives and 5 bean mix. I actually missed the taste of it hours later. Can anyone say “Salad Nerd”?

Confession: I ate a whole (small) tub of hummus with carrot sticks and rice crackers for afternoon tea one day this week. The tub was less than 200 calories and it was really tasty. But I decided not to buy another one for a few days anyway, just to try and exercise some control.

I did discover Minikins though. Miniature pumpkins which I thought would be great stuffed with quinoa. Alas, quinoa was either out of stock or out of my budget so cous cous it was. I also got to play with the work pizza oven since it was a quiet night at my evening/weekend job. See my action shot at left. Basically I put cous cous, chopped almonds, chopped dried apricots and salt & pepper together inside a tiny pumpkin, covered it in foil and roasted it for around 25-30mins at about 190-200degrees. About 10 minutes to go I took the foil off and put cherry tomatoes, broccolini and a mushroom on the tray.  The pizza oven was annoying, because in between doing other things I’d have to come back and run it through again. But you make do.

Roasted minikin with apricot & almond cous cous

 I thought that being on a budget was probably an indication that I should probably cut down on burritos, which made me sad. But then I remembered that I could probably make something close enough to the real thing and I was happy again. I cooked rice with a little lime juice and salt & pepper added at the end, cooked half an onion with a can of black beans and put it some on top, then about 1/8-1/4 of an avocado mashed coarsely, some corn, a couple tablespoons of salsa, and a small handful of shredded nacho cheese flavoured Cheezly. I ended up being able to make 2-3 small burritos and then I got a bit excited and decided to toast them in the sandwich press at my day job. So very, very tasty.

Black bean & lime rice burrito with things

Last but not least, tonight’s dinner was leftover cous cous from the Minikin last night, with a vegetable and chickpea stew. This is totally the easiest thing ever but it looks pretty special if you serve it in anything other than a plastic container. Warm a few tablespoons of olive oil in a big pot. Dice vegetables to about 1/2-3/4inch cubes – eggplant, zucchini, red capsicum, tinned tomatoes and also half an onion (can you tell I was preparing two meals at the same time?) then add a can of chickpeas and season with salt, pepper and any spices you like eg. cardamon, cumin, cloves etc. It’s a bit Moroccan if you use the right spices or you can use oregano & basil, maybe rosemary to make it a bit more Italian. Whatever you want to play with. Seriously, go play!

If you hadn’t figured it out yet, I have a pretty laissez-faire approach to recipes and cooking to a formula. I learnt to cook from eating, reading recipe books, watching my Daddy prepare meals and a whole lot of trial and error. Generally if you pay enough attention to food to watch someone cook or stop and think about the flavours and what goes into a meal, you’ll generally be able to cook basic things without much training.

I get excited by food and having a Vegan diet means (among other things) I can eat lots of things and larger amounts of things so that suits me given I am crap at portion control. I also get excited about pole dancing and aerial hoop for fitness which I am now writing about once a month over at Viva La Vegan so go and check it out, there’s also writing by Robert Cheeke of Vegan Body Building and a bunch of other amazing Vegans so I’m super proud to be among the ranks over there.