Cutting back on animals
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009So, last week, Phil and I decided that we were going to eat completely vegetarian for a week.
There weren’t any normal vegetarian reasons behind it – we both like eating meat. However, as the person who does most of the cooking and list making for grocery shopping, I decided that I want to reduce our reliance on boxed/canned/frozen meals. Since we were going to be buying a lot more fresh food, I decided we’d also do vegetarian for a week because I want to cut back on the frequency and amount of meat we eat overall. The vegetarian week wasn’t a preparation for overall vegetarianism, but I wanted to see if we could come up with enough meals that weren’t so conspicuously vegetarian that we felt very aware of the fact that we weren’t eating meat. A solid week of eating no meat at all would force me to come up with more than just salads, and require some creativity, as I do not eat imitation meat products. There’s nothing wrong with them, I’m just not a fan.
The first thing that we noticed was that, when doing the shopping, the weekly grocery bill wasn’t significantly higher than it is when we buy our normal types of food. Since I had always assumed that buying fresh food was more expensive, I was pretty pleasantly surprised. The majority of the items in the cart were from the produce section, with a few frozen items like snow peas and edamame, a few general ingredient type things that obviously last for more than one meal, and some snacks and such. Fresh food can be more expensive when you have a habit of letting it go bad in the fridge, which we had in the past, but our grocery shopping is largely planned around a meal plan for the week, so nothing has really gone bad.
Secondly, the recipes we used were largely a success as well.
On Sunday, I did a normal stir fry with rice. We have my rice maker, we had sushi rice in the fridge and I brought my sushi vinegar carefully from Maryland when Phil told me months ago that he wasn’t really sure of the closest Asian market. It was an easy recipe with fresh ginger and just a ton of vegetables, and aside from making the actual sauce, I didn’t really follow the recipe. I mean… it’s vegetables. That one was nothing remarkable, but it was good, and next time I might cook it a little longer for squishier vegetables. Also, I made rice balls out of the leftover rice, and the grocery store on base – I’m sorry, the cooooooommissary – only had nori flavored furikake. Phil liked it, but we’re going to have to get some other flavors as well.
On Monday, I made this recipe from the Pioneer Woman. It was so easy, I actually got it right. After months of eating “almost right,” “only slightly fucked up,” and “hey, it’s edible, isn’t it?” renditions of recipes, I actually didn’t mess it up. And it was so good. Oh my god, Internet. It is so good. The only reason that this took as long as it did was because I took the time to cut up all the cucumbers, green peppers, celery, and carrots that we had bought so we could put them in salads throughout the rest of the week. Otherwise, it was an absolute breeze. It was so easy, but so good, that it will probably be the recipe I’ll use if I need to make food for other people or take food anywhere. After we make some friends. Which we might, some day.
Tuesday was another Pioneer Woman recipe and it wasn’t new to us. We’ve made these sandwiches several times and seriously love them. We must eat them at least once every two weeks or so, and will continue to, vegetarian or not. They’re a little tricksy and I have yet to turn out two perfect sandwiches, but I’m getting closer. We only burned one side of Phil’s sandwich this week. That is another one that you must try if you haven’t yet.
Wednesday was a flat out disaster that I don’t even really want to talk about. It was something I made successfully for myself in the past, Phil hated it but ate it anyway which just made me mad, I put my thumb through an egg, broke the yolk of another egg and burned myself. I couldn’t be spoken to for about 20 minutes and then Phil made me a peanut butter and jelly.
Thursday we had baked potatoes and salad, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but we’ve been using these Sargento potato finishers, which really make them pretty filling. I also usually pick pretty large potatoes as well, and we had big salads. They were definitely lacking something without using the included bacon, though, so we’ll be glad to have that back.
Friday we had our normal frozen pizza, which is our habit.
We decided to continue through Saturday just to make a full week of it, so I made us a whole bunch of scrambled eggs with cheese for breakfast/lunch-ish. I made Phil his first EVER peanut butter and banana sandwich for a snack at one point. Seriously, he had never had one. Insanity. Then, for some reason Saturday evening, I decided I was going to bake bread. BREAD. From SCRATCH. And it actually worked, imagine that. It was delicious, and it’s mostly gone. I used this recipe, and we’re planning on trying a couple of different kinds in the future, though we also plan on getting a breadmaker at some point, though the whole world claims we’ll use it once and then never again.
Sunday, of course, we ate a metric asston of bread and decided it was finally time for meat, so we went to Outback.
Ok, it was delicious while we were eating it, but once we were home, we were some seriously unhappy campers. We were both sluggish and uncomfortable and unhappy.
While we still really LIKE meat and will continue to eat it, we learned a few things this week. One, it’s not significanly more expensive to eat fresh food as compared to our normal boxed/frozen/mix type food. Even if not all vegetarian, we’re definitely going to move more away from pre-prepared stuff. Two, there are plenty of good non-meat options available. One failure meal out of 7 is better than my usual weekly record, even. Three, it’s clear that while we don’t want to eliminate meat completely, we’re definitely going to cut back on the frequency of meat eating, as well as cutting back the amount of meat we eat on the days we do have it.
One week’s worth of recipes is not enough, however, especially considering one was a hopeless failure and one was us stuffing hot bread into our mouths. I especially need to find more side dishes than just rice or steamed vegetables, not that there is anything wrong with either of them, but with cutting down the amount of meat we will eat, we will need more filling side dishes as well.
So, Internet, whether you are vegetarian or not, I am certain you have some recipes and ideas that we can make use of in the future. I would greatly appreciate your input on the matter of cutting back not only on meat, but on our reliance on convenience foods as well. Recipes, vegetable-picking tips, and ideas with regard to replacing our taquito habit would be greatly appreciated.
Also, I seriously suggest you try the recipes I linked above, if I can make them taste good, I am sure you will be successful.
