Our adventures in Utah with my parents reminded me that for folks who have been omnivores for their entire lives, the idea of leaving meat out of things can make one feel like meals are missing something. Cooking for vegetarians, the thinking sometimes goes, is weird and complicated. What do you make if your meal isn't meat, starch, and veg? Surely all those strange vegetarian alternatives are expensive? What kind of casserole doesn't include ground hamburger? (This last is definitely a mystery to my mom.)
So my goal with this post is to convince you that eating vegetarian is a) not weird; b) not expensive; c) not complicated; d) delicious. The meals for the week are designed as usual - with a range of complexity (but tending toward quick and simple). There will be a photo of at least one meal each day, so you can see how pretty our food is. (It's the all-natural beauty of veggies and spices. Food staging is not a talent to which my skills extend.)
Okay, so maybe it's not hard, but it's got to be expensive, right? I mean, we shop at a co-op! Good news, friends: it doesn't have to be expensive, either. I will include an estimated cost for each meal, giving a price per person. These are absolutely estimates: most of our veggies come from our CSA, which is an up-front cost at the start of the season. But to be fair, I've priced each item at either the farmers' market or our co-op for purposes of estimating, and I try to round up for each meal.
A note: we eat minimal processed soy, due to a food sensitivity. We do, however, eat dairy and seafood. Vegetarians, obviously, do not normally eat seafood, so I'll include modifications for any seafood dishes we have this week. If you're vegan, or otherwise do not eat dairy, you'll have to get a little creative to replicate most of this week's meals - but I'd love to hear what you do!
Sunday:
Breakfast this week is bagels or English muffins with home-whipped garlic cream cheese and a piece of fruit. This garlic cream cheese is my favorite thing in the world to do with garlic scapes, though I happily add them to anything. It's almost too simple to count as a recipe: put the scapes into a food processor and pulse a few times, then add cream cheese and pulse again until they mix. Karen loves bananas, so they're the main breakfast fruit of the week. The total cost of the bagels, English muffins, scapes, and cream cheese came out to $10.66 across 12 breakfasts, meaning they cost... 89 cents per breakfast. (We got a sale on the bagels, and the pack of muffins was $2.50.) The bananas came out to 38 cents each - $2.33 for six bananas. So breakfast this week costs about $1.22 a person each day.
Weekend lunches somehow always take me by surprise: I tend to leave them off the food plan, and then we have to scramble (or stop for hoagies). This week, though, we have jackfruit egg rolls! The can of jackfruit, an oversized one, was $4. The egg roll wrappers were $2.99, and a head of cabbage is about $2 right now. We didn't use all of the wrappers, jackfruit, or cabbage for this recipe, but for estimation, I'll pretend we did. We have 8 egg rolls, or 4 lunches, meaning a cost about $2.25 each. We accompanied our egg rolls with lovely roasted ears of corn. So, add in the corn - one each, at 50 cents each - and lunch was $2.75 total.
We kept it simple for dinner today with a basil, tomato, mozzarella, and garlic pizza for dinner. Fresh basil is the best basil. The tomatoes were $2.50 a pint at the co-op, and the basil was going for $2.75 at the farmers' market (ours came from the CSA). The shredded mozzarella was $1.96 at the co-op, and garlic was $8 a pound at the market; we bought only 1 bulb, so it was less than $1. We were lazy so we bought a pre-made pizza dough at $2.79. A jar of sauce (we used less than half) is $3. And then we were hungry so we cut the thing in half and ate it. 2 dinners out of these ingredients makes it a $14 dinner, or $7 a person.
Monday:
Breakfast was the bagel, scapes and fruit combo ($1.22), and lunch today was the last of the jackfruit egg rolls from Sunday ($2.75 each).
For dinner, we had a kale caesar salad with fried chickpeas! This is a new recipe. It required a few adjustments, to our taste: I zested and juiced an entire lemon into the dressing, rather than using two tablespoons as per the recipe. And it needed just a dash of salt and more pepper at the end. We used lacinato kale (sometimes called dinosaur kale, I assume because it looks like something a brontosaurus would eat); we picked this because it came in our CSA, but it also meant that the kale was lovely and tender and amazing once it sat in the lemony dressing for a few minutes.
Let me tell you, this salad was a revelation. Karen immediately declared that it needs to be put into regular rotation. We're having it again next week. I didn't know fried chickpeas were a thing, but they are going to be cropping up in Queer Hipster Kitchen recipes for a long, long while. Since it was Monday, we decided to get fancy and open a bottle of wine, too. (Mondays can always be improved by a bit of fanciness.)
This salad was also very inexpensive: kale near us is $4 a bunch; the parmesan was $2.18. I had to buy the Dijon mustard, which is not a usual pantry staple ($1.99), and it calls for a single lemon. We always have lemons around - how much are lemons? I'm going to guess they are about 50 cents each. Garlic was less than $1, per our pizza night calculations. We needed a new jar of mayonnaise this week, which cost us $5 for the 16-oz jar. This recipe needed half a cup, which is.... a lot less than a quarter of a jar, so I'll round up big time and guess it was $1.25 of mayo. (That sounds like a LOT of mayo.) A can of organic chickpeas at the co-op is $2.79, and I didn't feel like starting from dried beans (even with the magic of my instant pot). The total guesstimate for ingredients is $13.71, making it $6.86 each.
Tuesday:
Bananas and bagels for breakfast today before we swap to our English muffins tomorrow! Lunch was "out" today - sponsored by the summer research program where Kara works.
It was fish night for dinner: tequila lime salmon burgers and green bean
fries. We got the burgers for $7.91 on sale at the co-op and paid
$2.50 for a pack of 8 rolls (31 cents each); going rate on green beans
is about $4 a pound. (We made less than a pound's worth of fries. But let's be honest, I would pretty happily eat a pound of green bean fries!) The
panko was a whopping 17 cents, and we used a little onion powder (total
cost less than $1 for the jar) and two eggs ($2.79 a dozen, so 23 cents
each). And we split an avocado ($2.45) to slice up on the burgers.
That means a total supper cost of $8.42 a person. If I were keeping it
strictly veggie, I'd swap out the salmon burgers with grilled halloumi
cheese ($9 is enough for two people), so the salmon-free version would
be $8.94 a person. But keep the avocado. Trust me.
Wednesday:
While making breakfast, I discovered that we're out of bananas. Sigh. So we've swapped to berries! We picked these up at the farmers' market, and we were lucky to get them; local berries had a very short season in our area this year due to rain. They're a little more expensive - we paid $10 for 2 pints. A pint is roughly 2 cups, and half a cup of berries is a serving - so $1.25 per serving of berries, driving the price of breakfast up to... $2.14. Breakfast looks extra-gorgeous now, though.
It was a packed-lunch day today, which meant sandwiches and veggies! We both really love a hummus and cheese sandwich, ideally with nice crunchy lettuce and a tomato or cucumber slice. So, the cost: we bought $1.45 of cheese and used half of it today. Hummus is $2 for a container. (I made mine from scratch, meaning it had a lower cost, but this makes a good estimate.) The big splurge here was the half a loaf of bread from a local bakery that cost $3.29, but is enough for four sandwiches - so, like the cheese, we used half of it today. The accompaniments were one cucumber ($2 a pound) and a quarter of a pint of tomatoes ($2.50 a pint). So, 73 cents of cheese + $1 of hummus + $1.65 of bread + $1 of cucumber + $1.25 of tomatoes = $5.63 for two lunches... or $2.82 a lunch.
Dinner tonight was two new, simple recipes: a lemon parsley orzo recipe that Karen found, and this asiago walnut chard recipe from our CSA. (I was grateful for the recipe: chard is one of only two things one often gets in a CSA that I'm never sure what to do with.) This pairing was amazing, and unbeatable for time to prepare - it took us about 20 minutes to have dinner on the table. Karen handled the orzo while Kara took care of the chard. (Pro tip: increase the lemon and toss some fresh lemon zest into the chard.) It all looks so pretty! We paired it with the wine from Monday that needed to be finished.
And the price? Chard is currently about $3 a bunch near us. The asiago was $3.30; the walnuts have been in the freezer for a bit, but the grocery store sells them for about $1.20 an ounce and we used a quarter of a cup (roughly 2 ounces) and another probably-50-cents lemon. The parsley was $2.75 from our farmers' market, and orzo goes for about $1.49 for a 16-oz box. (This didn't use the whole box.) If we used up all these ingredients to feed two people, that would be $6.72 per meal.
Thursday:
Lunch today was a quick, simple salad: mostly lettuce enhanced with some beets! We roasted our beets over the weekend (their greens went into a batch of saag paneer), so they were ready to go this afternoon. The lettuce and beets both came from our CSA: lettuce is about $3 and the golden beets are about $4. I tossed some balsamic vinegar on mine for dressing and called it good.
Tonight, we used our CSA squash to make noodles, accompanied by a seitan "meat sauce." The package of seitan - which is a house favorite for swapping into things that might "normally" have sausage or ground meat - was $3.69. Squash is going for $1.75 a pound. Tomato sauce - the fancy kind in the jar - is $3 near us. (We used the other half of the jar from the flatbread early in the week, but let's imagine the whole jar was used today.) That would give us a cost of $4.22 each.
Also, I forgot to take meal pics on Thursday. Sorry, friends.
Friday:
After breakfast muffins and lunch salads, dinner was pasta with pesto. This one is incredibly hard to estimate
because both items came from our freezer. A small jar of pesto sells
for $2.99 at the co-op. Fresh pasta is more expensive than the box kind when purchased: but when we make it ourselves, according to this estimate,
it would be roughly 90 cents a pound. We use fancy pasta-style "type
00" flour, so I'll overestimate and say it's $2 each serving. That
means dinner is about $3.50 a person. I'll use that number because I have no idea how
much our pesto costs.
Have I mentioned that you already have our pasta recipe? And this pesto recipe? And they are both totally amazing?
Saturday:
Technically, Saturday starts the "new week" on our meal plan, because it's CSA pickup day. That means I'm cheating by stopping with tomorrow breakfast - but we've gotten into a nice routine on Saturday mornings. Breakfast is treat day - that is, we pick up breakfast out when we go to the farmers' market. In fact, by now we have a standard: a scone ($2.50 each) and nitro cold brew coffee ($3.50), kindly poured by the barista into our fashionable hipster mason jars. Breakfast out for $6 each. Hooray!
So my goal with this post is to convince you that eating vegetarian is a) not weird; b) not expensive; c) not complicated; d) delicious. The meals for the week are designed as usual - with a range of complexity (but tending toward quick and simple). There will be a photo of at least one meal each day, so you can see how pretty our food is. (It's the all-natural beauty of veggies and spices. Food staging is not a talent to which my skills extend.)
Okay, so maybe it's not hard, but it's got to be expensive, right? I mean, we shop at a co-op! Good news, friends: it doesn't have to be expensive, either. I will include an estimated cost for each meal, giving a price per person. These are absolutely estimates: most of our veggies come from our CSA, which is an up-front cost at the start of the season. But to be fair, I've priced each item at either the farmers' market or our co-op for purposes of estimating, and I try to round up for each meal.
A note: we eat minimal processed soy, due to a food sensitivity. We do, however, eat dairy and seafood. Vegetarians, obviously, do not normally eat seafood, so I'll include modifications for any seafood dishes we have this week. If you're vegan, or otherwise do not eat dairy, you'll have to get a little creative to replicate most of this week's meals - but I'd love to hear what you do!
Sunday:
Breakfast this week is bagels or English muffins with home-whipped garlic cream cheese and a piece of fruit. This garlic cream cheese is my favorite thing in the world to do with garlic scapes, though I happily add them to anything. It's almost too simple to count as a recipe: put the scapes into a food processor and pulse a few times, then add cream cheese and pulse again until they mix. Karen loves bananas, so they're the main breakfast fruit of the week. The total cost of the bagels, English muffins, scapes, and cream cheese came out to $10.66 across 12 breakfasts, meaning they cost... 89 cents per breakfast. (We got a sale on the bagels, and the pack of muffins was $2.50.) The bananas came out to 38 cents each - $2.33 for six bananas. So breakfast this week costs about $1.22 a person each day.Weekend lunches somehow always take me by surprise: I tend to leave them off the food plan, and then we have to scramble (or stop for hoagies). This week, though, we have jackfruit egg rolls! The can of jackfruit, an oversized one, was $4. The egg roll wrappers were $2.99, and a head of cabbage is about $2 right now. We didn't use all of the wrappers, jackfruit, or cabbage for this recipe, but for estimation, I'll pretend we did. We have 8 egg rolls, or 4 lunches, meaning a cost about $2.25 each. We accompanied our egg rolls with lovely roasted ears of corn. So, add in the corn - one each, at 50 cents each - and lunch was $2.75 total.
We kept it simple for dinner today with a basil, tomato, mozzarella, and garlic pizza for dinner. Fresh basil is the best basil. The tomatoes were $2.50 a pint at the co-op, and the basil was going for $2.75 at the farmers' market (ours came from the CSA). The shredded mozzarella was $1.96 at the co-op, and garlic was $8 a pound at the market; we bought only 1 bulb, so it was less than $1. We were lazy so we bought a pre-made pizza dough at $2.79. A jar of sauce (we used less than half) is $3. And then we were hungry so we cut the thing in half and ate it. 2 dinners out of these ingredients makes it a $14 dinner, or $7 a person.Monday:
Breakfast was the bagel, scapes and fruit combo ($1.22), and lunch today was the last of the jackfruit egg rolls from Sunday ($2.75 each).
For dinner, we had a kale caesar salad with fried chickpeas! This is a new recipe. It required a few adjustments, to our taste: I zested and juiced an entire lemon into the dressing, rather than using two tablespoons as per the recipe. And it needed just a dash of salt and more pepper at the end. We used lacinato kale (sometimes called dinosaur kale, I assume because it looks like something a brontosaurus would eat); we picked this because it came in our CSA, but it also meant that the kale was lovely and tender and amazing once it sat in the lemony dressing for a few minutes.
Let me tell you, this salad was a revelation. Karen immediately declared that it needs to be put into regular rotation. We're having it again next week. I didn't know fried chickpeas were a thing, but they are going to be cropping up in Queer Hipster Kitchen recipes for a long, long while. Since it was Monday, we decided to get fancy and open a bottle of wine, too. (Mondays can always be improved by a bit of fanciness.)
This salad was also very inexpensive: kale near us is $4 a bunch; the parmesan was $2.18. I had to buy the Dijon mustard, which is not a usual pantry staple ($1.99), and it calls for a single lemon. We always have lemons around - how much are lemons? I'm going to guess they are about 50 cents each. Garlic was less than $1, per our pizza night calculations. We needed a new jar of mayonnaise this week, which cost us $5 for the 16-oz jar. This recipe needed half a cup, which is.... a lot less than a quarter of a jar, so I'll round up big time and guess it was $1.25 of mayo. (That sounds like a LOT of mayo.) A can of organic chickpeas at the co-op is $2.79, and I didn't feel like starting from dried beans (even with the magic of my instant pot). The total guesstimate for ingredients is $13.71, making it $6.86 each.
Tuesday:
Bananas and bagels for breakfast today before we swap to our English muffins tomorrow! Lunch was "out" today - sponsored by the summer research program where Kara works.
Wednesday:
While making breakfast, I discovered that we're out of bananas. Sigh. So we've swapped to berries! We picked these up at the farmers' market, and we were lucky to get them; local berries had a very short season in our area this year due to rain. They're a little more expensive - we paid $10 for 2 pints. A pint is roughly 2 cups, and half a cup of berries is a serving - so $1.25 per serving of berries, driving the price of breakfast up to... $2.14. Breakfast looks extra-gorgeous now, though.
It was a packed-lunch day today, which meant sandwiches and veggies! We both really love a hummus and cheese sandwich, ideally with nice crunchy lettuce and a tomato or cucumber slice. So, the cost: we bought $1.45 of cheese and used half of it today. Hummus is $2 for a container. (I made mine from scratch, meaning it had a lower cost, but this makes a good estimate.) The big splurge here was the half a loaf of bread from a local bakery that cost $3.29, but is enough for four sandwiches - so, like the cheese, we used half of it today. The accompaniments were one cucumber ($2 a pound) and a quarter of a pint of tomatoes ($2.50 a pint). So, 73 cents of cheese + $1 of hummus + $1.65 of bread + $1 of cucumber + $1.25 of tomatoes = $5.63 for two lunches... or $2.82 a lunch.
Dinner tonight was two new, simple recipes: a lemon parsley orzo recipe that Karen found, and this asiago walnut chard recipe from our CSA. (I was grateful for the recipe: chard is one of only two things one often gets in a CSA that I'm never sure what to do with.) This pairing was amazing, and unbeatable for time to prepare - it took us about 20 minutes to have dinner on the table. Karen handled the orzo while Kara took care of the chard. (Pro tip: increase the lemon and toss some fresh lemon zest into the chard.) It all looks so pretty! We paired it with the wine from Monday that needed to be finished.And the price? Chard is currently about $3 a bunch near us. The asiago was $3.30; the walnuts have been in the freezer for a bit, but the grocery store sells them for about $1.20 an ounce and we used a quarter of a cup (roughly 2 ounces) and another probably-50-cents lemon. The parsley was $2.75 from our farmers' market, and orzo goes for about $1.49 for a 16-oz box. (This didn't use the whole box.) If we used up all these ingredients to feed two people, that would be $6.72 per meal.
Thursday:
Lunch today was a quick, simple salad: mostly lettuce enhanced with some beets! We roasted our beets over the weekend (their greens went into a batch of saag paneer), so they were ready to go this afternoon. The lettuce and beets both came from our CSA: lettuce is about $3 and the golden beets are about $4. I tossed some balsamic vinegar on mine for dressing and called it good.
Tonight, we used our CSA squash to make noodles, accompanied by a seitan "meat sauce." The package of seitan - which is a house favorite for swapping into things that might "normally" have sausage or ground meat - was $3.69. Squash is going for $1.75 a pound. Tomato sauce - the fancy kind in the jar - is $3 near us. (We used the other half of the jar from the flatbread early in the week, but let's imagine the whole jar was used today.) That would give us a cost of $4.22 each.
Also, I forgot to take meal pics on Thursday. Sorry, friends.
Friday:
After breakfast muffins and lunch salads, dinner was pasta with pesto. This one is incredibly hard to estimate
because both items came from our freezer. A small jar of pesto sells
for $2.99 at the co-op. Fresh pasta is more expensive than the box kind when purchased: but when we make it ourselves, according to this estimate,
it would be roughly 90 cents a pound. We use fancy pasta-style "type
00" flour, so I'll overestimate and say it's $2 each serving. That
means dinner is about $3.50 a person. I'll use that number because I have no idea how
much our pesto costs.Have I mentioned that you already have our pasta recipe? And this pesto recipe? And they are both totally amazing?
Saturday:
Technically, Saturday starts the "new week" on our meal plan, because it's CSA pickup day. That means I'm cheating by stopping with tomorrow breakfast - but we've gotten into a nice routine on Saturday mornings. Breakfast is treat day - that is, we pick up breakfast out when we go to the farmers' market. In fact, by now we have a standard: a scone ($2.50 each) and nitro cold brew coffee ($3.50), kindly poured by the barista into our fashionable hipster mason jars. Breakfast out for $6 each. Hooray!
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