Primarily Plant Based Eating

For the last eight years or so I've done my best to switch my family over to real, whole, organic food.  We've always been good about cooking at home so this wasn't much of a stretch for us.  The LoML does most of the cooking for dinners and he is sometimes resistant to this plan, and sometimes resorts to what he calls "Boxed Dinner" which translates to purchased frozen items (think fish fillets, french fries, etc.)  or boxed rice sides a la Rice-a-Roni.  But for the most part we cook from scratch and eat as much organic, local grass fed, etc. as we can afford.

For Christmas I bought him "The Blue Zone" cookbook and an Instant Pot and told him I want to eat more beans and greens and less meat.  This move, eating more plant based, is both extraordinarily healthful and economical.  Double win. 

I just finished reading this book and highly recommend it.  It makes so much sense and I feel as if my normal food preferences lean towards this type of eating.

Here are some of the plant based meals I ate this week. 
For breakfasts: I have fallen in love with Chia pudding made with oat milk, a little cinnamon and berries on top.  My other go to is steel cut oats cooked in water with dried blueberries and nuts, or apples and nuts.

Lunches were: salads with kale, apple, craisins & nuts, and broccoli & apple salad with some left over soba noodles:

Dinners were things like: soba noodles with roasted broccoli, a bean, sausage & kale stew, veggie frittata and a stuffed cabbage abomination.

I say that the stuffed cabbage is an abomination for a good reason.  The LoML travels periodically and when he comes home he brings home all the leftovers from the restaurants he where he had his meals.  It is usually what I call crap food and after his last business trip I told him I didn't want to eat that crap anymore.  Last time he came home with leftover greasy Chinese food (no veggies in sight), a giant Italian hoagie (longer than my arm), a Popeye's bucket o' chicken with sides, including the famed chicken sandwich, and a bunch of bags of different chips and cheese crackers.

Well this time he came home with fried clams (can you even eat those leftover??) Chinese food, and a corned beef sandwich with about 2 lbs of corned beef on it.

When dinner was served I just assumed this was regular stuffed cabbage, but no.  This was an evil impostor.  Instead of tomato that sauce on top is Sriracha, and inside was tofu, rice, peppers, mushrooms and. . . are you ready for this?    Peanuts!  Like some sort of kung pao tofu and greasy rice filling.   He called it Amasian stuffed cabbage.  😕  I told him if he ever made that again I was divorcing him. LOL!

So I think overall I've done a pretty good job this week minimizing meat and eating healthy.  At the end of next week I'll be starting a 10 day cleanse and then when that is done I'll be doing a 28 day diet, again plant based but more strict as I do really need to lose some weight.  Beans and greens baby!!