Vegetarian-ish

Tonight for dinner I thought I'd go with something simple - burgers and fries. However, lately M and I have decided to go vegetarian-ish. No, you haven't stumbled upon someone else's blog. I'm still the bacon loving girl I always have been (and always will be), thus the "ish" part. Plus, it was all M's doing. He's worried about the environmental impact of our meat consumption, so we're giving this the old college try, except that we can still have meat for two individual meals per week. I think that concession may have had something to do with the high-pitched whining that greeted his suggestion. Yay for me! You can just call me the reluctant vegetarian(ish). I'll just state for the record now that the last time I was a vegetarian, I threw myself from the wagon by eating a grilled sausage and an uncooked hot dog in about 5 minutes flat. Full disclosure and all.

Anyway, so far being a semi-herbivore has worked out pretty well. It's been about two and a half weeks now, and I'm settling into the routine. It just requires a little more planning. Take lunch for instance - usually I have a sandwich comprised of some sort of cold cut and cheese. Now I either have to have leftovers, or a salad, or veggie meatless stuff that you buy in the freezer case. Since I'm a simple creature, and since I prefer to save leftovers for dinner, it's usually the last option. Not such a big deal. My grocery lists have changed quite a bit too. I didn't type today's up, as I have before, but it was a big ole column of produce with a few random other things like bread and snack food thrown in for good measure. When the checkout guy asked how often I shopped, he was pretty amazed that I only said "once a week." Apparently, my cart o' veggies indicated to him that I was "refusing to eat" and that he would eat everything on the conveyor belt in two days. Assuring him that you could make quite a bit out of a whole bunch of produce, I left for home.

This is where it got more complicated.

My sister, a die-hard veggie for many years now, has been sending me recipes. So tonight, it was to be "burgers" and garlic fries, the burger obviously being a homemade veggie burger. Lemme tell ya, she wasn't kidding when she said they took forever to make. Rather than mush together some ground beef with some other stuff, I had to saute a bunch of different veggies, then add liquid to allow my texturized veggie protein (sounds appetizing, right? It's defatted dried soy flour, but hey, don't knock it till you try it) to rehydrate, then let cool, then add flour and spices, then let cool for another half hour. In the interim, I nearly managed to set my kitchen on fire when I unwisely used a flat baking sheet for the fries and the oil leaked all over the bottom of the 475-degree oven. Awesome. It's not yet warm out, but there are many windows open in my house tonight. My bedroom, even with the doors having been closed, smells like a damn barbecue, and not in a good way. I even had to wear a bandanna over my face like I was in some old Western. All told, what would have taken a mere half hour if I were serving up beef burgers took an hour and a half. I was starving by the time I was done, and writing this post is giving my poor feet and back a much needed rest. Plus, my formerly clean kitchen now looks like this:


Note to readers - the dishwasher is also full. It's a big freakin' dishwasher. But hey, they tasted good, and were pretty substantial (12 grams of protein per burger, and M is currently laying on the couch telling me that he's "el stuffed-o"), especially when you consider that the main ingredient was the aforementioned texturized vegetable protein, which one writer has said that "even rabbits won't eat."