Meatless Meal Planning

We signed up for a meal delivery service a few weeks ago. This one is called FreshPrep, is based in Vancouver, and offers meals with no animal protein (no meat, fish, eggs or dairy). It's a bit of an experiment and we only get two meals a week but... we are trying to wrap our heads around tofu and... so far, things are going well.

Our first meal was Sweet & Spicy Tofu Stir Fry with Snow Peas, Mushrooms and Sriracha Teriyaki Sauce. We were a bit skittish about this meal since it had (a) tofu with which we have had bad experiences and (b) mushrooms which we both hate with a passion. But... we soldiered on and gave it a try. I cut up the tofu into centimetre chunks and while the recipe called for sliced mushrooms... I seriously diced them into near invisibility. What you can't see or chew won't hurt you! And.... as we gingerly chewed our way around the tofu... the verdict was... YUM!! We actually both loved it. The mushrooms were practically invisible and the tofu texture was palatable. Kind of like well-cooked chicken.

Our second meal with FreshPrep was a Spring Vegetable, Lentil & Quinoa Salad with Sweet & Spicy Cashews. Score two for two! It was seriously yummy as well and introduced us, in a nice way, to fennel. We had tried a fennel lemon salad (a la Jamie Oliver) a few years ago and found it... inedible. But... this version through FreshPrep was very good and we would definitely do it again.

See, that's the thing... you order these meals from the delivery service, figure out if it's yummy or not and then... you recreate it from scratch whenever you want... easy peasy way to try out new recipes and, for us, new ingredients.

We aren't 100% reliant on the meal delivery service... obviously. I've been trolling through the internet looking for good recipes and we had some plant-based recipe books from the library during the Covid-19 lock-down... so we have a good dozen recipes that are our go-to meals at this point...

Last week, when we gave away our stash of frozen meat, our friends asked us... but how do you plan a meal without meat? I get it... without meat at the heart of a meal... how do you figure out what to cook??? Well... we kind of go by what legumes we're in the mood for... or what flavours we are looking for. Do we want to go Mexican today? Or have a curry? Or maybe some sushi. A lot of it depends on how much time we have as well, since we eat our main meal at lunchtime. I don't want to spend most of my weekday mornings cooking... so we do a lot of cooking and freezing on the weekends.

Some of our favourites are:

Pita Tostadas with Butternut Squash, Black Beans and Avocado.

This recipe is super easy and super yummy... the biggest time factor is baking the butternut squash but... you only need about half a squash so we just bake it, mash it all up and then save the remainder for next-time tostadas. If you have mashed frozen butternut then whipping this together is a breeze.

We particularly like the freshness of the lime juice in the beans and the yogurt drizzle. And yes... we found that almond yogurt, while not really edible on its own, makes a good substitute for the drizzle.

A couple of tips... this is insanely messy to eat so we have learned to wrap the rolled-up tostadas in aluminum foil like they do with donairs... way less messy.

Coconut Curry Lentil Stew with Spinach & Currant Salad

We got this recipe from GoodFood last year. It is super yummy and one of our staples. We make it in a double batch and freeze the leftovers. It's relatively easy but one does need a few key ingredients like curry paste - which we buy in a jar (we use Patak's mild curry paste). We also go easy on the coconut milk as it is fairly rich in the bad saturated fats. We sometimes just put a tiny can in instead of the 400 ml can the recipe calls for... and we don't save any for the end. Red lentils are easy to cook with and don't require any soaking beforehand. Plus... we try to get a variety of legumes in our diet so... this ticks the red lentil checkbox! The recipe calls it a stew and serves it as a stand alone but we usually have it with rice or farro or some other grain.

Sweet Potato & Black Bean Enchiladas with Avocado-Cilantro Cream Sauce

This receipe came out of the Oh She Glows cookbook and is one of our standbys. [I couldn't find the real recipe online but there is a version of it here...]

It's a bit trickier to make because you have to make the enchilada sauce from scratch which takes extra time. We usually get at least two and a half meals out of this recipe so it's good value for time!

We love the avocado-cilantro cream sauce... which is just avocado, cilantro, lime juice whizzed up in the food processor with some salt and garlic powder. Again... the lime juice just adds a bit of vibrancy to everything.

Coconut Chickpea Curry

I found this recipe online and it has become one of our favourite staples. It uses Garam Masala as the main spice blend which you can buy in any store.

Again, we tend to go easy on the coconut milk and the recipe still works. It's super easy and quick as most of these curry recipes are. Just be sure to have a few cans of chickpeas and diced tomatoes.

We like to add chopped up cilantro and peanuts onto the tops of our curries. The cilantro adds a nice little burst of flavour and the peanuts add some nice texture.

Ultimate Lentil Walnut Loaf

Another recipe I pulled offline, also from Oh She Glows. while we didn't eat a lot of meat loaf back in the day... this lentil walnut loaf has become a serious staple in our lives. It freezes really well and defrosts quickly, so it's great for those days when you go "oh shit, forgot to take something out of the freezer". Mind you... it is seriously labour intensive - there is a lot of chopping and measuring involved in this. But... given that one loaf makes four meals (eight slices of loaf)... the time investment is worth it. The recipe says 40 minutes of prep time but that is not accurate... more likely an hour. It goes quicker if you have two sous chefs working away at prepping the ingredients.

https://camillestyles.com/food/pita-tostadas-with-butternut-squash-black-beans-avocado/

Our Experiment with a Meal Kit

Have you received some of those meal kit flyers in the mail? Or been invited to try them by a friend? We got a GoodFood flyer in the mail last June, offering us three free meals and decided to give it a shot.

We had multiple reasons... our lives had gotten super hectic and it was becoming a challenge to get healthy meals onto the table at dinner time. We'd forget to take something out of the freezer and, utterly pooped at the end of the day, fall back on ordering pizza/curry/chow mein via delivery. Which wasn't really helping our budget at all... nor our health. I had been following an American finance blogger who had tried HelloFresh and he said it had helped them. So we though... "why not"...

While there are a few meal kit options in Canada, we went with GoodFood purely because we had a coupon. The promo pics looked good as well - lots of fresh produce and the online recipes were mouthwatering! We chose to order three meals/week with a delivery slot of Fridays. That meant we could have the weekends free and clear. We wouldn't have to think about what to cook, etc.

GoodFood is Good Food!

A GoodFood recipe - mmm
Paprika-Honey Salmon with Lime Sour Cream
over Bulgur with Peas & Roasted Peppers

Our first box arrived and... it was amazing! The recipe cards were easy to follow and everything was perfectly portioned out. Just the right amount of vinegar or carrots or noodles or spices. It was also quick... we could whip a meal together in 30 minutes or less. Their selection/variety was good too - a mixture of meats and even some vegetarian options. The recipes also had some ethnic diversity, introducing us to to exotic flavours from Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean.

Ordering was super easy - just go online, scroll through the options, choose the three meals and voila, Done. And we could make changes up to a week before our delivery date. I loved it!

Overall we gave most of the recipes a 9/10 or 10/10. We were wanting to lick the plate sometimes... they were that good. Except for one recipe... it was the slabs of sesame crusted tofu that we were told to fry in the frying pan. Neither one of us are entranced by tofu and the thick, wobbly slabs were... unpalatable... and actually inedible for both of us. That was the only fail out of dozens of meals.

Oh, and they are Canadian - based out of Montreal - go Canada!

What the contents of a GoodFood box
really look like.

The Not-so-Good

Now... there were also some downsides... First up... the way the food is delivered. It's not like that oh-so-eco-friendly picture above. When you you open the box... it looks more like this...

Everything is bundled in plastic. Each meal (except for the meat) is bundled in a big ziploc bag containing smaller plastic packages with the individual ingredients - lentils, noodles, rice, diced squash, farro, etc.

There are also small plastic screw-top containers with spices, vinegar, miso sauce, curry paste, etc. That's a LOT of plastic. We kept the little plastic containers as they were useful for seeds and what not. But the plastic bags were a bit much.

The other thing I noticed was that the little plastic containers were not labeled. So it was kind of a guessing game as to what was what. There was one time where I mixed up the red wine vinegar with a ponzu sauce or something. Not disastrous since we could scramble to recreate the sauce from our ingredients in our own kitchen but... still... why not label the little containers and vials? Their promo pics show that their containers all have labels but none of ours ever did.

GoodFood promo pic with labeled
plastic containers

The box itself was cardboard with some internal waffle cardboard partitions, some of which had a reflective coating on them. Mostly recyclable.

The food was kept cold by some plastic ice packs. According to the GoodFood site -  "The solution in the ice packs is a water and salt gel designed to get colder than ice. Pop them in your freezer for future uses, or snip off the ends and pour the all-natural solution in the toilet. You'll be left with the plastic wrapping which you can drop into your recycling bin."

Opening a GoodFood box

We tried popping the ice packs in our freezer but... our freezer quickly filled up with ice packs! No one needs that many ice packs... so eventually they went down the toilet. In the packaging department... GoodFood was not so good for the planet.

On top of that... as the weeks/months went on... we found that our grocery/food budget actually went UP! The GoodFood meals cost about $12-15/person/meal. So each week (3 meals) we'd be spending around $70 or $90. Multiply that by 4 weeks and... our GoodFood spending was about $300/month. Which is, honestly, a bit excessive considering our entire grocery budget is around $550/month. True, our eating-out/take-out expenses went down to zero but... all it really did was transfer that to the grocery category. And... we still had to cook four other dinners/week soooo... GoodFood was not so good for our budget.

Easing away from GoodFood

In August, after a couple of months of trying GoodFood, we started skipping weeks. We had visitors... we were away... whatever. We decided to try making some of our favourite GoodFood recipes from scratch using the recipe cards we already had. We found a few that worked quite well (a yummy red lentil curry) and I even tried pulling some new recipes off the GoodFood site. It's much cheaper to make the meals from scratch (duh) but not as convenient... you actually have to measure 30 g of ginger instead of just using what they give to you!

Over the last few months, though, as we've modified our eating plan... the GoodFood recipes don't fit in too well. While they have some vegetarian options, most of those include things like dairy. So... it's unlikely we will be going back to GoodFood, or trying another meal kit.

That's not to say it wasn't a good experience. For this apprentice-chef... it was great to be guided through a process and to see how easy it can be to create yummy flavours with just a few simple ingredients. We were also introduced to some not-so-familiar ingredients like farro, bulgur wheat, udon noodles and goodness knows what else. So there are some tips and tricks that have had a lasting benefit. Have you tried a meal kit? Did you like it?