Welcome to the first installment of my Meatless Monday experiment! Getting started on this little adventure today was a bit of a challenge, as we are overdue for a trip to the grocery store and I was missing some key ingredients – but I managed to create a tasty and satisfying meal regardless, so I would definitely consider Week One a success.
Because it was my first time cooking in ages, I stuck with my tried-and-true one-pan meal strategy – and relied a lot (probably too much) on packaged and canned foods. (One of my goals is to cook with more fresh foods, but since I’m just starting out I went a little easy on myself and made something I’d done before.)
Last night Peter had, on my request, picked up some Tofu Shirataki noodles – my favourite ultra-low-calorie pasta replacement. (I’ll be writing more about these wonderful noodles, so watch for it in a future post!)
On his own initiative, he also added a package of veggie meatballs to the basket. (I suspect he figured that even if he couldn’t have meat, at least he could pretend!)
I started by dry-frying the two packages of noodles for about ten minutes, then added the rest of my ingredients and cooked everything together until done:
· 4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
· 1 cup canned Romano beans
· 1 pkg veggie meatballs
· 2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
· 1 cup canned diced tomatoes
· 2 tbsps tomato paste
· Sriracha sauce (to taste)
· onion flakes (to taste)
· garlic powder (to taste)
· salt (to taste)
Normally when I prepare Tofu Shirataki noodles I fry them with finely chopped fresh onions and a couple of finely chopped cloves of garlic – but as I mentioned, we were out of pretty much everything, so I had to rely on dry flavourings. Not an ideal situation, but it worked.
Here’s the final result:
After entering the ingredients in the MyFitnessPal calculator I determined that half of the recipe (i.e., the portion shown above) is around 450 calories. A little high perhaps, but it was very filling, so I think it was worth it.
I’m so happy I started down this path, and am really looking forward to getting creative on future Mondays!
