I don’t know how it happened, I’ve been a meat and potatoes girl forever. It has to be being pregnant, I hope it goes away. I can’t do meat any more, I don’t want to look at it raw, I get queasy just thinking about it. I am not touching it. Even cooked, I don’t even want to look at it. Lovey brought me home a steak hoagie the other night from my favorite place and the smell just turned my stomach.
That’s okay, I can deal. There’s lots of meatless meals I like, too. Unfortunately, not enough. I have been making do for about the past three weeks, but I’m just about tired of the limited number of meatless dinners that I know.
So help me if you can, anyone have a recipe for a meatless meal? Especially anything solid or heavy? Light meals are okay sometimes, but around here, we like to eat, yano? Fish is okay (but shrimp is right out, although I have a 5 lb. bag in the freezer I hate to see getting old), beans are better. And please, nothing that I have to go to a specialty grocery to get.
Bean burritos are ridiculously easy. Fry a chopped onion, add cumin if you want, add cayenne if you want, dump in a can of beans, heat up. Serve with tortillas, cheese, sour cream, salsa, avocado, etc.
But if you can think ahead, make the beans from dried. Again, stupid simple.
Dump 8 cups water in a big pot. Add 1 lb of dried beans (rinse and sort them–they always say to do so, but I’m not entirely sure how necessary this is). Add a couple teaspoons of salt, add a chopped onion if you want, add some minced garlic if you want, and boil, covered, on low heat, for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. When the beans are done, you’ll be able to blow on one and the skin will peel off under your breath. Total prep time is less than 10 minutes.
We do this almost once a week, and then we eat bean burritos, and I take beans for lunch, and we have beans and rice for a meal at some point. Sometimes we add some pork in some various form to the beans, but usually not. They’re delicious.
As a variation of Left Hand of Dorkness’s idea, you can make your own refried beans for a burrito. Although the way I make them, I guess they are more like “mashed beans.” I take some cooked (or canned) beans, put them in a pot over medium heat with some olive oil, and go at them with a potato masher. If the mixture is too thick for your liking, you can add some water or vegetable stock. They make a great burrito with all of the previously suggested toppings.
Also, some cheesy pasta could make a good “heavy” meal. Like fettucini alfredo, or mac & cheese, or spaghetti carbonara.
And speaking of fried, have you ever done fried rice? Here’s how it goes:
-Make a meal with rice, doesn’t matter what, only make a lot of extra rice.
-Refrigerate the extra rice.
-Next day, scramble a couple of eggs, maybe with some soy sauce, and set aside.
-Add some more oil to your pan, and stir-fry some vegetables. Or use some leftover cooked vegetables.
-Dump the rice into the pan, probably with yet more oil.
-Stir-fry the rice and veggies. Add some garlic, some ginger, whatever you want at this stage.
-Add the egg back in, chopped up, and heat it through.
3 cans of skinless, boneless salmon
2 slices of bread, torn into small cubes (I use white bread.)
1 egg, beaten
1/3 cup milk (I use 1 %)
2 tsp. dried minced onion
Combine salmon and bread. Combine milk and egg. Mix them together and add onion. Put into loaf dish. Cover and bake at 400 degrees F. for an hour, removing the foil for the last fifteen minutes. (I like things very well cooked, so you could probably bake it at 375 degrees for ten minutes less and it would be okay.)
A 12 oz. container of pasta, prepared normally, and added to a pan with a sauteed vegetable, one tablespoon of oil, a little oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper, with an egg broken into it, and with maybe a quarter cup of romano cheese added, is vegetarian, and pretty filling.
How about a vegetable lasagna. That’ll stick to your ribs. Or zuchinni parmesan with a side of pasta. Check out www.recipe.com and do a search for vegetarian dishes.
Quinoa is available in the major grocery stores now, and with all that protein in it, it should help fill you up. Versatile, too - season however you like, add whatever still sounds good (veggies, scrambled egg, etc.) and it’s good both hot or cold.
I’m feeling lazy, so have linky. There’s quite a few easy, yummy, meatless recipes in there; each and every one of them is Doper-tested. I can’t say “Doper-approved” because a couple of failures got reported too: they’re marked as such.
Simple butter sauce for pasta: stick of butter (or half butter half oil, I like olive), salt/pepper, and about 20-30 fresh sage leaves. Melt butter, cook sage, about ten minutes or so.
I also did a variation of this with a chopped onion, two chopped tomatoes, and some dried thyme.
Holy freaking $%^&*, Maiira, that sounds delicious.checks I have fresh sage growing. And now, I know what we’re having this weekend. Thanks!
OP, I just noticed you called yourself a “meat and potatoes” girl, but meat is out. So, potatoes are still OK? If so, a baked potato topped with heaps of everything you like should be filling as all heck.
It IS delicious! I actually put too much salt in mine (because when I’m only cooking for my boyfriend and me I tend to go overboard with it, since I don’t have to worry about my dad’s dietary restrictions), but it was still very good (and in fact the saltiness, far from being overpowering, mostly just added more flavor). Found it in some recipe book we just had lying around.
