7
votes
What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Made a vegan Cubano yesterday (made with Yves' ham and salami) with black beans and fried plantains. I don't have a sandwich press, so I just heated up another pan and smushed the sandwich between two pans. Overall, very tasty.
Been doing lazy meal prep for a while now, where I cook a big batch of something on Sunday and partition it out for easy during-the-week meals. Last week I did pasta with Beyond Meat’s ground “meat”, and this week I did the same dish with Impossible’s version.
The short of it is that neither is bad, but I prefer Beyond Meat. It holds up a lot better than the Impossible when cooking, so my Beyond Meat batch had chunks of meat in it, while the Impossible broke down into small, uniform bits. This made the Impossible meal more of pasta with a meat sauce. Flavor-wise they both taste fine, but I also prefer the Beyond Meat there too. It also smelled better when cooking and has less saturated fat, so it’s a pretty clear winner for me, though I do still love Impossible Whoppers, so I feel like there’s room for both.
For any meat eaters wondering if the substitutes are convincing, the answer is... sort of.
Beyond Meat tasted like and had the feel of ground turkey right after cooking. I wouldn’t mistake it for beef, but I might not have known it wasn’t turkey if I wasn’t the one who prepared it. Given that I was not eating this fresh, however, and instead as leftovers over the course of the week, I’ll say that it actually became more convincing the second time around. After it sat in my fridge, it came out indistinguishable from leftover pasta with meat. Also I genuinely wanted to eat the remainder of the leftovers, as opposed to just finishing them because they were there.
Impossible’s details were harder to tease out because I didn’t get a big distinct bite of it, as it just sort of disappeared into the sauce. It doesn’t taste bad by any means, but I don’t know how much it adds to the dish either. I’ll eat the remainder of the meals this week, but I’m not looking forward to them like I did with the Beyond Meat. The one thing Impossible has that Beyond Meat doesn’t is that it is much more convincing as “raw meat” and while cooking. It has that recognizable raw redness that turns over to brown as you cook it. Whether or not you consider this a positive is up to you. I find it a bit off-putting, personally (I don’t need my fake meat to be fake bloody), but I can also see how people might feel similarly about Beyond Meat, which comes out of the package a sort of thick gray-brown sludge.
Today we had mini meatball soup, which my middle child likes to make. It's pretty delicious - I'm not a soup guy, but I would eat this all the time.
We dice an onion, some carrots, and some celery, and then put it in a big pot over olive oil. Add in a couple of bay leaves, some salt and pepper to taste, and sautee for a while while you prep the meatballs. Whatever your ground meat of choice is, take about a pound of it, add in some breadcrumbs, some parmesan, an egg, some nutmeg, salt to taste, and mix it up. At this point, we normally add the broth to the saucepan (we go with chicken stock, two 900mL boxes, and put the heat to high to get it to boil. While waiting for the boi, form the meat into small meatballs. When things are boiling, turn the heat down, and then add the meatballs to the broth. We add in a bit of pasta - today it was smashed up lasagna noodles because we had lasagna noodles. Let the meat and noodles cook in the broth for about 10 - 12 minutes. Optional end step: add in some spinach and let it wilt in the soup. We had no spinach today. Serve and enjoy!
Due to my celiac disease I am 100% gluten free and low fodmap. I’ll typically have some fruit in the morning and then something with eggs, usually I’ll add spinach and feta cheese and maybe some chicken. For lunch I’ll do a cooked salmon patty from Costco and use some more spinach for that. I eat bananas regularly, they are the easiest snack for my diet.
If I’m really feeling fancy I’ll bake up some sweet potatoes and eat them with a little bit of salt and pepper and also feta cheese, spinach . I’ll add protein as I see fit , tofu, chicken, fish, etc.