Lunches Archives - Wholefully

One Bag of Lentils: Three Meals

June 20, 201711

This post is brought to you by a Wholefully partner

Without fail, every time I post a lentil recipe somewhere on social media, I’ll get a “yuck” or a “gross.” Holy wow, are there are a lot of lentil haters out there! I understand it. Poorly cooked lentils are mushy and bland—if that’s the way lentils had to be, I’d hate ’em, too! But trust me, when done right, lentils totally and completely rock.

They are über affordable, packed full of protein and fiber, cook super quickly (they require no soaking like dried beans), and since they are nearly flavorless, they work beautifully as a meat-substitute in your favorite flavor-packed dishes—like Vegetarian Lentil Sloppy Joes and Lentil-Walnut Veggie Burgers.

Today, I’m partnering up with my friends from USA Pulses and Pulse Canada to open up your eyes to the glory of lentils. Don’t think you know what Pulses are? You totally do! Pulses are the delicious, protein-packed, sustainable foods known as dry peas, chickpeas, lentils, and beans.

They are so tasty, so versatile, incredibly healthy, and so affordable to cook with. The average cost of beef per serving is $1.49, whereas you can serve dry peas, chickpeas, lentils, or beans for about 10 cents per serving. TEN CENTS! If you’re looking for affordable ways to eat healthier, pulses need to be on your grocery list. Sign up for the Half-Cup Habit, and see how easy it can be to add a ½ cup serving of pulses to your diet 3x per week.
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Vegan Antipasto Pasta Salad

June 13, 20178

This post is brought to you by a Wholefully partner.

You guys know by now that I’m a big proponent of meal prep—where you carve out a few hours on the weekend to prepare healthy meals for the rest of the week. I think it is one of the most important habits to get into when you first start on the journey to eating a healthier diet.

Sometimes I think meal prepping gets a bad wrap because of the Instagram pictures of neatly organized, perfectly-portioned, and undoubtedly, extremely-time consuming meal preps done by girls who do yoga on the beach wearing $1,000 leggings (#blessed). I’m here to tell you: that is not what meal prepping looks like in my house. Not by a long shot.

For me, I usually try to carve out an hour for meal prep on Sunday while wearing my paint-stained, bright pink Crocs with a toddler running around yelling “POOP!” at the top of her lungs (#blessed). I set a goal to just make one food item for breakfast, one for lunch, and one snack. Does that cover everything we eat in a week? No way. But just having that little bit on the fridge goes a LONG way to helping make food preparation throughout the week much easier.

It’s a buffer. A margin. It’s enough preparation to make sure that on the days when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed and too tired to even think of making lunch, you have a healthy option. It’s enough meal prep to take the edge off without meal prep totally invading your life.

If I’m being totally honest, I usually follow the same formula for my preps each week, too. Something oat-tastaical for breakfast (overnight oats when it’s warm out or oatmeal cups when it’s chilly). Something protein packed for snack (like hard-boiled eggs or date bites). And then lunch is almost always one of two things (or both if, by some miracle, the toddler lets me cook longer): a salad in a jar and some sort of grain or pasta salad.Read the post »

One Bag of Black Beans: Three Meals

May 9, 20178

This post is brought to you by a Wholefully partner

One of the more frequent questions I get is how to do this whole healthy eating thing on a budget. Is it even possible? And to that I say, absolutely yes!

It takes some adjustments and problem-solving, but I believe that a healthy diet can be just as budget-friendly as a diet loaded with cheap (and not-so-nourishing) foods. And one of the main stars of a budget-friendly healthy diet? Pulses!

Pulses are the delicious, protein-packed, sustainable foods known as dry peas, chickpeas, lentils and beans. They are so tasty, so versatile, incredibly healthy, and so affordable to cook with. The average cost of beef per serving is $1.49, whereas you can serve dry peas, chickpeas, lentils, or beans for about 10 cents per serving. TEN CENTS!

Canned pulses are a great deal, too, but to stretch your budget even further, drive your cart down the grocery store aisle a little more and pick up some bags of dried beans, lentils, chickpeas, or split peas. A pound of dried pulses runs between $1-$2, and trust me, you can streeeettttcchhh each of those bags into multiple meals.

Today, I’m partnering up with the awesome folks from USA Pulses and Pulse Canada to show you exactly how to do just that. We’re kicking things off with one bag of black beans that I show you how to transform into three separate meals. And over the course of the next few months, we’ll cover all categories of pulses—chickpeas, lentils, and even split peas!
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EasyRecipe

How to Make Awesome Grain Bowls

May 2, 20179

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Tasty Bite. All opinions are 100% mine.

Call them grain bowls. Call them Buddha bowls. Call them macro bowls. Call them power bowls. I don’t care what you call them, just as long as you are making and eating them!

Grain bowls are exactly what they sound like—a base of healthy whole grains in a bowl with all kinds of delicious, nutritious toppings. When done well, a grain bowl is a beautiful quilt of textures, colors, and flavors that is an absolute joy to bite into. Typically, grain bowls are improvised. Sure, there are recipes out there for them (hello, Cauliflower and Quinoa Power Bowls), but the beauty and fun of grain bowls is how free you are to experiment with your meal.

Whatever you have coming off in your garden. Whatever you got in your CSA box. Whatever you have kicking around in your crisper drawer—you can make it into awesome grain bowls. It’s a great way to reduce food waste and help you use up any produce that might be on its last leg before it hits the compost bin.

Today, I’m partnering up with the awesome folks from Tasty Bite (more on them in a sec!) to teach you how to make your own (improvised) grain bowl. I’m going to teach you to fish by giving you the exact formula I use when I craft awesome and tasty grain bowls. Follow this method, and I promise you’re going to end up with something delicious in your bowl.

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Stock Your Freezer with These 3 Awesome Veggie Burgers

February 28, 201724

This post is brought to you by a Wholefully partner

If you were to show up at my house right now, open my freezer, and take a peek inside you’d see lots of bread (we can never get through a loaf before it starts to go bad—so we always keep our bread in the freezer); a few bags of frozen berries, beans, and veggies; and lots and lots of veggie burgers.

Veggie burgers are a “pantry staple” in our house. When the cupboards are bare and I have no idea what to make for supper, I can always fall back on the veggie burgers in the freezer.

Veggie burgers are one of those things that you really should be making at home if you haven’t been—they’re cheaper (WAY cheaper), tastier, and healthier than the store-bought alternatives. Plus, they don’t take much time at all—they definitely aren’t complicated to make. And, like I talk about above, they freeze beautifully. Meaning you can make up a giant batch every other month or so, and eat on them for weeks and weeks.

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Huevos Rancheros Breakfast Sandwich

September 19, 20167

This post is brought to you by a Wholefully partner

My Mom is awesome. And I know everyone says that, but my Mom is really awesome. For example, as a lot of 22-year-olds do, I moved back home after college when I started my first job.

I was jazzed to have employment (in my chosen field, even), but I was barely making enough money to scrape together the cash for the gas it required for me to commute—let alone actually afford my own place. So I moved back into my parents’ place and used it as a halfway house to help me transition into the real world.

My parents have always been about fostering independence, so when I moved back into the nest, they asked me to help around the house—both financially and with normal chores. It wasn’t the same situation as it was when I lived there just a few years prior during high school. I was now an adult, and even though we were living under the same roof just like when I was 14, it was important to both me and my parents that our relationship transitioned to an adult relationship. I did my own laundry. I paid my own bills. I got my own oil changed.

That paid-absolutely-nothing job turned out to be a complete dud. I worked there for 10 months, and it was honestly one of the hardest times of my life. I was unhappy in my job—it’s crazy how a toxic workplace can infect your entire life. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, was living in another country. I was commuting up to two hours a day—sobbing in the car everyday. All my friends were spread across the country post-college. Oh, and did I mention I wasn’t getting paid enough to do…well…anything? It was just a really joyless time in my life.

Now that I’m a mother, I can see how difficult that must have been for my nurturing, supportive, and empathetic Mama. To see me come in the door each evening, totally defeated, and stay supportive, but also allow me to struggle through it in my own way.

There are a lot of difficult things in parenthood (a lot), but I think that the most difficult is letting your kid struggle. I believe it’s important to struggle. It builds character, and it (eventually) builds confidence. But man, is it heart-wrenching to watch your kid struggle. Your first instinct is to fix it. And fix it NOW. But that’s not always the best thing for them. That’s true for my two-year-old, and was certainly true when I was 22-years-old.

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Vegan Pumpkin Black Bean Chili

September 8, 201615

I’m gonna go ahead and put this out there: this recipe is weird. Things tend to get weird when you’re trying to make something taste “meaty” only using vegetables. But you can trust me, I promise. You’re really going to love this.

I’m not a vegan (or even a vegetarian), but I do love the challenge of cooking meatless dishes. It really tests my cooking skills to try to take plants and make them taste rich and hearty like a meat dish would. I mean, I love veggies as much as the next gal, but I don’t love them because they are rich or hearty. Those aren’t words you usually associate with lettuce, you know? I think that’s why there are so many meat substitutes out there on the market—many folks want to eat a plant-based diet for one reason or another, but find themselves still craving that meaty depth.

I have two really great meat-based chilis in my arsenal—Turkey Taco Chili and White Chicken Chili are pretty much alternated each week from September through March in our house. They are both really awesome recipes that are 100% no fail (I even heard from a reader that they won their office chili cook-off with my White Chicken Chili recipe last year). Mama can cook a mean pot of meaty chili.

Vegetarian chili is a whole other story. I’ve made a few vegan chilis in the past (there are even a few on the blog), and they all turned out well. But all them seemed to be missing something. They were all delicious, and packed full of flavor, but none of them were good substitutes for regular, meaty, rich, hearty chili. They all felt light. I really like lighter fare sometimes, but when I’m craving a bowl of chili? That’s not when I want light.
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Easy Chicken Caesar Wraps

August 17, 20165

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Can we talk about how it seems like school is starting earlier and earlier each year? I saw kids shopping for school supplies back at the beginning of July! I guess it makes sense—we don’t really live in that agriculture-based society anymore where the kids need to be home to work on the farm all summer. But still, phew, it seems to sneak up on me every year!

Juni isn’t to school age yet, so it doesn’t impact me directly, but I do hear from a lot of you guys around this time of year that you need help. The lazy days of summer are over, and suddenly your already packed schedules are filled with even more meetings and events and practices and games. Who has time to cook healthy food for dinner when you’re at a soccer game until 8pm on Tuesday after working all day?

When things get crazy (or you’re just trying to adjust to a new schedule) that’s when I think it’s time to take shortcuts. I’m a big believer that there is nothing wrong with shortcuts. Would it be better if we could all grow our own lettuce and churn our own butter? Maybe. But we can’t. My life philosophy (and food philosophy) is to do what you can with what you have when you have it. And let’s get real, sometimes, I just don’t have time to spend four extra hours prepping salads for work lunches all week (and sometimes I do). That’s when I love a good shortcut.

My favorite shortcut right now: rotisserie chickens. You know those roasted chickens that the grocery store sells for like $5 every afternoon and evening? It seems like almost every supermarket does it now, and it’s awesome. Especially because a lot of the supermarkets around here have gotten the memo, and have started also stocking natural, organic, and even free range rotisserie chickens (for more than $5, obviously, but convenience costs money). Those suckers SAVE MY LIFE when I’m busy. They are tasty, versatile, and you can stretch one chicken so far.
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