Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Happy Herbivore Meal Plan–Easy Enchilada Bake

This is pretty good, although I would double the enchilada sauce. The entire recipe seems to make more than 4 servings in reality. It's great with a dollop of vegan sour cream on top. With eating a smaller serving, I think you would balance out the calories of the added sour cream and the extra sauce. (I used the Happy Herbivore Enchilada Sauce on page 260 and reduced the chili powder a little.)

Changes I made: I added the corn into the enchilada layers. I cooked half in the microwave and half in the toaster oven. I used more olives than called for.

Changes I would make in the future: Double the sauce–it seems a little dry. Add the sauce in each layer. Use whole black beans instead of refried. Whole beans would be easier to add to each layer. Maybe throw in a little Daiya cheese in each layer, watching out for total calorie count.

Reviews
The Man and Me: Liked it. Thought it was a little dry.
The Girl: Tried it, but said the sauce "Tasted funny."

The Happy Herbivore Meal Plan-Pineapple Teriyaki Chickpea

This may look familiar to you since it is very similar to Lindsay's "Hawaiian Chickpea Teriyaki" featured a couple of posts earlier.

This is a simpler version with fewer ingredients. You can use bottled teriyaki sauce or make your own (many recipes on the internet). Two changes I made: 1. I used cooked millet in place of the quinoa. 2. I put most of my pineapple IN with the garbanzo beans when I sauteed them in the sauce.

I like this as did The Man. The Girl doesn't like garbanzo beans any more so I didn't try. I LOVE millet now, which I made in my rice cooker after dry-toasting in a skillet.

We also had this for lunch cold on a bed of romaine lettuce. Great way to add greens to this!

The Happy Herbivore Meal Plan-Crisps

I'm taking a little side-trip here to report on The Happy Herbivore's 7-day Meal Plan items. I'm not doing them in order, since I am trying to use up food I already have before shopping again or making things I know (think?) The Girl might actually eat. As with all the recipes on this site, I make reference to what I might have changed, but I won't be posting the actual recipe. If Lindsay has it on her site, I will link it. I'll refer to these as "MP" for meal plan.

One of the breakfast recipes is Pineapple Crisp, but since I have a lovely bag of frozen mixed berries, I made a Mixed Berry Crisp the first day and an Apricot Crisp the next. Couldn't get The Girl to eat either of these, but everyone else in the family liked them. For those not dieting, the crisps are excellent topped with either ice cream coconut cream. I also had mine with a dollop of plain unsweetened soy yogurt, which I think is still within the spirit of "low-cal."




When I followed her instructions for mixing the crisp ingredients with agave, I got a bit of a hardened lump, but when I accidentally forgot to use agave and used sugar instead, the crisp was much crispier. I simply substituted frozen mixed berries (after thawing in the micro) and then fresh apricots in my two versions.

The Happy Herbivore webpage lists a similar recipe, but with added sugar. Blueberry Crisp.