My First Vegetarian Meal and Other (Painful) Adventures

Last night my first meal without chicken, fish, or beef was met with "It's missing something. Is there any meat?" "No," I told my family, "This is it. Enjoy!"

They weren't overly impressed. To be honest, it could have been better, and I'll work on it.

My meal started with Black Bean Spaghetti Noodles. Ingredients: organic black beans and water. I followed a recipe in my Vitamix cookbook for a creamy roasted garlic tomato sauce to top it, a toasted multigrain thin bun, and a platter of fresh fruit on the side- grapes and oranges- the vitamin c in the fruit needed to help with iron absorption.

Did I like it? Yes. I even ate seconds. Was it bland? Very much so. The recipe was a decent base to carry flavour, but it needed a lot more spice and seasoning to really work. I'm not going to share the recipe, because it wasn't that memorable. I'm going to keep playing with the black bean pasta to see what I can do with it.

The sauce recipe, unfortunately, was a pretty big recipe. However, I don't throw out food if I can avoid it, so tonight it lived a second life as a feta and fresh dill dipping sauce for grilled cod.

Here's a picture!

Tonight's meal was awesome, however, and I'll post about it tomorrow. In the meantime, let me remind you to never do what I did when making dinner tonight- licking a stainless steel spoon that had boiling honey on it. All I can say is "ouch". It's amazing I could even taste dinner tonight!