Vegetarian Week- Part One

This past Sunday for Sunday Company Dinner I made fajitas.  I decided to use pork as my base and gave it a marinade that I whipped together from lime juice, orange juice, olive oil, cilantro, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, cumin and chili powder.  I didn’t really follow a recipe, just threw it together.  It turned out great.  It probably could have marinated longer, but this was good.  The first fajita was good, but it was the second one that really grooved my taste buds, and the only difference between the two was that I left off the pork for the second one and added some rice instead.  Don’t ask me what’s really going on, but for the last several weeks, I just haven’t had an appetite for much meat at all. In fact, last week, during the week I think I ate meatless all week.  And so far this week I am doing the same.  So I thought I would challenge myself.

All week long I am going to take a photo of my lunch and my dinner and keep track and attempt to eat a balanced vegetarian diet.  It actually will probably be easier for me than for most people, since I have a well-stocked fridge and a garden at my disposal which is flowing with spinach, baby lettuce and radishes already.  While I am eating meatless I am also going to be watching the dairy as well.  I never have problems eating yogurt, or a bit of dairy with a meal, but when I focus on it, I really pay for it later. (Which I forgot yesterday, unfortunately.)  I’m not going to take a picture of breakfast because for the most part Ijust have a bowl of cereal- maybe some fruit, and that’s not very exciting. 

So here’s yesterday’s lunch.  I had leftover mushrooms, onions and peppers from the fajitas, so I opted to turn them into a delicious quesadilla.  There are a lot of vegetables here, and not much cheese.   Really, just enough cheese to get everything to stick together- that’s how I like quesadillas best.  I had it with salsa and sour cream for dunking in.  Then on the side I decided to have a bowl of cottage cheese topped with blueberries and a glass of iced tea.  It was a very satisfying lunch, and that quesadilla was perfectly done.  Really, it didn’t need the cheese, although I was sad that I’d used all my avocados for Sunday’s guacamole because that would have been the ideal addition to the quesadilla.  The cottage cheese was tasty, and it’s been a while since I had it, but it was just too much cheese for me apparently…

Because by the time dinner came around I really wasn’t very hungry.  I had gone out to the garden and picked some spinach, baby lettuce, and a few baby chard leaves to form the base of a salad for dinner.  We had some leftover taco meat and cheese that Abigail added to her salad, and Zander opted to add some leftover barbecue chicken to his plate.  We also discovered that Abigail loves almonds on her salad, so I’ll need to pick up some more to keep around.  My salad was meatless, but I added broccoli sprouts, which the kids don’t care for, as well as a small handful of blueberries and some almonds.  Chopped up peaches, strawberries, and watermelon finished off my plate, and while we had some whole wheat pita bread on the side, I didn’t have any.   Again, it was satisfying to me, and I really felt great at the end of the day, like I’d gotten some good nutrients in my body that I needed.

Today I have something a little more adventurous planned for dinner.  Lunch may be a repeat of the quesadillas, but dinner should be fun. Come back tomorrow to find out what it is!