Meal Planning and Dinner with Friends

Saturday. This is a big day. We're going grocery shopping for the week - big shopping as we call it - for our vegetarian meals. But first, Nate had to work so I took care of removing most of the last of the meat from the house. Actually, I ended up putting some of it in the freezer.

I carefully wrapped up the chicken breasts from the fridge in plastic wrap and freezer paper. I scoured the rest of the fridge for any other meat products. I found a partial package of pepperoni. Okay, that should freeze too. And leftover pork, chicken, and chicken noodle soup. Okay, that we'd just have to finish.

I went into the freezer. Hey, we have veggie burgers from when we had our friends K & D over! We may have to give them a try soon. I took a frozen beef tenderloin (a gift from our friends R & B), a partial bag of shrimp, a boneless skinless chicken breast, some Anytizers chicken wings or something like that and the chicken and pepperoni from the fridge and put them all in a paper bag and stuffed them into the ice bucket at the bottom of the freezer. Now, temptation is hidden away but we won't waste that food. We can eat it in April.

When Nate got home we ate lunch (I had some of that leftover soup) and put Liam down for a nap. We began our meal planning. We checked out some websites friends had sent us and took stock of what we already had in the house. We came up with the following set of meals for the week:

Asparagus and sweet pea risotto

3 Bean Chili

Carrot Ginger soup and perogies

Bean Burgers

Quiche

Bean and Veggie Braid

Cheesy Veggie Bake

The last two items on the list are vegetar-izations of meals we normally make: A Taco braid (with ground beef) and Cheesy chicken bake. It sounded a bit silly to me to make the cheesy bake without the chicken, especially since it is already chock full of veggies, but we figure we'll just add more veggies and see how it goes. We couldn't come up with a good substitute protein.

We did our shopping - lots of veggies, lots of beans. When we were out shopping we heard from our friends K & D who wanted to get together for dinner out. We thought that would be fun. But where to go? They wanted us to pick. We decided that despite our meatlessness we would head to one of our favorite places, Iron Hill Brewery in Media. We've gone there with them before plenty of times and D is a semi-vegetarian (she eats chicken) so we figured we'd be all set. As we got there Nate said "Well at least beer is vegetarian".

I didn't realize how not easy this would be. First we explained to K & D that we meant meatless for all of Lent, not just on Fridays. It has been easy for Liam to be meatless - he wanted Mac & Cheese anyway. He's two, what are you going to do? But looking at the menu I realized for the first time ever how NOT vegetarian friendly that restaurant is. Wow! Why does D always say it's cool to go there? I know that she's a big fan of the nachos. And if you don't get them loaded they are vegetarian. Though, that doesn't make them healthy :-)

I was looking at this menu with new eyes. I can list nearly everything on the menu that would fit our Lenten diet without going to the website to double check. There were two soups: French onion and Kennett Square mushroom (both of which probably contain beef broth or milk so you'd have to just go meatless and not vegan) and a third soup was on special: Broccoli cheese. There were a handful of salads in the appetizers section. The ones under "big salads" all came with a meat protein. There were the nachos, and fried asparagus, and sweet potato or regular fries, and bruchetta, all appetizers. For a full meal you could get a pizza (they had a couple meatless options there), or a black bean burger, or a hummus wrap. That's it. And it is a HUGE menu. Shocked. Really. D said to me, "That's why I still eat chicken sometimes."

Apologies to Iron Hill if I missed a handful of things, but I'm pretty sure not. Point being - menu is a good 90% meat based. But they don't advertise as a vegetarian restaurant so I can't really hold it against them. They do make really good beer. (Try the Pumpkin Bourbon Ale if it's on tap at your location - it was the special on nitro this evening)

I ordered the Southwest black bean burger which came with fries, coleslaw, and a pickle. Nate ordered a cup of the broccoli cheese soup and a pizza that was essentially a mushroom pizza. And the table ordered nachos. I found the bean burger to be tasty, though poorly constructed. It had so many chunks of beans and sweet potatoes and corn and peppers that it didn't stay together, it kept falling apart all over my plate. I ended up taking a bunch of it home. Leftovers!

So, only a few days in and I'm starting to see things a little differently. We'll see what tomorrow brings.