Happy Monday! My weekend flew by, mostly because I spent half of it not getting to San Diego. Long story short, we had crazy car trouble, drove in circles, spent the night in LA, took 4 hours driving back to Santa Barbara, and didn't get home until Saturday evening. Oh well, that's life for you.
On the plus side, unexpectedly getting my Sunday back gave me time to meal prep for the first time in weeks! And, as an added bonus, I got this awesome new cookbook in exchange for a review from Blogging for Books. Nothing like free stuff to brighten your day!
The VB6 Cookbook is a follow up to the #1 New York Times bestselling VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health...for Good. The concept presented in VB6 is pretty self explanatory: eat vegan meals every day before 6:00 p.m. and then enjoy a variety of foods for dinner. The cookbook has shopping tips, meal planning suggestions, and hundreds of recipes to help you stick to the plan.
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Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for writing a review. I was not compensated for this post and all opinions are my own.
I love the taste of meat but I've been trying to eat more of a plant based diet for health, environmental, and budget reasons. Especially since moving to California, I eat vegetarian meals pretty regularly and have a lot of vegetarian recipes in my repertoire. But since most of these meals rely on plenty of eggs, cheese, and Greek yogurt for protein, going VEGAN seems way more difficult.
Luckily, The VB6 Cookbook starts by breaking down the foods that make up a mostly vegan pantry. So, after consulting the helpful tables in the book, here's what I came home from the grocery store with:
As you can see I ended up with a ton of vegetables and plan on getting my protein from quinoa, beans, nuts, and tofu. For my "after 6" animal products, I picked up some egg whites and will probably also eat some eggs and salmon burgers I already have. In fact, this is pretty much what I would buy any other week, except without the cheese and Greek yogurt.
After my shopping trip, I made two recipes from the book. For breakfast, I made the Almond Quinoa.
It was fairly simple to make since all it consists of is toasted almonds and a big batch of quinoa cooked in almond milk. Really similar to a lot of my normal meal prep breakfasts, but a little lower in protein since I didn't add egg whites or Greek yogurt. We'll see if I notice any difference in how long I stay full.
I also attempted to make Phony Bologna for a lunch protein. I made the recipe in muffin form instead of loaf form since I wanted to cook faster and my blender would not blend the tofu mixture, so I'm not exactly sure how these turned out.
I'm definitely going to try a few of the dinner recipes throughout the week as well (time-permitting). I have my eye on the Beans, Shrimp, and Fennel and this yummy looking Steak Au Poivre with Mushrooms.
I'll post a full review of the book after trying more recipes and seeing if it's easy for me to stick to this whole VB6 thing for a week or if I have a crazy bacon binge break down.
Q: Do you always, sometimes, or never try to eat vegan food? Do you think I'll go into crazy animal-product withdrawal?
That's great you cook vegan. I like to cook vegetarian meals often but don't think I could do vegan. I like dairy way too much....especially cheese! ~L
ReplyDeleteYea vegetarian is definitely way easier than vegan. I missed out on a delicious homemade pear tart and cupcakes from my favorite bakery at work this week. Was sooo hard to pass that up!
DeleteI occasionally will cook vegetarian meals. There is a bakery across from my apartment that sells vegan banana chocolate chip coconut cookies... soooo good! sorry to hear about your weekend debacle! Looking fwd to your review.
ReplyDeleteOoh yum finding a good vegan cookie sounds like it would make VB6 a lot easier! Hope you are having a blast in Turkey! :)
DeleteOoh never seen that cookbook looks good. I am a vegetarian not vegan but I do eat vegan lots of the time and I am always looking for new cookbooks
ReplyDeleteI like it so far! I'll have a full review after I make some more of the recipes so stay tuned :)
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