With cooler mornings I’ve been loving starting my day off with oatmeal with chopped apples and cinnamon. Sometimes I add chopped prunes or raisins for a little extra sweetness and grab an orange for calcium and vitamin C to ward of all the viruses of the season
For lunch at work I threw a handful of green leafy spinach in a Tupperware and then added my “Mac and Cheese” with some hot sauce. I made a big pot of this plant- based Mac and Cheese over the weekend. I use penne pasta made from chick peas for a protein boost. I boil this with some fresh kale from the garden and green peas (more protein from this legume we all think of as a vegetable). I love the amount of leafy greens in this lunch. These dark greens release nitric oxide and help lower blood pressure and so I eat them everyday. For the “cheese” sauce I soak some cashews for a few hours in water and then blend them in a blender with nutritional yeast, soy milk, garlic, onion powder, paprika, turmeric and a jalapeño pepper.
I also had a side of walnuts for omega-3s and the rest of my apple I didn’t put in my morning oatmeal.
For a snack I had hot cinnamon tea and some oatmeal cookies. These are a fun no bake cookie that involve using the food processor to blend up oats, dates, raisins, cinnamon, flax seed, and almond butter and then forming into balls and keeping in the freezer. Yum! I curled up on the couch to finish my book for book club with this snack beside me.
For dinner my husband cooked me his pumpkin curry! This is his top secret recipe. I was amazed as a newlywed when he took our uncarved Halloween pumpkin and halved it, de-seeded it, and roasted it in a hot oven. I guess pumpkins are just big squashes! He uses the roasted pumpkin for our Thanksgiving pumpkin pie each year and keeps chunks of cooked pumpkin in the freezer so that we can enjoy this dish all year. He uses coconut milk, black beans, curry and other spices, and tops with cilantro. We serve it over rice and it is delicious!
Happy plant eating, Jolly Hearts!
