Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
I had decided not to eat meat for a month, because I’d already gotten a good start on that anyway without noticing, but I fucked that up last night, so I guess it’s just going to be mostly a month without meat.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going all granola-bear-hugging. Hell, I killed a squirrel yesterday just so that animals don’t forget that I prefer them dead. I just wanna lose a few pounds before I find myself having to haul said pounds up and down the green belt and Big Bend all summer, and the last time I tried going a month without meat (a year or so ago) I found a lot of vegetarian meals good enough to include in the stone-coldest of killers’ diet.
Anyway, I’ve eaten a lot of good stuff the last week, so I figured I’d give a few shout-outs. In keeping with my lazy-ass habits, none of this stuff takes more than about 5 minutes to make.
1. Whole Foods’ Poblano corn chowder: $7 a quart. Dunk a hunk of their $3 focaccia and you’ve got a couple of damned good meals for $5 apiece. The same goes for their tempeh chili. I wouldn’t say it was as good, but it’s damned sure not bad.
2. Bean and queso tamales from Central Market. They’re $9 a dozen, up from $8, but cover ‘em with some of their spicy pico de gallo ($5 a pound, a little dab’ll do ya) and you’ve got three meals for less than $4 each. If anybody tells you Mexicans don’t eat pico on tamales, tell ‘em you’re from Texas and punch ‘em inna nose.
3. If you look in the consignment shelf near the checkout on the north wall of Whole Foods, you’ll find several things from Austin-local Karma Kuisine that cost $3 each and are hella yummy on the tummy–Nepali pasta, Saag pasta (a little spicy), and samosas, which are Indian fried potato dumplings, and come with a little thing of sweet sauce. They’re all good. A couple of these dishes fills me up.
4. Get fresh basil pesto from Central Market ($9 a pound, but a third of a pound goes a long way). Cook up some penne, then toss with a couple tablespoons of pesto and maybe a teaspoon of butter per good-sized bowl. Damn good, damn cheap, damn quick. Probably not the quickest way to lose weight.
5. The mini cholla rolls from Whole foods ($2 a dozen) don’t make a great meal by themselves, but they work great with the pastas and soups above. I like to cut them in half, put a really thin coat of butter on top, and sprinkle them with garlic salt before toasting them until the edges brown. Now that I think about it, I probably could sprinkle them with a little oregano, too. A couple of rolls are enough to accompany a good meal; they’re rather small, miniature even.
6. Also in the way bread to break, Whole Foods has blueberry cornbread and jalapeño cornbread that are both damned good. The blueberry’s more of a novelty thing, the jalapeño has staying power. All corn bread should have jalapeños in. Central market cornbread isn’t quite as good, but the difference is so minimal it’s not worth going out of your way to get one or the other.
7. Whole Foods sells prepared fettucine with tomatoes that also has some sunflower kernels in. I don’t know what they do, exactly, with the tomatoes, but I suspect they hypodermically inject them with pure deliciousness. It costs about $7 for a meal-sized package, but it’s a damned fine way to fill the ol’ calorie requirement.
8. I haven’t even eaten any of the following this week, but thinking of good things without meat in made me think of them: Bear Creek makes some great dehydrated vegetarian chili and potato soup you can pick up at any HEB. It makes damned good camping food, too. Mahatma makes a whole line of delicious rice-and-seasoning-in-a-bag dishes, but if you cook up the beans and rice (takes 20 minutes, but very little human intervention, just fire and forget) and eat it with corn bread, that’s probably going to be your best bet, right there.
