Woohoo, I’ve got the bulk of dinner done and I got it done before 9am! It took me less than 20 minutes too! I found these green lentil lasagna sheets at Aldi last week and thankfully they’re oven ready. I also had some Cutting Vedge plant-based crumbles I’d gotten at our neighborhood discount bodega. How I made this was I popped the frozen crumbles in the microwave for a minute, just until it wasn’t completely frozen and stirred in this jar of pasta sauce (got those from Sam’s Club online), I blended half a leftover block of extra firm tofu and a whole block of silken tofu with some nooch, basil, and onion salt to make a ricotta replacement, and then I just layered it with some Earth Grown (Aldi) vegan mozzarella. Now it’s chilling in the fridge. This meal also happens to be completely gluten-free. It could be made soy-free if you made a bechamel sauce out of another plant-based milk to replace my tofu ricotta.
By the way, I had taken a picture of the back of the crumbles but when I was tweaking the photos, I ruined the quality. I just wanted to show the nutritional info. It was made out of quinoa, pea protein and artichokes (no gluten nor soy) and has 11 grams of protein per serving.
And I thought I’d include how I get a pretty high protein diet even in a caloric deficit. I usually get at least 10,000 steps in, and most days I hit the 22 minutes of being either in cardio or fat burning zone (when your heart is over ~112, I think. I’m somewhere in the ballpark.). I also do some strength training throughout the day with resistance bands. So I’m able to eat at least 1600 calories a day and lose somewhere between a pound or 2, give or take, a week. Seriously, I’m never feeling very hungry, like I have in the past, even when I might be eating up to 1800 calories. I think the high protein really helps A LOT! When I lost weight a few years back, I bought some new jeans, and they fit me now, better than they did when I was actually almost 10 lbs. lighter so I think my muscle mass is doing better this time around, and I really do think protein helped me retain more muscle and lose more fat. So today, I’ll be clocking in around 130 grams of protein. The other macros, fat and carbs, aren’t accurate because I really am not concerned where fat and carbs fall so when I have to manually add something in, if it’s not in the system, I just don’t enter anything but calories and protein. Usually, I think I tend to eat lower fat, but today is an anomaly and is higher fat because of the pasta sauce, crumbles and vegan cheese.
Wow! That looks tasty and nutritious. Good job!