Menu Plan Monday, aka, Sarah and Andrew Go Vegetarian

So I know that title is a bit of a shocker, but it's really not quite as dramatic as I made it sound... after considering how much our fresh produce consumption has recently peaked, Andrew and I figured we'd try going vegetarian on our main dishes (dinner) this week and see how it went. It's an experiment for health and money reasons mostly, and because we like cooking and trying new things. And we ended up saying "vegetarian for main dishes" because Andrew nearly always has turkey or tuna when we brown-bag lunch, and we weren't sure what we would replace that with.

Monday: We started out strong on the vegetarian wagon today with a four-bean curry meal we crock-potted... it consisted of kidney beans, chickpeas, black beans, and lentils, all cooked to a delicious kind of mush and flavored with garlic, masala garam, and hot curry. We ate it with couscous and were impressed with how good it tasted, since we had just sort of threw it all in there and hoped for the best. It was good enough (and DEFINITELY easy enough/cheap enough/healthy enough) so that next time I'm posting the "recipe" and pictures.
Tuesday: Four-bean curry and couscous round 2
Wednesday: Spinach and four-bean curry quesadillas (yeah um, the crock-pot was pretty full if you can't tell lol)
Thursday: Vegetable fried-rice, that we had planned on making last week but ended up skipping in favor of using the vegetables for other things.
Friday: Out with friends
Saturday: Vegetable fried-rice round 2

For lunches we'll have turkey and tuna, GoPicnic meals, and Lean Cuisine/Healthy Choice meals. For snacks and sides we've got yogurt, applesauce, carrots and hummus, salsa and chips, Alexia crunch snacks, and Kettle chips. I try to keep our lunch-expenditures to $2 or under per lunch, and that should be quite do-able this week. With eating vegetarian and buying most of our fresh produce from the International Farmers Market (hands-down the cheapest place I've found for organics), it should be a pretty economical week! And since I just finished buying a bunch of books for my classes, that's definitely a good thing. ;P

Here's wishing you an organized, healthy, and wallet-pain-free week of eating! :)

This post is part of Menu Plan Monday over at I'm an Organizing Junkie. Check out more great meal-plan ideas there!