Married to the Empire

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Cheap Vegetarian

My husband is giving up meat for the next 2 weeks. This is totally his decision, which is somewhat shocking. But now I need to come up with stuff he will be happy to eat for lunch and dinner.

I got a head start a couple of weeks ago when I decided to go Greek by making hummus and baba ganoush. This wound up being extremely inexpensive, as I cooked dry chickpeas in my crockpot. I soaked them overnight, then drained off the water, put them in the crockpot, added more water, then turned the thing on high and let it cook all day. Easy and cheap.

Mark Bittman's hummus recipe has become my favorite. It's delicious and simple to make with a food processor. As for the baba ganoush, I tried this recipe, which was good, but not great. (I'm comparing it to the baba ganoush at a local Greek restaurant, which is fantastic.)

In addition to 2 containers for immediate consumption, which I failed to photograph, the 2 recipes made all of this for the freezer:



And I still had enough chickpeas leftover for another round of hummus when I run out:



A 99-cent eggplant and about $2-$3 in dried chickpeas made enough food for multiple meals.

2 comments:

*carrie* said...

I'm not an eggplant fan, but I do like hummus. I hate to buy it because I know it can be made more cheaply at home, but I've tried several recipes, and haven't found one I like yet. Will keep this one in mind. I have two others in my queue first!

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