The month of not eating out: Sneak Peak

March will be my month of not eating out. No Chinese food. No restaurants with friends (but you can come over and I'll cook for you). Basic exceptions to the rules are Chipotle is allowed on long run days (once a week not counting step backs) and coffee is generally allowed. (I can't believe how infrequently I have coffee now compared to other times in my life.)

I started keeping track of what I eat, which has been an interesting experience. (Do you realize how many calories are actually in candy? Bread? Spaghetti? Food from any restaurant?) I realized that I eat practically no vegetables if I'm not cooking them. It's not acceptable to rely on Chipotle is a vegetable source. I do eat fruit but still not as much as I should. It's also much easier to track how much I eat when I know what's in everything.

I've decided to go for a whole month of not eating out a couple of times before. The first time was just after my kitchen was finally done and that time it was mostly a financial decision plus I'd literally eaten out for a month and I was sick of it. The second time was last summer during marathon training and that was partly financial and partly a weight loss measure.

I was going to go to Chipotle today but I decided to skip Chipotle today and keep an extra Chipotle day in reserve for March. (How's that for motivation?) After running, I spent some time watching the hockey game and playing on the internets. I scoped out some recipes and went shopping.

First dish of the day is Tomato Lentil Soup: I don't have one recipe to refer you to here. I have several. I refuse to use canned tomatoes or tomato paste in my soups so this tomato soup recipe has good instructions for roasting the tomato and onion that become the base of the soup. This one has good instructions about adding the lentils and other seasoning.

In my house tomatoes get their own cutting board and their own knife so the juice and ooze doesn't contaminate anything else. (I hate tomatoes but I have been craving this soup like you wouldn't believe.)

Lots of onions in the soup too.

Yes, that is an entire head of garlic roasting along side the veggies. That actually got used in a couple different things.

An ingredient not listed in any of the recipes in sugar. I used brown sugar in my soup. It may sound odd, but I just needed a little something to cut down all the acid from those fresh (and no longer gross) tomatoes.


Next up was Lentil Pea and Potato Curry. This time I totally left the tomatoes out. (That was predictable.)
This was the last dish I made so I kept forgetting to take pictures. Here's the finished product. Anyone know where I can find some naan in the Twin Cities?



Apparently I was craving red foods today. I got beets to roast because I was watching a television show where someone was cooking them and they looked good. (No, seriously.) It helps that it's one of the few foods grown locally that I can buy right now.
This one was almost the size of my head. Are they supposed to be that big?

Roasting tip: let the tin foil be your friend.

I only have so many jelly roll trays (what some of you may call a cookie sheet). One was being used to roast the tomatoes so the beets had to marinate for a while.

But an huge amount of beets roasts down into practically nothing. It's so good. They taste like potato chips.

Now I just need to clean up. (I'm gonna lay on the couch a while longer before I go do that...)