Settling into good (or at least better!) habits

Ah, it's that time of week again... my beloved Monday. Monday is a wonderful day in the Pethtel household. It consists of one or more of the following: How I Met Your Mother, Castle, Buffalo Chicken sandwiches (formerly calzones) or pizza. Since starting the vegan challenge, we have not had calzones or pizza (mostly because each have gobs of cheese and the calzones were making me obese). I am slowly mastering the art of creating a vegan Buffalo Chick'n panini.

I finally made an acceptable vegan version of ranch dressing. I can't have my delicious buffalo sauce without it being paired with ranch. While I understand that this is not really the healthiest obsession to have, it could be worse! I could be trying to make mock Big Macs (*shudder*). I'm reading Fast Food Nation, hence the shudder. :)

The vegan ranch recipe can be found HERE, though I did throw in a splash of regular soy milk, some dried dill, and some onion powder. This time I DID use the blender, and it came out quite nicely! I'm sure if you were to put it up next to bottled ranch dressing, it probably wouldn't be as good... but you know what? I made it myself from scratch, it's devoid of animal products, and I can put whatever sort of herbs I'd like! So that makes it a winner in my book. :) I noticed from the last (failed) batch, that it's much better after sitting in the fridge for awhile. I had it with baby carrots earlier today, and it was amazing. I can't wait to try the ranch on the paninis tonight!

Vegan Ranch!

And why, yes that is an old Prairie Farms sherbet container. I am very much my grandmother's granddaughter. She was raised during the Great Depression, so she never really throws anything out that could easily be reused. My family kids her about holding onto plastic containers that are supposed to be thrown away and recycled. She's the matriarch of our family, not to mention the best cook by far (sorry family members!). She would make so much food for Sunday lunches or holidays that there were always leftovers, and what made better to-go containers than old plastic food containers? She never really worried about getting the containers back, though if you amassed a collection of her Cool Whip bowls, you'd be politely reminded of it the next time you took home leftovers. Anyway, my grandmother is brilliant in more ways than one, but this is one of her good habits that I picked up... though I would say her love of reading is much more important, and I luckily inherited that as well. :)

On a side note: last night we had quick and easy Indian food. I put the packaging in with the recycling which was collected early this morning, so I can't remember exactly what it was or who made it. Epic fail on my part, but the food itself was really good. Pretty sure it was Channa Masala? All you had to do was make rice and then slit the package open and nuke it in the microwave for 2 minutes, and boom, dinner is served. Completely necessary on days when I just don't feel like cooking!

Also, we are no longer traveling for Easter, so I can go ahead and complete the vegan challenge as I initially intended. I started on April 7th, so I'm going to go until May 7th. I'm not going to lie - it's been kind of a pain to cook without any sort of dairy, but the substitutions if I can get them (or make them) are pretty awesome.