A week of nourishing budget friendly meals

Back to Go Gently's YouTube channel. My name is Bonnie Wright and I am so grateful you're here. Today we are in my kitchen and we are going to be cooking a week's worth of food. Well, by that I mean 10 meals, lunch and dinner for Monday through Friday. I often find the weekend a great opportunity to batch cook some food and give me a bit more freedom of my time in the week ahead for busy days, lazy days, whatever that may be. Now you're probably thinking, you know what, I hate batch cooking, I don't like to eat the same meal consecutively. Well, fear not, this is a bit of a different method. Imagine a dinner plate which is all constructed by different ingredients, whether that's rice or vegetables or salad. We're basically making each of those separate things so that throughout the week we can kind of build different meals based on those kind of core ingredients that we've already made that are full of flavour and can be made in many different ways. So we are going to head to the grocery store, get the ingredients we need as it's the weekend. I'm definitely someone who loves to get there early before it gets too busy, so let's get going. And we mustn't forget our tote bags and I also have some bags that I can put bulk things in and vegetables. Off to Sprouts we go. So I've set myself a budget of $30 for these 10 meals, filling up with some rice and sunflower seeds in the bulk section. Looking for some chickpeas and some cannellini beans. Browsing through the vegetables, having to make some choices. Oh, I won't get one free, love that. And I love seeing this, it's rescued food that would have otherwise been thrown away because they're odd shapes and sizes. If only they weren't on plastic, but still saving waste food. Another buy one get one free. And finally some pita breads for some lazy days. Okay, we are back from the grocery store. We managed to be in budget at just over $28 for all the things we got and it's time to get cooking. Wow, we've got so many things. Delicious, got kale, parsnips, carrots, sweet potato, lemon, beets, rice, tofu, different types of beans. So first I think we roast the vegetables because they definitely take a long amount of time. And then I'm going to move on to the beet dip because the beets also need to be cooked. And we'll slowly work our way through each step. Okay, so in a big roasting tray, we're going to roast these vegetables at 375 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 45 minutes, making sure you turn them a couple of times. So I realized as I'm cutting the parsnips that they're probably going to cook a lot quicker than the sweet potatoes. So I'm actually going to cut all the potatoes I cut in half again, just so everything evenly cooks. So I'm also going to roast an entire garlic with this, which will be super helpful for just flavoring the whole thing. And I'm going to season this with thyme and cumin, olive oil, salt and pepper. I personally am someone who always goes heavy on the herbs because I feel like it really just helps to add flavor to things. Now we have the beet dip we're going to make where we need to cook these beets and we're going to mix it with the cannellini beans, lemon, olive oil, and make a lovely bright dip. I basically have a pot of water. They just need to be submerged in the water. We're going to cook them until they're soft. It can really vary on how big the beets are, but it could take anywhere from like 30 to 40 minutes. If you cut them smaller, they'll cook quicker. So now we're going to make a sunflower dressing that we're using some parsley, sunflower seeds, lemon, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper to taste. This will just be a really great bright dressing to kind of drizzle over your food throughout the week. So next up we're going to be cooking some of these garbanzo beans, chickpeas, in the oven. We're going to kind of spice them up with some cayenne, paprika, olive oil, salt and pepper. And a great trick to remember is when you drain your chickpeas from the can is to save the liquid water that they're in because they're an incredible base for an aquafaba chocolate pudding, which we may have time to make. So now we're drying the chickpeas before we roast them. We really want to get all the moisture out that we can. In the chickpeas we have olive oil, salt and pepper, paprika and cayenne. So next up is my Bonnie's beet dip, which is actually also in my book, Go Gently. This is one of my favorite dishes. I'm using great northern beans, kind of similar to cannellini beans, anything that has that creamy waxy flavor of beans. We're going to mix that with the beets, lemon, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. And we didn't get dill today. We opted for parsley because it worked for both the dips, but in the recipe in my book it's with dill. Okay, next up is our tofu, which we are going to cook in a pan. Now I'm just making a quick and easy glaze for the tofu that I'll add to it once it's cooked. Okay, now we're going to do a quick massaged kale. I always really try and take out these big intense parts because when they're not cooked, it's pretty hard to digest. So definitely need a lot of olive oil in this. It's really about massaging the oil into the kale. And here's everything. We have some roasted carrots, parsnips and sweet potato, massaged kale salad, tofu, crispy chickpeas, beet dip that's from my book, a nice sunflower seed parsley kind of dressing and some rice and some pita breads we bought. And we are going to now construct some different bowls and variations of food that you could have throughout your week. Obviously it's totally up to you, however you want to build your meal, you go that way. And obviously with different things, these are interchangeable depending on what vegetables you find in the grocery store, just cook those. If you don't like kale, maybe make a salad and just lean into what you know you love, but it's more just practicing this concept of constructing and building your batch meals. Yum. So it's been so fun cooking today. I'm so excited that my week ahead is going to be full of flavor and some color and also some ease as I really put the effort in today and I'll be so grateful for that as my week goes ahead. As you can see, there's many ways you can put these meals together. I really hope you feel inspired to try some of these or make everything your own. I'll be sure to put the recipes for these things in the captions. Again, thank you for joining us on Go Gently's YouTube channel. I hope you have a beautiful Sunday. So late in the evening, I did use that saved chickpea water to make my chocolate aquafaba pudding, a recipe that's in my book Go Gently. Let's have a taste. Fluffy. So I did say I'd update you on my knitting. I'm doing a little bit better. I switched. I kind of abandoned the project I started before and I started with this nice white wool. I'm not sure what it's going to be, maybe like a mini scarf, but you know, I'm still committed to making myself be a better knitter. So I'm going to go and do some more knitting and enjoy my aquafaba chocolate mousse.