A Week of High-Fiber Meals (Vegan)

Protein has been getting all the attention for years, but lately I'm hearing more people talk about the importance of fiber. We all know we need more of it for gut health and for satiety, but about 95% of us are not hitting our daily goals. So this week, I want to share some of my favorite recipes and hacks that I used to get between 30 and 40 grams of fiber per day without it feeling like a chore. Let's get started. I want to kick this video off with a lunch that I have been obsessed with for the past couple weeks. It's a tuna cotto sandwich, vegan obviously. We're going to start by making a batch of a classic chickpea tuna salad. So we've got chickpeas here, but the key to make it a little bit higher in fiber is to add some seeds. Adds a nice crunch too and a nice flavor. So I've got pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, sometimes I'll add sunflower seeds, and I got all these ingredients from Thrive Market who are sponsoring today's video. You guys know I love Thrive Market. I've been using them for years to get all my pantry staples and snacks and cleaning supplies delivered straight to my house. So they are great. Let's go ahead and drain your chickpeas. Give them a good rinse. So normally I just mash the chickpeas with a fork, but lately I've been using this little food processor and kind of pulsing it and making it more of like a pate. And oddly, the texture, I really prefer it that way. I also feel like it makes it hold together better on the sandwich. You don't have little pieces of chickpea falling apart. Oh, I missed one. Just a couple of pulses. Pop this in our bowl. And I'm also going to run my celery and some scallions through this too. So that's really fine bits. Celery. I've got two scallions. And again, I'm just going to pulse it a couple of times. Looking good. I'm going to add in a few tablespoons of hemp seeds. Again, great source of omegas, minerals, and fiber. And some pumpkin seeds. And I've just gone ahead and blitzed these up in the food processor as well. Now a few tablespoons of nutritional yeast. I recently learned this is deceptively high in fiber. Some Dijon mustard. I usually add pickles. Today we're going to do pepperoncini. And lately, just to lighten it up a little bit, I've been doing a mixture of veganaise and this Greek style protein yogurt. I was skeptical at first, okay, but it actually is really good. This flavor is good. Trust me. I'm a certified mayo girly, and I really don't miss it. I can't open it. So just a couple dollops of this, and then a couple dollops of the veganaise. I just measure with my heart. What is the yogurt made out of? It's so thick. It's like coconut and cashew, and it's got pea protein in it. Then some lemon juice to brighten everything up. Salt and pepper. Got the diamond crystal. It smells so good already. I'm very excited. And this is going to last us a couple of days. See what I mean since I pulsed the chickpeas in the food processor? I don't know. The texture is just better. I'm going to pop this in the fridge for a couple of minutes. The seeds will soak up some of the extra moisture, and it'll get really nice and thick. I'm going to get the rest of the sandwich ingredients. Got all the ingredients for my sandwich. I always used to assume that because I'm vegan, surely I'd be getting enough fiber. But I actually ran the numbers recently, and I realized that even I am coming up short on some days. I think it's because there's this misconception that the best way to get fiber is to eat huge salads or just eat a lot of vegetables. But actually, some of the best sources of fiber are things like whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. So whole grain bread, seeded bread, is actually a great source of fiber. For this sandwich, I have been loving this lavash flatbread. It's like whole grain and flax. One flatbread is 5 grams of fiber, 6 grams of protein. Pretty incredible. You can also get those like low-carb tortillas. Those are usually very high in fiber. I also have this hero bread to try out. Just one slice is 12 grams of fiber. That's crazy. That's like half of what you need in a day. So I'm going to use the lavash today. I'm getting it nice and toasty. I add pesto, avocado, and tomato along with my chickpea salad, and it is so good. Also, avocado, sneakily high in fiber. Half of an avocado is usually around 6 to 7 grams of fiber. So get back on your avocado grind. I'm talking to myself. So I like to take the lavash, fold it in thirds to make like a pocket, and then toast them until they're crispy. Pay no mind to our tiny little microphone right here. It's lunchtime. I wrap it in this parchment, and it just makes it feel like I got a fancy sandwich from a deli, and I'm treating myself. Also, this sandwich is like a little bit messy, so it holds everything together. Like a diaper. Okay, ready? Yeah. It's incredible. It tastes like tuna salad. The crunchy lavash is so good. I can't remember how many times I've had lavash before we started making this recently. It's so good. I love it. Like a perfect springtime, summertime lunch. Wow. Now, because we're fiber maxing today, I also got an Olipop. I don't usually drink these because I find it's just, it's kind of overkill since we do tend to get a lot of fiber, but if you're struggling to get enough, one can is 9 grams of fiber. That's crazy. Yeah, it's pretty good for a drink. Yeah, I don't really understand liquid fiber, how that works, but I'll take it. Listen, Olipop also available on Thrive Market. Yes, that flavor is really good. It is good. Gonna finish our lunch, check back in for a high fiber dinner. Hey guys, it is dinnertime. I just made a stir fry with some air fried tofu, a bunch of veggies we just had in our fridge, a handful of roasted cashews. It smells so good. Very excited to eat that. Now, you guys know we eat tofu multiple times per week for dinner and until very recently, we would always just make plain steamed white rice. Like I'm half Filipino, the rice cooker is like part of our family basically, but plain white rice has almost no fiber in it and a really simple upgrade that we've been making lately is to just add some lentils and quinoa into the mix. The combination is great because it adds a lot of fiber. It's a great source of plant protein and it adds like a little bit of nuttiness and hardiness, but you're still getting rice, so you still get that comfort factor. Also really easy to make. The green lentils take a little bit longer to cook than the other things, so I will soak those in some boiling water for about 30 minutes just to soften them up first. I'll rinse the rice and the quinoa together really well and then I just pop everything into my rice cooker. If you like to cook rice on the stove, you could do that too. You just start it on the regular white rice or standard setting and it cooks up perfectly. Super fluffy. Just mix it all up together and it's just a great option to always have on hand. I like to freeze them in the super cubes. I have the half cup one and the one cup version and then I'll just freeze them and we always have a high fiber like rice grain blend. We can just pull it out of the freezer, microwave it for lunch, for dinner. It's great. And of course I always get my organic lentils and quinoa from Thrive Market along with all my other whole grains. And as someone who cooks constantly for work and for regular life and goes through so many ingredients, it's just so convenient to have everything delivered straight to my door and I always know that my pantry is going to be well stocked. I'm never going to have to randomly run out in the middle of a workday to get an ingredient that I ran out of. And of course they have so many high quality organic options which is really important to me and they have a buy it again feature which is super convenient because I'm kind of forgetful. So it's nice to be able to see things I purchased before, things that I go through really quickly like quinoa for example. So I can always make sure that I restock them on time. So if you'd like to try out Thrive Market for yourself, you can go to thrivemarket.com slash Sarah's Vegan Kitchen. Right now you can get 30% off your first order plus a free gift which is incredible. So I'm going to go heat up my lentil quinoa rice and we're going to have our stir fry for dinner. Okay ignore the giant soft box please. Here's our delicious stir fry. Super excited. This has shiitake mushrooms which is like one of my favorite stir fry ingredients. That is really good. I air fried the tofu extra so it looks like a little bit dry when it came out of the air fryer but then when you put it in the sauce it soaks it all up and it like just gets like perfectly chewy. It's very satisfying. And the rice, super fluffy. I like to use a long grain rice for this so that it stays fluffy instead of like gummy. I use basmati in this batch and it's really nice. So I'm going to go enjoy my dinner and I will check back in with you tomorrow. Hey guys we are back. It's day two of fiber maxing and today I'm gonna do a little bit of meal prep. Nothing crazy. I'm gonna prep this really nutritious high fiber salad. It's my cabbage, cashew, and edamame crunch salad that is so savory and satisfying to eat. And I'm very much the kind of person who I don't have a healthy option prepped for me ahead of time. When it comes time for lunch I'm just gonna be snacking at whatever's in the pantry. I'm gonna be eating chips, crackers, candy. So by doing a little bit of work ahead of time I'm really setting myself up for success. So let me show you. I've prepped all the ingredients here. So I have lots of finely shredded green and red cabbage. This is very high in fiber. I love the crunch it gives and I just feel like this is an underrated vegetable. It has lots of nutrition in it and it's also very hearty so it's gonna keep well for several days. Lots of shredded carrots. Again very nutritious. For our protein and lots of fiber, edamame. I just went ahead and defrosted this. Half a cup of edamame is about six grams of fiber. Pretty incredible. I'm obsessed with crunch textural variety in my salad so I've got some roasted cashews and almonds. I just chopped them up. So I got both of these in bulk from Thrive Market and I just roasted them myself and I did a quick price comparison against my local grocery stores and healthy ingredients like these are always cheaper on Thrive Market. Orders over $49 ship for free and I pretty much always hit that minimum. So it's a very convenient great way to save money on staples like these that I always want in my pantry. The last things I have for the salad. I have some finely chopped romaine. I just think it's nice to have something a little bit lighter to mix in with the cabbage because the cabbage is very hearty like I said and the jaw can get fatigued so this kind of lightens it up. And then I love cilantro so I have a lot of fresh cilantro to add in and then I made this almond butter ginger soy dressing. It's so good. So easy to make too. For this dressing I just combined some roasted almond butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar, lime juice, maple syrup, some toasted sesame oil, some fresh minced ginger and garlic, a little bit of sambal chili paste, and then if you need to you can add a little bit of warm water just to adjust the consistency. One quick note about this salad. I meal prepped this for us last week and I was prepping the cilantro and I thought there was a typo in the recipe because I was like there's no way I'm supposed to use this much cilantro. I got to like a quarter cup and I was like this has to be it right? No I'm just obsessed. She just loves cilantro and I will say it's not overpowering in the recipe. It is the right amount. It just kind of blew my mind. Yeah but if you are a cilantro hater you could use Thai basil, fresh mint, you can add some scallions in there. Also look how we're dressed. It's like 90 degrees in Colorado today. It is hot. It is salad weather. What is happening? You can just prep the salad base in a huge bowl but I am a lover of a salad jar. It's just so convenient. You can layer the dressing on the bottom then the more hearty ingredients that aren't going to get wilted from the salts and the acids in the dressing and then like more delicate ingredients at the top and it's just so easy in the middle of the day. Grab one out of the fridge, shake it up, dump it out on a plate and you have a really quick healthy meal. So I'm gonna do my salad layering now. Okay guys we're done. A little bit of prep work and now we have these beautiful salads prepped for the next couple days and one jar. This is about 16 grams of fiber. It's also pretty high up there in protein as well because of the edamame and the nuts and the almond butter dressing and if you wanted to make this even more filling you could add in some like cooked and chilled soba noodles, rice noodles, you could add an extra can of beans in there to bulk it up even more. And if you're thinking like that is a lot of food, it is but it's mostly water right and once you mix it with the dressing the greens are going to wilt a little bit. Yeah this is like volume eating at its finest you guys. So let's shake one up and give it a try. You also get a little workout when you eat one of these. Here we go. Oh my goodness look at that. That is health and it smells so good. This is my favorite kind of salad. It has like a bunch of different textures, flavors. Why did I blow on it? Like it was hot. It was um That's so funny. It was instinctual. Did you burn your mouth? Delicious. Okay so one of my main gripes with salad is that it just gets wilty so fast so I love the salad because it doesn't do that. I'm also such a sucker for an almond butter or peanut butter dressing or sauce so it absolutely slaps. Also I just realized that I had bought avocado to put on top of this salad. Don't put it in the jars just put it on fresh when you're about to enjoy the salad but if you want to add more fiber do that. Okay I just prepped all the ingredients for dinner. I'm going to be making my marry me butter beans recipe which I make all the time but I'm making a slight variation today. The recipe calls for two cans of butter beans. Today I blended one of the cans with the cashews to make a cream. It's just going to make the dish way saucier because I'm going to serve it over pasta. I have been loving this Brahmi protein pasta lately. One serving has five grams of fiber. It's almost three times as much as regular pasta and 12 grams of protein which is really good. And another reason I love Thrive Market so much is how easy it is to find products like these because you can filter by your diet or different ingredient preferences. So not only can you look for things like gluten-free or plant-based but you can also search high fiber or high protein and that's how I came across this pasta which has now become a staple for us. And you can also filter by value things like b-corp, sustainable, regenerative if that's important to you. So it just makes it easier to stock your pantry with the good stuff. So I'm going to go make dinner now. I'm very excited this is going to be a very cozy meal. Hey guys we are going on a date. We're headed to the movie. What are we seeing? We're seeing Project Hail Mary which is a movie I've been waiting to see for so long because Project Hail Mary is my favorite book of all time. I've listened to it like three times and I've read it physically one time and I just love it and just thinking about going to see the movie is making me like a little teary-eyed. Really? I'm so excited. I have not read the book but every time Eric reads a book he basically updates me on it so I feel like I've read the book. She knows every single thing that happens in the book slash movie. Yes his other favorite book slash movie is Martian which is by the same author and we've watched it many times. Now on the topic of fiber since we gotta we gotta bring it all back to fiber uh we're snacking on some popcorn today obviously usually if you just leave the it's vegan friendly but you can double check make sure there's no dairy in there and then. Wait wait wait I gotta note about popcorn. Listen we know the movie theater popcorn not like good for you okay a lot of fat a lot of salt but ignoring all of that it's high in fiber which means it's highly relevant to this video. Yes it is. Another thing is you guys Eric is strict when it comes to the popcorn. We usually share a popcorn and he will well okay he he does let me eat it before the movie but he would prefer that I not start eating it. You're allowed to eat the popcorn whenever you please it's just a personal it's just a personal thing I will not start eating the popcorn until the actual movie starts. As soon as the lights go down popcorn. Okay another thing candy wise there are a lot of options out there now that have a lot of fiber one serving of joyride eight grams of fiber so I have that um I also have unreal's which are just normal candy but they're delicious and yes we do smuggle candy into the theater. Do not tell anyone don't tell anyone. I usually will just have regular candy there but sometimes I just you know I'm mindlessly eating candy the whole time and then I get sick after so it's nice to have you know a lower sugar higher fiber option but yeah we'll check in after the movie. Hey guys day three and I wanted to share some of my favorite healthy high fiber snack options. I love grazing I love making a big plate with lots of different variety to snack on so here's some of my favorite things edamame in the pod I just add some salt very high in protein and fiber in one cup of edamame in the pods there's about six grams of fiber incredible and then as I mentioned earlier I love crunchy salty snacks like if you give me a bag of potato chips I'm going to eat it all in one sitting so I always like to have healthier alternatives in my pantry something I've been loving lately is a classic just crispy roasted chickpeas you can buy them at the store but I just like to make them myself they're really easy to make and it's cheaper that way and if you're going to make them yourself I recommend making two or three cans at a time because these are addictive and I will just crunch and crunch and crunch and then they're all gone half a cup of these has about 10 grams of fiber so if you want to make these all you have to do is rinse your canned chickpeas really really well and then you want to take a kitchen towel or some paper towels and blot them dry really thoroughly toss them in some olive oil salt and pepper you can add different spices to nutritional yeast is really great to add to these as well and then just air fry them I just kind of go by feel it takes like around 20-25 minutes for me usually but every air fryer is a little bit different and they are just so crunchy and satisfying oh so good crackers and dips are another thing I have poor self-control with so I really like these mary's gone crackers crackers uh these are the super seed one they're made with quinoa brown rice pumpkin seeds it tastes a little bit healthier but they are really good uh one serving of these three grams fiber five grams of plant protein and you serve it with some hummus even more fiber then of course popcorn is always a great option you get three cups of four grams of fiber great for those moments when you just want to be mindlessly snacking watching a movie tv show we have popcorn multiple times a week usually eric will make it on the stove I think it tastes best that way but we always have some in our pantry as well for those days and you just want something quick as far as fruit goes berries super high in fiber one cup of raspberries has eight grams of fiber lots of other nutritional benefits too and they are delicious expensive though but delicious one last thing I've been loving lately and I had forgotten how much I loved just snacking on raw celery with almond butter or peanut butter or hummus I used to regularly eat like a half of a bunch of celery in one sitting it's just so crispy and salty and refreshing so I rediscovered my love for celery and almond butter lately and I'm loving it another benefit of fiber besides the fact that it helps you feel full and satisfied is that it helps stabilize your blood sugar because it slows the absorption of carbohydrates so it's going to prevent those glucose spikes so if you're like me and you're someone who will have lunch or a snack in the middle of the day and you'll feel like you need to go to sleep afterwards being a little bit more mindful of getting enough fiber should definitely help you to avoid those slumps okay so that's all I wanted to say about the snacks but it just occurred to me we never followed up about Project Hail Mary so we're gonna do a little debrief now and then we'll close out the video I'm handing the mic to Eric and I'm gonna keep on snacking quietly I absolutely loved Project Hail Mary I mean they had to condense a really long book into a movie and anytime you do that you're gonna lose some of what makes the book the book but I think they did a really good job with the adaptation like the stuff they cut out it was it was fine to cut out I think I guess someone who loves the book I think it was fine they didn't change anything in a crazy way which is really the trap that movie adaptations fall into which is just like Ready Player One I loved that book I hated that movie they changed the entire thing so I think they did a really good job with that they just kind of like trimmed the fat with some of the story and a lot of the science which I think was an absolutely okay call the movie was still two and a half hours long yeah so if you're a fan of the book and you went to see the movie please let us know in the comments what you thought I mean even if you haven't read the book let us know what you thought of the movie if you went to see it I thought the movie was great obviously I don't have as much of a personal connection to the story and the characters as Eric did but I thought it was good it was very unexpected it was way more whimsical than I thought it was going to be I thought the tone was going to be a bit more similar to The Martian a bit more serious but it was very whimsical and the soundtrack was really good like I hardly ever notice soundtracks to films when I'm watching them the first time but this one really leapt out at me it was great all right I banished Eric so that I could do the outro myself thank you guys so much for watching it's been fun let me know if you have any other favorite high fiber snacks recipes meal ideas because I definitely am making this a priority for myself moving forward trying to eat better this year if you watch to the end thank you so much and I will see you very soon bye