I Ate Like a Vegan World Cup Player for 24 Hours

Two breakfasts. Hey, so there's this little thing going on called the World Cup. I have become a little bit obsessed. I was never a big sports person despite being from Massachusetts, but the World Cup has actually lured me in in such a way that I am hooked. I'm hooked. I like the camaraderie. I like how it's bringing people together. We all love Holland. The World Cup being in the U.S. has been so cool. I started getting curious because I am so blown away with the stamina that these people have. The field is huge. How are they running all over that field for an hour and a half and even more? I don't know. So I started getting really fascinated by what they might eat. What are vegan soccer, football players, what are they eating? What are they doing? So today I'm going to eat like a vegan World Cup champion. I need to know. I'll be honest. There weren't a lot of them, at least not publicly. There are a lot that eat mostly plant-based, but it was very hard to find any that call themselves vegan. So I did my best. The first one we're going to do is Alex Morgan. Alex Morgan played four edition of the FIFA Women's World Cup with the United States national team. Let's go. Winning in 2015 and 2019. In 2012, Morgan and the U.S. team won gold at the Olympics. So she's a big deal. All right. We're going to start with Alex Morgan's breakfast. Or actually I should say breakfasts. Two breakfasts. This is what she eats before a match. She has an oatmeal and then she has pancakes. I always get a little bummed about the oatmeal, but then I saw that she has a pancake sequel after that. And I got excited again. Oatmeal, nothing too crazy here, right? I'm just going to simmer some oats in some soy milk. Before it's totally finished, I like to put a scoop of peanut butter in there. And then I will usually mash a banana, toss that right in there. And then I'll add in some frozen berries. Loaded oatmeal. Easy peasy. Okay, here we go. First meal of the day. Nothing to not love about oatmeal with peanut butter and berries and bananas. Yep, that's good. Oh my gosh, so good. Damn, that's delicious. I knew I was going to like this because I eat this myself all the time. But what I'm really excited for is the prospect of doing some pancakes after this. And we'll see how energized I am. I feel like I'm going to be very full and ready for a nap. But we'll see. This is great. Off to a swimming start. We're going to make like a vegan butternut milk. Not a butternut milk. Buttermilk. I have been doing this for too long. By taking some oat milk, soy milk, whatever plant-based milk you like, and adding some vinegar to it. This acidity helps to curdle it a little bit so it gets that same effect as buttermilk. It makes it fluffier. Baking powder is going to be the other secret ingredient that's going to make these super, super fluffy, which is very important to me. So we're going to mix together some flour and our baking powder and some salt. Mix all that together and then mix that together. Then we're going to add the wet to the dry. I usually mash a banana up and just add it right in there. But we're not going to do that this time. We're going to slice up the banana and have it in the pancakes whole. And I like to add a little bit of a neutral oil into the batter as well. It just helps with flipping the pancakes, I've noticed. You could also add vegan butter if you want to. Whatever you prefer. Mix that up. It doesn't get any better than pancakes. It really doesn't. It doesn't. I'm not using my free will as well as I could. I should be eating pancakes all the time. Ah! It didn't happen. Ah! Oh my god. Mmm! Look at those pancakes. Oh yeah. Oh my god, that's delicious. Yep. Breakfast of champions. If you want my pancake recipe, I'll have it pop up. You want it. I'm going to eat these and then I'm going to go to the gym. Let's see if the carb loading really, like, works. The only other time I've done that is for my half marathon that I did, where I was eating a ton of carbs leading up to it. But I guess if you, like, eat a ton of carbs and then you just sit, it's probably not going to have the same effect. I'm going to try to stay active. Get in there. What if I told you there was a way you could support my channel without spending any money and you could actually earn cash back? You'd say, too good to be true. No, it's not. Thanks to Upside, who sponsored today's video. Upside is a free app that helps you earn extra cash back on gas, dining, groceries. Especially useful these days. Upside has given back $1 billion to its users. And did I mention that Upside is free? Here's how it works. You open the app, you find and claim an offer, pay with your card like you would anyway, and then you earn cash back. That's it. And you can stack Upside with your existing credit card and loyalty rewards. 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All right, and so for lunch and dinner, we're going to be doing two different recipes by Chris Smallings. Chris Smallings is an English professional futbola, center back, which as far as I know, is like the toughest position. That's my little understanding of the sport. I could be totally wrong. He appeared in the 2014 FIFA World Cup and his wife is vegan. So they actually released a recipe for lunch here. This lunch recipe, they released this in a Veganuary cookbook. So Chris and Sam Smallings peanut stew. I'm very intrigued by this because it seems really healthy. I've never had a peanut stew and I know it's an African inspired dish. The concept of putting peanut butter in a stew excites me. I love peanut butter. And I think the idea of making it more savory and I don't know, peanutty is appealing to me. It seems pretty simple and straightforward. It has a lot of great ingredients in it. So first we're going to dice up some onions. I'm also going to dice up a red pepper. So we're going to add the chili, garlic, the red pepper and some minced ginger. And we're going to cook that for about three minutes. Then we're going to add some ground coriander and cumin, water. We're using whole sun-dried tomatoes like this, not in oil. They're actually less expensive when they're not in the oil, when they're still dehydrated. So we're using six of those and add those in. Some coconut milk, some peanut butter, which is intriguing to me. I recently learned the power of adding peanut butter to my soups, to my ramen, I should say. The recipe called for coconut sugar, but I'm just going to use a little bit of brown sugar. And then whatever your preferred bouillon cube or stock cube, whatever you like to use. We're going to bring it to a boil and then reduce that and let it simmer for about 10 minutes. I'm also going to chop up a sweet potato and you make sure you wash your sweet potato if you're keeping the skins on, which I am. Cause they have good nutritional value and, but you want to get the dirt off. Let's get these puppies boiling. Look at how much this produced. Pollen sized. Then we're going to blend this all up into a sauce. I can't find my immersion blender to save my life. So I'm going to be transferring this over to my Vitamix and blending it up and then putting it back in. We're going to add our sweet potatoes and some chickpeas right in there to the peanut sauce. And we're going to let that simmer for another five, 10 minutes. It says you can add spinach if you want to. I'm going to add spinach because historically I have been anemic and simply by eating spinach and kale I have been able to stop taking my iron supplements. So I add spinach to everything now. Two little things I wanted to share. So I boiled the sweet potatoes and then I saved the water from the sweet potatoes. And I use that hot water to boil our quinoa which is what I'm going to serve this with. I was going to serve it with rice but now I'm going to do quinoa. Another thing I do, cause the quinoa is not my favorite. I don't love the taste of quinoa really. So I tend to, I will often add a quarter to a half cube like a bouillon cube into the water as well. So now we got the sweet potato flavor and we got a mushroom bouillon cube. So this quinoa is the best chance this quinoa is going to get. Then I'm going to squeeze a little bit of lime juice over the top. Good jumping up into the air. You smell the peanut butter and the peanut stew, don't you? Really? Oh, did you just belch? Thank you for that. Staring at me. She really wants the stew. This smells amazing. If you couldn't tell by Lucille's reaction. Oh wow. This is serious business. This is so good. I'm like speechless. That's amazing. That's like my favorite thing I've eaten in a long time. That is so delicious. I have been sleeping on peanut butter in my stews. It's so creamy and delicious and like the healthy fats you get from the peanut butter. It has a nice heat to it as well. And then the sweetness from the sweet potatoes. Oh boy. This is like a damn near perfect meal, man. I'm not a huge quinoa fan, but I have no problem eating it with this. This is gonna be shards of glass and I'd still be eating it. Okay, maybe not shards of glass. All right, Smallings, 10 points to you. That is special. I'm very happy because we have another Chris Smallings meal next. First, I think I'm gonna eat this entire bowl. I'm not even joking. Okay, next. Chris Smallings was quoted as saying before a match, he'll eat a mushroom lentil bolognese. Sounds good to me. So if you're gonna carb up, go the whole nine. You know what I mean? Oh my god, I realize it almost looks like he's talking to you. That's kind of fun. We're gonna be using lentils. I'm using dried ones because it is far less expensive. Cooking them is very easy. We're just gonna bring some water to a boil. Let them simmer for 15 minutes or so with some salt. Easy peasy. All right, so for this recipe, we are going to be using mushrooms, onion, celery, carrots. So I'm gonna be using baby Bella mushrooms. You can use any kind you want. I'm using these because they're cheap. Straight up, they're cheap. And this dish has so much flavor in it already. We don't need like shiitake or porcini. You can if you want. I just didn't feel like spending a ton of money. Here we have our big bowl of mushrooms. The start to any delicious recipe. Mushrooms release a lot of water. And so ideally, once I get them in the pan while I'm chopping the other vegetables, I'm gonna add a little salt in there to speed up the process of them losing their water. And then we can cook with the mushroom water that's released because it's quite flavorful. Well, I'd like to brag about the fact that I organized one of my drawers that hasn't been organized for a year and a half. And I'd like to show you really quickly because I'm very proud. You don't have a before, but check it out. Organized. I got an organizer. Oh, it's like a fingertip. It's on haul. I was thinking about doing a video on vegan camping. Now we've got all our veggies. We're gonna add these to our delicious mushroom mixture. Pepper. I'm gonna add some. I'm gonna add some fennel seeds. We're gonna let that cook for about seven minutes. Add in some oregano, red pepper flakes. Add in our tomato paste. And you could use marmite. The original recipe used marmite, but I'm using a vegan oyster sauce to get that depth, that umami. And then I'm gonna add in some cooking wine and let the alcohol cook off. Add in my crushed tomatoes along with some water. And we're gonna let that bad boy simmer for about 30 minutes. And then you can just salt and pepper it to taste. And of course, don't forget, I'm using linguine for this. You can use any pasta you damn well please. And honestly, that's it. This has so much flavor in it from the tomato paste, to the cooking wine, to the vegan oyster sauce, which I know sounds disgusting to have in a bolognese, but just trust and believe the process here. This recipe is great because it's got carbs, it's got a ton of flavor, and it's got a bunch of different vegetables. Mushrooms are nice to have in a bolognese because they kind of can get that meaty texture themselves. And then we're gonna get a ton of fiber and protein from the lentils. Well, we officially have our bolognese ready to go. It's, I mean, it smells amazing in here. There's so much, there's so much fragrance going on. This is gonna be flavorful, I already know it. Let's have a try. Wow, oh yeah, this is delicious. The sauce is doing so much. The mushrooms are perfectly cooked. We've got all these vegetables in here. The lentils are giving us fiber. They even have like a little peppery flavor to them. I mean, I think that vegan oyster sauce was actually a great substitute for Marmite. You can't find it, but... Yeah, it's really delicious. Very comforting. The fennel seeds are a nice touch. Oh man, this is fantastic. This with some vegan parmesan would be good too. Super hearty, super filling. This is delicious. The mushrooms give it a nice meaty texture too. The sauce is incredible. Oh man, yeah, worth the work. Well, everyone, this was a delight. Hope you had a good time. Hope you had fun. I did. I'm like still blown away by the peanut sauce. Like for that, the Smallings peanut stew. That was incredible. And I'm gonna start eating pancakes for breakfast again. Lots of carbs. I think this is a good reminder that carbs are not evil. Load up. Load up before you go out and expel some energy and enjoy. I don't know if I'll have two breakfasts, but I will certainly have pancakes for breakfast. So if you enjoyed, please like and subscribe. I'm almost at 100... I'm almost at 200,000 subscribers. We're so close. I'd love to get there. And if you enjoyed this, I have many other videos where I ate like X person for a day. Travis Barker, Kourtney Kardashian, Pamela Anderson. Anyway, I hope you like this. Let me know if there's another video you'd like to see. And in the meantime, go sports! I'm about to go watch a game right now. I just want everyone to have a good time, right? Right. Tell me who you're rooting for because I'm actually super curious to know where many people are from that watch this video and want to know... Or not even where you're from, but who you're rooting for. It doesn't have to be where you're from. I'm curious. Let me know. Okay, bye.