I Planned 4 Days of High-Protein Vegan Meals for You!

Let me meal plan the next four days of fit vegan meals for you. We're doing a full meal prep Sunday together and I'm gonna show you exactly what I'm making so you can recreate it at home. For breakfast, we're making my banana chip oatmeal bake. For lunch, we're making my lazy girl pasta bake. For dinner, I'm making a lemon dill tofu steak, but I'm gonna have the option of having it with wild rice or roasted potatoes. One of the snacks is gonna be an edamame spinach hummus with a side of carrots. And snack number two is gonna be a berry parfait. If you know me, you know I love batch meal prep. That is my favorite method of meal prepping, but today we're doing a combination of batch meal prep and pre-portioned meals. I personally love batch meal prepping because it allows me to have so much variety through the week. I grab my favorite staples and then I make different bowls throughout the week. But I know that some of you are really busy and prefer to have like a grab and go meal already ready to go for you. So we're tackling both today. I'm gonna show you how I do it. I've been vegan for 13 years. I've been meal prepping for that long as well. I competed in professional bodybuilding. So I consider myself a professional meal prepper. So the first thing that you want to do is start off with the things that are going to take the longest and work your way down. Today, that's gonna be my rice, the potatoes, and some of the baked dishes that are going to go in the oven. We're gonna forget about them while we work on the rest. I'm curious to know, do you prefer the batch style meal prep method or the pre-portioned meal prep method? This is how I stay organized. I put everything out on the counter. So this is the breakfast. This is the lazy girl pasta bake. And then these are the potatoes that need to go in the oven. The tofu for the lemon dill tofu. I got my VFIT app open with all of the recipes ready to go in there. I'm gonna start here and work my way down. This is my recipe for all the lazy girls out there that don't want to cook that say, Nellie, I'm just not a very great cook. This one is for you. We're just gonna dump and bake. So this recipe calls for spinach, but you can use whatever combination of veggies that you like. I'm gonna keep it simple and use frozen spinach and frozen broccoli. But another combination that I've done that it's really good here is artichoke hearts. They go so well in this recipe, even peppers. So whatever you enjoy. And then for my protein, I'm using Abbott's pea protein crumbles. These are great, but feel free to use whatever you want. If you want to use seitan crumbles or even tofu crumbles, you will just have to season those before adding them, but it's a great alternative if you're not a fan of these. And all this is is pea protein crumbles with mushrooms and spices. That's it. So I'm just gonna crumble it up. So I'm using store-bought marinara sauce to keep things very convenient and straightforward, ready to go. But feel free to use whatever sauce you like. Now, the key to this is to cover the pasta with liquid. So I refilled my jar with some water, and we're gonna make sure that it covers everything. So usually it's like a jar and a half of water. If you don't cover the pasta, it will not cook properly. This is completely optional, but you can throw some mozzarella, vegan mozzarella. About two servings is plenty. And some tomatoes. We're gonna cover this and put it in the oven and forget about it. Okay, we're gonna start making our breakfast. Baked oats. So you want really, really ripe bananas. You could probably get away with even riper than this. The riper, the sweeter it's gonna be. This baked oatmeal dish is super customizable. You can change out the fruit. You can change out the toppings. You can add more fruit. You can even add dates or nuts, seeds, whatever you want. I think the key ingredient of nailing good protein baked oats is to have a good quality plant protein, like veg nutrition. If you guys wanna try this one out, it's my absolute favorite. You can use code NATALIE at checkout to save 15% off your purchase. They're third-party tested, all natural ingredients, absolutely delicious, and it bakes and cooks amazing. Next thing we're going to be working on is our lemon dill tofu steaks. And I just realized that yesterday I couldn't find dill. So we're gonna pivot. It's gonna be a lemon garlic tofu steak. All of the other ingredients are gonna be the same with the exception that we're going to be adding garlic and no dill. So, you know, this is your sign that if you're somebody that follows a recipe to the T, you can have flexibility with it. I'm telling you right now, just have fun with it and see what flavors go well together. Make sure to get in all of those little crevices. And then we're gonna save half for later because halfway through the baking process, we want to reapply some of this marinade. Okay, it's time to make the rice now. So I'm making wild rice and I'm gonna wash it first and then cook it here and forget about it and keep working on the rest of my meal prep. So whenever I'm meal prepping rice, I always love making more than what I actually need because that way I can always like pre-portion it and then freeze it and have a backup stock. Okay, the oats are ready. I'm just gonna let them cool and I'll slice them up later. I am already so sweaty. I don't know how people do these meal prep videos and don't look this shiny afterwards because you're constantly in the heat running around, but I'm about to prep some of my sweet potatoes and russet potatoes. I have a combination of both because I really love having variety, not just with my protein sources. As you can see, I have Abed pea protein crumbles. Sometimes I use seitan, sometimes I use tofu, but I also love doing the same thing when it comes to my veggies and my carb sources because I like to focus not just on macronutrients, but on micronutrients. And the way that you get these more into your diet is by eating whole foods, making sure that you're hitting your fiber and making sure that you're eating the rainbow. So having a lot of color and variety is super important to me. So next up is my edamame spinach hummus. We're gonna throw everything in the food processor. Do as I say and not as I do. You're supposed to put the spinach first and then the edamame, so the edamame weighs the spinach down and everything gets well incorporated, but I forgot my own step. Look at how bright it is. Sometimes if I don't have spinach on hand, but I do have kale, I'll swap it out for kale. You could swap it out for basil. Swap the greens out for whatever you have on hand and you will get so many different delicious combinations. But basically you wanna give this a little bit of love. It's probably gonna take a couple processing cycles. So you wanna scrape down the sides. You might need to add a little bit more of lemon juice just to keep it going. This is the consistency you want. Something spreadable, that is perfection. And then you can taste test it and if you need more salt or more sweetness, you can adjust. Another tip that I could give you for flavoring this is you can use pickle juice or sauerkraut juice. So like the leftover like liquid and it turns out so good. So yeah, you can have a lot of fun with this recipe as well. So usually if an item has multiple servings, but I'm putting it in one container, what I do is I tear the container to zero, add what I need to add. I take the total number and divide it by however many servings I'm gonna need it for. So I did a double batch today. So I'm gonna divide this by four. Look at how bright that is. Yum. We're moving on to our veggie prep. So all I did was cut up the stems of the asparagus and I'm going to place them in a pot of boiling water for about five minutes to blanch them and then immediately move them into an ice bath to stop the cooking process and preserve the bright greenness and that way the texture is just right. Get the rain out there. We had to bring reinforcements. Oh my gosh, you can't see anything. Okay, now I'm gonna cut my carrots. You can cut these however you want. I washed and peeled them. So I'm just gonna do like this into quarters so I can have basically like a chip so I can pick up the hummus. Now we're gonna prep our parfaits and I'm using the Icelandic Provisions Plain Oatmeal here. I really like this one instead of the one that has added sugars because I can add sweetness to it. I can either add maple syrup or stevia or whatever I want to like sweeten this up. And I got my little containers. I always get questions on where I got these containers. I'm gonna see if I can link them to this video. Look at that consistency. Yeah. If you like it unsweetened, you can leave it like this but I'm gonna jazz it up a little bit. And then we're gonna add some granola to these. I have a little bit of my homemade granola left and some of the Purely Elizabeth ones. So we'll do a combo. And then I'll add the kiwi when I'm ready to eat this. We did it guys. Look at how beautiful this bread looks. It's all colorful and it smells amazing. I can't wait to dig into these meals. I'm feeling very inspired. I put all of these recipes in a downloadable PDF in the description box below where I will guide you step-by-step and also include a grocery list. Now, if you try it, let me know how it goes and tag me in your recreations. I love when you guys tag me on your recipe remakes. It makes me so happy that you're using the recipes and that I get to be a small part in your journey. Now, if you're wondering how you can figure this out for yourself and make all of these meals fit your own unique calorie goals, I actually use the brand new meal planner inside my V-Fit app. It's basically like having me in your pocket helping you figure out what to eat. V-Fit is my all-in-one vegan fitness app for women. You can find workouts, progress tracking, meal logger, macro tracking, all of my recipes in one place. And now, a meal planning tool. The meal planner gives you a bird's eye view to your next four days so you can see everything before you commit to it. See a meal you don't like? Swap it. Want a completely different option? Generate a new meal plan. Gluten-free, soy-free? Don't worry, I got you. And once you're happy with your plan, it generates your grocery list, gives you the recipes, and even walks you through the meal plan. Now, this meal plan that I'm sharing with you guys is 2,000 calories. I wanted to give you something that was pretty much the average for the majority of people, but I'm gonna share with you how you can adjust it up or adjust it down based on your unique goals. So for example, I need more calories than 2,000 calories, so I'm gonna be pairing my sourdough bread. That's why I made this. Look at this beautiful loaf. I'm gonna pair it with the edamame spinach hummus and the carrots. And then for the breakfast meal, I'm gonna add some fruit and a little bit of maple syrup and maybe some nut butter. And for the lemon tofu steak meal, I am going to add a dressing on top. So those are ways that I add calories to these meals. Now, say you're on the opposite end of the spectrum where you need to eat less. Maybe you're in a fat loss phase at the moment and need to be in a caloric deficit. You can simply reduce the amount of rice and maybe swap it out for potatoes, and that will give you more volume but for less calories. Or you can simply just add more veggies and swap out the carbs for more veggies. And as I'm saying potatoes, I forgot I still have my potatoes in there. So again, if you wanna meal prep these next four days just like I did, make sure to go to the description box below and download your PDF. If you enjoy this video and appreciate that I put everything into that PDF, make sure to give this video a like and subscribe to my YouTube channel if you're not already. Happy Meal Prep Sunday, and I'll see you on the next one. Bye.