What I Ate in a Day #27 (Low Spend Month Version)

For some reason, I am more inclined to take you through full days when it's cheap food; go figure. Here we go again!

Breakfast on this day was toast on multigrain bread with homemade vegan cream cheese, strawberry preserves, banana slices, hemp seeds, and chia seeds with a strawberry-kiwi smoothie on the side.

I may never buy cream cheese again, because this recipe from Okonomi Kitchen is amazing. It was worth using my last precious lemon. More importantly, I made a big tub of it that could last me a full week of breakfasts easily for probably half the price of a little tub of Miyoko's, plus it has more protein. The toast was great, and you'll see more variations on this theme soon.

I had a few shriveled kiwis left in my fridge to go with frozen fruit to make this smoothie, based on a recipe from Well Plated. I'm having a lot of smoothies on these summer mornings and enjoying them thoroughly.

For lunch, I had some cucumber salad, tomato salad, segments of a clementine, the end of a package of Norwegian-style flatbread crackers I found in the back of my cupboards, kidney bean hummus, and a cut up slice of non-dairy pepperjack cheese. Though I didn't buy all that much in the way of fresh produce this time around, I did still have the end of an English cucumber, and the clementine, and some red onion. I did buy grape tomatoes, because you have to have a little something to make you feel less--I don't know--strapped?

I had totally forgotten about the crackers. They taste of nothing and seem a lot like cardboard, but if you spread them with hummus or add spicy cheese and eat them with the salads, they're fine--this finished them off, and I won't buy this brand again. 

The hummus was so good and creamy. I used the end of a can of kidney beans I had left from my beefless filets you saw recently and was roughly guided by this recipe from Chomp Slurp Burp. I didn't end up adding any oil, because it didn't need it.

At some point in the afternoon, I got hungry and ate the protein bar in my purse, though, so it was only a modest success at a budget lunch. (My protein bars are important, but also kind of on the pricier end of things I eat.) Oh, well. I won't need to buy more protein bars right away anyway.

The lighting was terrible for dinner, but it was basically just my leftover pasta with peas, sausage, carrots, and spinach. Like many frozen veggies, I found the spinach improved as leftovers. That is weird but I won't question this.

Not pictured, I had a multivitamin, an algae-based DHA supplement, and some dark chocolate.

I'm holding pretty steady here and not feeling bad about it, so today was an overall successful day, rogue protein bar snack or no.