Dinner Bowl #40

 

Here's a deeper venture into my pantry challenge: Here we have mashed potatoes, sauteed peppers and onions, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, and arugula millet chickpea meatballs (recipe from Planted 365).

I'm trying to make more meals like this one now--a raid-the-pantry assortment that is relatively easy and with some leftovers that can be frozen for later. The ingredients dipped into several pantry stash things--oats, brown rice, millet, chickpeas--with some basic seasonings, an onion, and some arugula. To boost the proteins and fats, the meatballs are rolled in hemp seeds before baking, which is another thing typically found in my pantry stash.

The one mistake I made was not chopping the arugula finely enough, because it made it a bit harder than I'd like to roll these meatballs. Otherwise, no complaints! I much prefer recipes for this sort of thing that you bake, too.

This turned out to be not only a whole foods, plant-based meal, but one free of all major allergens! (I haven't made one of those in a while.) I didn't deliberately set out to make this, but I am determined to be as sensible as possible when it comes to using what I have, and when I saw the recipe, and knew I had everything on hand, of course I made it. But it was actually really great. I loved how these tasted, especially with mashed potatoes.

All of this brings to mind a Fred Rogers quote I've often repeated to myself in trying times:

Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect on any front-and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.

And so a journey continues, wherever it will lead, however long I can keep it up.