Chunky Vegetable Baked Potatoes

Yes, a recipe for a change!

After many months eating tons of vegetables multiple times a day and no longer losing weight, even if I reduced the starches, I decided to drop that way of eating for a while and go back to oatmeal for breakfast, a small lunch, and some simple McDougall recipes for dinner. There are still thousands out there I haven't tried yet from the books and newsletters. We spent one week on all soups, another on all salads (like those I wrote about last July), another of simple meals, like mashed potatoes and broccoli, rice and mixed vegetables. This week I decided to grab a cookbook I rarely used in the past.

This dish comes from the McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook, page 212.


Chunky Vegetable Baked Potato

4 large baking potatoes
1 onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
1/3 cup water
1 14.5 ounce can stewed tomatoes
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
freshly ground black pepper to taste

Scrub the potatoes and pierce them all over with a fork. Place on a paper towel and microwave on high for about 15 minutes, turning once halfway through the cooking time.

Meanwhile, place the onion, bell pepper, and zucchini in a saucepan with the water. Cook, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and cook for another 5 minutes.

When the potatoes are done, split the tops and ladle the vegetable mixture over the potatoes.

*To change the flavor of this dish, use Mexican, Cajun, or Italian style stewed tomatoes.


My change:
Instead of a raw red bell pepper I used a pepper from a jar of fire roasted red peppers. I have a strong dislike of raw peppers of any color. Those darn pepper skins always decide to cling like shrink-wrap to my upper palate. I wish all colors of bell peppers came like this!

This was one decent sized baked potato (about 4-5 inch long) with exactly one quarter of the veggies. It's served in the same bowls all my other food pics are taken in. Not much food, is it? We both had 2 potatoes, each with a quarter of the total veggies on top, using up the entire amount of veggies. It could have used twice that amount, to be honest. My husband wound up making a whole other meal to eat about an hour later. I white-knuckled it out and stayed hungry all night, waking up every hour or so when the stomach rumbles got too loud.

Tonight I'm going to make another new-to-me recipe from this cookbook. Looking it over, it says it makes 6 to 8 servings, but to me, it looks like it might make 4, tops, and that's only if I include a pound or more of vegetables with each serving, too, something that's not included with the recipe. And these are main dish recipes, not side dish or appetizers.

Now I remember why I stopped using the Quick and Easy Cookbook.

I have a feeling next week - or sooner - we're going back to those heavy chili and stew meals made in the Instant Pot, along with me having multiple pounds of vegetables throughout the day. I may not have lost any weight eating that way in recent months, even gained a few pounds back, but at least I wasn't starving and scrounging for snacks after dinner.

VeganMoFo Day 19 - Rainbow Skillet Medley

We love hash browns in this family. For around 6 months now, not counting MoFo weeks, every Thursday I would make up 2 skillets of hash browns. One of them would contain a dish known as Poorman's Meal, based on Clara Cannucciari's dish from the Depression Cooking YouTube site.

This is the dish I make my son. He doesn't follow the McDougall - or ANY plant strong - program. Yes, I put those little pink globules known as sliced hot dogs in it, too.

But I don't make this for hubby and myself. I've never found a vegan hot dog I like, so just don't bother trying to replicate this for us. I usually make some other version of a hash brown meal each week, and as long-time McDougallers know, Mary McDougall loves using those bags of hash browns in recipes so I have plenty to choose from! I only buy the Ore-Ida Southern Style if it's on sale. I usually buy the store brand whose only ingredients are potatoes and some brands have a preservative.

This meal we had is Rainbow Skillet Medley and comes from the Quick and Easy cookbook. 

Still tossing stuff into the skillet

Instead of boiling the taters as Mary directs, I just take them out of the freezer in the morning and they're defrosted when it's time to start cooking. 

Not only did I use frozen corn as directed, but also used frozen broccoli and jarred fire-roasted red pepper. The green pepper was fresh, although I do keep some sliced up in the freezer that I usually use. The green onions were from the bag of dehydrated ones I keep in the pantry from the mail order place Spices, Etc. I use this so infrequently, and many times the bunches at the store look wimpy, so I found keeping a supply of the dried stuff works out nicely. I keep some other dried veggies in the pantry, too, like diced red pepper, green pepper, and a combo of both (I know - silly but an impulse purchase at the time). I tried the tomato bits, thinking they would be like the sun-dried tomatoes, but even when boiled in water for a few minutes they stayed hard as rocks. I forget what happened to them. If they're still buried in the pantry I might try grinding them down into powder and add to some of Bryanna's broth powder for a cheap but quick instant tomato soup. Carrots are another one I keep on hand, tossing a handful into soups or stews if they need just a touch of "something."

I did have one problem with this meal - I burnt it. One of the hazards of cooking without oil is that things don't brown, the stick unless you toss them about every 5 minutes or so. I got distracted and it was almost 15 minutes before I got to the pan, and although it was on the lowest flame, the entire bottom layer burnt onto the bottom of my 6-month old non-stick almost $100 Calaphon skillet. Damn! So with about a third less food to eat (It's a big skillet so even a small amount takes up a lot of volume) I knew we would still be hungry so I opened up a box of McDougall Right Foods Lentil Soup. They may be out of stock at the factory store, so I'm glad I stock up when the local grocery store has them on sale.

And the skillet washed up beautifully. Things may still stick while cooking, but with a little soap and water the burnt on mess swished right out of there.

VeganMoFo Day 8 - Portobello Mushrooms and Beans

This week I'll wander into Dr. Fuhrman's nutritarian territory. Since getting a gift subscription to Dr. Fuhrman's web site by my husband back in early Spring when he saw me reading the updated version of Eat To Live, most of my time there consisted of gathering recipes that are not only Fuhrman-approved but would do great on the McDougall program, too.

Don't worry, my fellow McDougallers, I'm not abandoning the McDougall way of eating! Even Susan Voisin of the Fat Free Vegan web site and blog has plenty of recipes suitable for both plans on her site. I've been McDougalling off and on since the Health Supporting Cookbooks first appeared in my local health food store back in the 1980's. They had a 'book nook' where people could come and browse through the books on display, even had a table and chairs set up to encourage note-taking. I still use some of those recipes and wound up buying those used copies of the 2 volumes from them when they disbanded their book section in favor of (sigh) an Atkins product display area. At least the Atkins stuff is now gone, a fad that passed, but the books never returned.

Portobella Mushrooms and Beans is one of the first ones I ever copied from the Fuhrman web site. It's been a few weeks since I made it, but after seeing NutriDude and NutriWife's VeganMoFo post on it the other day I had a yen for it, so when doing the weekly grocery shopping bought the mushrooms & tomatoes for it. The rest of the ingredients I usually have plenty of on hand, anyway.

Unlike NutriDude/NutriWife, I never have wine around the house so used a half cup of broth made from Bryanna Clark Grogan's broth powder recipe (I always exclude the salt when making this stuff) to saute the veggies in. I'm also using double the onions and garlic and probably even the cherry tomatoes, because those are three ingredients we love in this family. Besides, the extra garlic will be good for hubby's cough. The portobellos are fairly large so the 2 are quite enough. If not, I have some button mushrooms I can slice up and add to it. A handful of baby spinach tossed in near the end of cooking will round this out nicely. I'll be serving this over a bed of brown rice, and knowing my husband, he'll grab some bread to soak up all the juices left on the plate and skillet.

Oops, ran into a problem. Even though I JUST bought these mushrooms, I unwrapped the package and got hit with a stronger than usual moldy mushroom smell. Then I touched the caps and found them slimy, and those gills on the underside left a black powder all over my fingers. Ugh! Out they go! I'm glad I also had those button mushrooms in the refrigerator because I already had the onions sliced and garlic chopped and in the skillet and the tomatoes halved and in a bowl waiting to go in.

You can see why this is one of our favorite recipes - just look at this! 

What you can't see is the juice it made, hiding under this. The onions started to burn on a bit while I was playing with those mushrooms and I added about another quarter cup of plain water to loosen it all up, and between that and the liquid the mushrooms and tomatoes gave off it made a nice flavorful gravy of its own. 

Between the 2 of us, we each had 2 servings and polished the whole thing off in one meal.