WHERE'S THE BEEF

Road trip food for a vegetarian. Thank you @whitecastle .

We hit the road as soon as we got home from work for our last camping trip of the year. Usually, one of us stops by Planet Sub and picks up sandwiches for the road, but our Planet Sub was closed or not answering their phone on Friday. We left the house with chips and just planned to get something on the road. We ended up stopping at Loves/Hardee’s. Michael took the dog and handed me some money, telling me to go find something for myself to eat. Then we would trade places. I looked all over that Hardee’s menu and saw nothing I could eat. The young man at the counter asked me if he could help. I asked him if they had something like the Impossible burger. He said “No Mam, but we do have the Beyond Meat patty that is all plant based.” I said “Yes! Give me one of those with cheese and curly fries.”

I grabbed my order and then traded places with Michael. I was about three bites into my sandwich when Michael walked back out to the truck. He threw open his door and incredulously asked “Are you eating a hamburger?!?!?” He’d looked at the menu too and had not seen anything vegetarian. When he saw me eating my Beyond meat burger, he assumed that I had resorted to just eating a regular hamburger. I explained to him that I was not eating a hamburger and he nodded his head, but still looked skeptical. I might have been a little excited about being able to eat a fast food burger, but this is something I have not been really able to do since I became a vegetarian/pescitarian. There have been many a road trip where Michael’s most common question is “but what are you going to eat?”

I have never been concerned about this. I know I can walk into a convenient store and grab some nuts and a bag of chips and be just fine. My diet is my choice and I have no expectations that places will be accommodating. Growing up in a state where beef is what’s for dinner and there are college meat judging teams means that choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is going to be a challenge. Salads have bacon on them. That’s just how it is. I have learned to adapt and get creative while traveling. I have also learned to not be picky or snobby or have any expectation of not having to ask for them to leave the bacon off the salad. Also, when you are on a road trip, you don’t expect to be eating anything all that good for you anyway. The junk food is part of the fun of a road trip. In spite of my low expectations, I am really happy that more fast food chains are embracing plant based options like the Beyond Meat patty and the Impossible Burger.

Michael talks about White Castle burgers at least once a week. They do not exist west of Columbia MO. There had been some questions about whether we should stop in at the one in Columbia on our way home from our camping trip. Michael did not want to take the camper through the drive-thru and then he thought there would be nothing for me to eat. I forced him to stop. I walked up to the drive-thru window and the woman inside said “Mam, you cannot walk up to the drive-thru.” She then sent someone outside to take our order. Michael finally got to eat some White Castle burgers and I got to eat some Impossible White Castle burgers. Josephine got to eat a lot of french fries. We were all winners.

Now I kind of see the point of Michael’s obsession with White Castle.

MEATLOAF

Proper Sunday dinner. Beyond meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans. Michael made the mushroom gravy. #beyondmeat

I wanted to make a proper Sunday dinner. In our house, growing up, lunch on Sundays was a big deal. We would all gather around the family dinning room table and Mom would cook a pot roast or a ham or something like that. There would be side dishes and rolls. There would be more effort put into the making of the Sunday meal than what was usually spent during the week. I have attempted to implement a Sunday meal in my adult life a number of times, but Sundays usually end up being chore days. Michael is rarely up before noon on a Sunday. By the time he gets up, I’ve already had a decent breakfast and I am not interested in a lunch. Dinner rolls around and I’m starving because I ended up eating a handful of tortilla chips at 2:00. I am also unenthusiastic about cooking anything elaborate because I scrubbed the house from top to bottom.

This has changed slightly since Michael and the Cabbage are home all the time. Chores happen during the week. I don’t have to spend a lot of time on Sundays getting ready for Mondays because there just isn’t that much to prepare. I have more time to spend on prepping food and testing out some experimental recipes, like potato and cactus enchiladas. That was a recipe I found online and it was a bust. The cactus part was good, but the recipe was more potato than cactus. I think I will try a mushroom and cactus filling next time. This is not the first time I have followed a recipe found online that has left me disappointed. The first time I made a meatloaf with Beyond Meat patties, I used their very own recipe from their website. It wasn’t that the meatloaf turned out badly. It was that it was lacking flavor and a bit boring. I have been hesitant to make another attempt because Beyond Meat is not cheap.

When we sat down to plan the menu for the week, I decided that maybe I needed to try again with the meatloaf. We would have a traditional Sunday dinner of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with brown (mushroom) gravy and green beans. A few people have asked me what is in a Beyond Meatloaf. I couldn’t tell if they were asking me how I made me meatloaf or what is in Beyond Meat. Beyond Meat is a plant based fake meat product that I think tastes like ground beef. I’m not really a good judge of that because I haven’t had ground beef in so long that I do not remember what it tastes like. Michael says that Beyond Meat doesn’t taste like ground beef, but he thinks it is pretty darn tasty. I don’t rely too much on fake meat products. I use them in recipes more now because that is the easiest way to get Michael to eat a vegetarian meal. What I like about Beyond Meat is that it is made of beans and brown rice and is not filled with tofu or gluten.

But what’s in my meatloaf?

That’s a very good question. I used a mixture of garlic butter croutons and saltines for my bread crumb mixture. I think it was a cup. I chopped some mushrooms and two shallots in the food processor. I sautéed this just to soften up the shallots. Then I mixed one package of Beyond Meat ‘ground meat’ with the mushroom/shallot mixture, bread crumbs, some garlic powder, some pepper, some basil, some tarragon, some tomato paste, maybe half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and some Worcestershire sauce. I smooshed it into a loaf shape and baked it in a bread loaf pan at 375 for thirty minutes, covered. After thirty minutes, I removed the aluminum foil and poured a mixture of BBQ sauce, ketchup, Tamari and a fancy mustard all over the top. Then the meatloaf cooked for another thirty minutes, uncovered.

I think this was the tastiest meatloaf I have ever made, real meat included, but I am an inventive chef. I make a better meal without a recipe. Some is my form of measurement. That is probably why I am not that great of a baker. Exact measurements are boring. I mean, I can do it if I have to, but luckily for me this is not a baked goods kind of household. There is quite a bit of creativity happening when I start cooking without a recipe. I like to imagine that I am Remy from Ratatouille. I cook from the heart.

It is incredibly frustrating for anyone who wants to repeat something I have made.