Meatless Meals

I try to do a meatless meal at least once a week.  Not only is it super cheap, but I feel like we eat too much meat anyway, and I really don't miss it when we eat one of these meals...

Sweet Potato + Salad:  Sometimes I'll just put a couple sweet potatoes in the toaster oven (no need to peel; just wash and place on a baking sheet) and serve a baked sweet potato with a salad.  I dress them up with a little butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon and that's it.  They usually take 40-60 minutes to bake, depending on the size, but it doesn't get any easier than that.  You can make the salad ahead of time and just take it out of the fridge when you're ready to eat.

Loaded Baked Potatoes or Mashed Potatoes + Salad:  If I have russet or baking potatoes, I'll bake them.  If I have small red potatoes, I'll just boil them, skin on, and mash them (I use a potato masher like this so I don't have to get my mixer dirty) with some butter, milk, garlic salt, and pepper.  Sometimes I boil a few cloves of fresh garlic with the potatoes and just mash it right up along with the taters, in which case I'd leave off the garlic salt and just do regular salt.  Mixing a little cream cheese in while you're mashing really adds to the creaminess factor and tastes awesome as well.  I'd serve the mashed potatoes or the baked potatoes with a little sprinkle of cheese and whatever else people like (green onions, crumbled cooked bacon, sour cream, jalapenos, etc.).

Beans in the Crock Pot:  This is so cheap and easy!  I take a bag of dry beans (the other day I did this with pinto beans), rinse them, and throw them in the slow cooker with plenty of water (I cooked on high for around 4 hours and they were perfect; no soaking required) and some seasoning.  I put in some country ham I had and added some seasoned salt, but you could replace about half of the water with chicken broth and I bet that would be good, too.  This is a great cold-weather meal and is really good with a side of corn bread or biscuits (I used a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix and stuck a sliced jalapeno on top of each muffin before baking...yum).  Oh, and when I made this most recently, I stirred in a handful of chopped kale about 15 minutes before serving.  I felt like it really added some nutritional benefit and it tasted great, too.