Recent Cheap Eats & Zonta Happenings

Today I have updates on recent cheap eats and local Zonta updates.  I thought I would start off with food stuff and I'm working a little backwards because this is what I had to eat last night for dinner.  I made a couple of sandwiches.  Chickpea Sandwich Spread Sandwiches to be exact.  I still had some canned chickpeas from a Brandless order in my pantry.  I added some Just Mayo, Garlic, Parsley, Black Sea Salt, and Smoked Paprika.  I made a double batch so I still have some for dinner tonight.  I might try and pair it with something else, maybe, to change it up.

I've been a little too addicted to making sauces and homemade vegan sour creams with a cashew base.  It's been too pricey and I really shouldn't do that in January which is the worst month budget-wise.  So I challenged myself to make a vegan Mac & Cheese with no nuts, no seeds, no potato/carrot-combo, and using just a few ingredients.  This is what I came up with.  It's been a while for a vegan cheese sauce like this for me.  I used a little Vegan Butter Flavored Coconut Oil, Earth Balance, Yellow Mustard, Flour, Almond Milk, Onion Sea Salt, and Nutritional Yeast.  It turned out pretty good.

Saturday I continued cleaning our kitchen that has gotten out of hand.  While I was doing that I was able to take some time to cook a few things for a bit of meal prep...such as Lentils!  But before I get to what I did with the lentils I have to tell you about this dish, first.  What you see in the photo above is a Sweet Potato Spinach Mash topped with leftover homemade vegan sour cream.  It was AMAZING!

Enter the LENTILS!  After I cooked up the lentils I added the leftovers from the Sweet Potato and Spinach Mash and that is what you see in this next photo  I ended up adding quite a bit more vegan sour cream (because...why not) and it was super tasty!

Late last week we had our monthly Zonta meeting.  This month was a lunch (next month will be a dinner).  They are VERY open to vegan options and always accommodating!  This month we did a Taco Bowl Bar!  This was mine!  They set aside the bean and corn salsa without the dressing special for me and they had a taco seasoned chicken that was cooked separately and offered off to the side!  Of course, I passed that over and opted for extra avocado instead!  Mine contained Quinoa, Tomato, Corn, Black Beans, Avocado, Red Onion, and Lime Juice.

During our Luncheon, we recognized 3 women in our community who make a difference.  These are the 3 ladies we recognized.  I knew all 3 of them.  The one I nominated is the person on the right.  She is highly involved with several dozen aspects of our county fairgrounds as well as our local Red Cross.  The person in the middle is involved with many literacy programs, student programs, senior citizen programs, voter registrations, and others.  And the person on the left is involved with early childhood education, child literacy, area fire departments and first responders, and more.

That evening we had a Service Committee Meeting.  That went really well and we planned for the next several months.  In addition, we had another Free The Girls (FTG) Bra Shipping Party!  We shipped another 456 bras in 5 large boxes!