Here we come to the final entry in the blog, ending with
my last meal based on rice and beans. I think after this I might take a little
holiday from those types of meals and expand out into the wide-open horizons of
“almost literally anything else”.
Still, this meal didn’t have too much riding on it.
Breakfast was a disappointment, and lunch was (still in my opinion) the
greatest meal of all time, so dinner was inevitably going to fall somewhere in
between regardless of how well it went.
For the final food, I thought I should revisit the food I
had so slanderously called falafel earlier in the week (when in fact it was
just chickpeas and oats). Hopefully this time I could make a better version of
that – which, again, is like setting the bar for the high jump by laying it on
the ground.
I decided to use this recipe (https://gourmandelle.com/chiftelute-de-naut-healthy-vegan-falafel/),
mostly because it had the word “healthy” in the title, and meant that I didn’t
need to deep-fry anything. It also looked relatively straightforward – blend everything
in a food processor and then fry it.
Of course, to add a small complication I don’t actually
have a food processor. But I do have a hand blender which eventually did the
job, after lots of stops to scoop out mush from where it got stuck behind the blade.
(This time the mush was comparatively tasty, though, so I didn’t mind).
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| Since the picture is slightly unclear, this is in a white mixing bowl, not a very large white plate. We're not going to go all The Dress here. |
Once everything had been smushed up, and following a couple of substitutions (garlic granules for actual garlic, ordinary flour instead of chickpea flour [got to get some extra gluten in there somewhere] and smoked paprika for sweet paprika), everything was ready to fry away.
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| Come fry with me, let's fry, let's fry away... |
Turns out the mixture makes about twenty falafels, and I
only planned to eat four, so the rest have gone into the fridge (and most eventually
into the freezer) for another day.
This meant that I got the “beans” part of the “rice and
beans” in there. To get the “rice” part in, I decided to make rice. This did
the job admirably. I also decided to pad it out with some broccoli, because
broccoli is my favourite vegetable and I had one I accidentally bought late
last week that I wanted to use before it expired in my fridge.
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| Pictured: rice and beans and friends. The perfect triple act. |
As expected, this meal landed comfortably between the two others of the day taste-wise – but definitely enjoyable, and much of an improvement on the dinners of previous days. So that's my meals for the day.
In terms of my energy levels throughout the day, mine have still been
fluctuating quite a bit. I think it’ll take a few more days to property
readjust to eating properly and to having the usual number of calories. I lost around
4 pounds over the course of the week, which was rather careless, and I may have
to look into trying to replace them.
And so concludes my writing about the Mean Bean
challenge. I’ve mentioned a few times how grateful I am for all the very kind
donations I have received – that’s mostly because I really am very grateful and
very humbled at how generous you’ve all been, so one more round of thankfulness
is probably called for. I’m also very thankful for everybody who’s read this
blog – it’s given me something to do during the week, and it wouldn’t be nearly
as fun to write if nobody was reading it. I’ve been doing this in a Word
document and the word counter tells me I’m at a little under 14,000 words (excluding
picture captions), so probably thanks is due to my keyboard as well for not
collapsing under the additional strain of the week.
I’ve very much enjoyed writing this, and hopefully you’ve
enjoyed reading this too. If anybody has any suggestions for other challenges I
could take on and write about, do let me know!
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